It's interesting no matter how much you consider yourself an explorer, there are some things we consider our favorites and no matter what happens or where we find ourselves, we always keep coming back to those same things. This applies to anything really... travel, food, music, you name it, you probably have a favorite for it.
Camping is a perfect example for @mrsbozz and I. It doesn't matter how many places we have visited in the state of Michigan, or how many places we haven't visited in the rest of the country, there are always a handful of state park campgrounds that we find ourselves going back to time and time again.
Indian Lake State Park in the upper peninsula of Michigan is a perfect example of that. I will be sharing photos from that state park throughout this post, even though the topic isn't exclusively about that location.
I mean, with views like that you can't really blame me right?
Actually, this post is about HIVE. Even if you are fairly new to the chain, you probably still know that there are any number of ways you can access the blockchain. Given the plethora of ways available to us, we also probably find ourselves going back to the same ones again and again. Personally, I prefer the PeakD front end when I am on my PC and Ecency when I am on mobile device.
Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of cross over between the two (so to speak). Ecency still has some filtering issues that keeps it from being super effective for me. Likewise, PeakD is web only, so there isn't an easy way to access it on a mobile device. I fully respect and acknowledge that there are people in the world who only have a phone and they have become quite adept and navigating web pages in a mobile browser. That's not me.
In addition to there being front ends that we find ourselves coming back to, the are also users who we repeatedly find ourselves reading, commenting, and voting. That's kind of the point of the blogging portion of HIVE right? We build those relationships that we nurture and grow.
One of my favorite parts of PeakD is the "Favorites" feed that you can access on the front page. I've talked about this before, but I feel it bears repeating. Unlike the following feed that carries hundreds if not thousands of accounts you have followed over the years, the favorites feed is a hand selected snapshot of accounts that have become near and dear to you.
Sure, I could simply whittle down my following feed, but I really don't like the emotional trauma associated with unfollowing people. I also don't like closing the door on those people in my following feed one day making it to my favorites feed.
Unfortunately, for the favorites feed to work, it requires a plugin to be installed by node operators and according to PeakD, all node operators have decided to stop running that plugin.
No doubt there will be some who try to point out that Ecency has a favorites feature. I appreciate that and I do use the favorites feature occasionally, but it doesn't work the same as the favorites feed on PeakD. For example, the favorites feature in Ecency opens up in a pop up window over top of whatever screen you have open in that front end. PeakD on the other hand is a separate page. It makes it much easier to simply right click and choose "open in new tab" the stories you haven't read yet.
I also feel like the voting slider is easier to use in PeakD.
Like I said, there are certain things that each front end does really well. It's just a shame that we can't see them all in a single place. Ideally, the node operators would run the plugin required to make the favorites feed work reliably. Until now, my requests for this seem to have fallen of deaf ears. I realize I am not one of the big players here on HIVE, but I feel my years on the chain and my reputation should speak for themselves. If that isn't enough, perhaps dig into my wallet transactions and see that I have rarely if ever moved funds off the chain.
HIVE is my home and like my favorite state park, it is one of those things that I am always going to keep coming back to. Perhaps I need to visit the official HIVE Discord and see if I can get some answers straight from the block producers.
Barring that, it is possible I may have to switch to using Ecency full time as my main means of accessing the blockchain. Perhaps in time they will get the filtering things sorted out on the mobile app and they will make their favorite feature work a bit more like the PeakD version.
In case you were wondering, my biggest beef with the filter option on the app is that when you go to the "notifications" area, you aren't able to turn off all the upvotes that have been given to you. Due to autovotes, that can sometimes be hundreds of lines of notifications that you need to scroll through.
The could easily add a "New Posts" tab or give you the ability to filter out "votes" from the "all" tab in notifications. I've been told in the past you can turn vote notifications off in the app, but that only applies to push notifications going to your phone. It doesn't exclude the votes that show up in this "all" list.
As I said, it would really only take a few tweaks to make things almost perfect on both sides of the front end fence.
edit
I did hop into the HIVE server and asked some questions. According to Marky, running a node is a lot more intense than just being a witness. Due to that fact, the consensus seems to be why add more work adding a plugin to the mix. It's unfortunate because I really like PeakD. It's too bad they can't run the code for the Favorites feed natively like Ecency apparently does.
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