gFam

Hi everyone!

On the gFam platform we've been rocking along on our development path slowly but surely... there is so much functionality we want to add, but obviously it's always going to be tricky finding time for development outside of regular jobs, wildfires, pandemics, really good couch-time, etc.

We do have some exciting new functionality to share with you though...

[Source]

First up, you can now reply directly to comments:

To be perfectly honest, we did not expect this to be the most requested feature out of everything. We didn't think it was a big deal, users could create a comment and just say the name of the person they were replying to, but people didn't like that at all.

We even had a user stop using the platform after a single post because of the lack of a direct reply function... so we put it at the very top of our To Do List...

A reply to a comment will now appear directly underneath...

Unfortunately a reply to a reply isn't going to work at this point, we'll have to completely recreate our database to allow for that... but we're confident we can look into that at some point in the future.

[Source]

The next feature is way more exciting (to us at least)....

You will earn micropayments when Coil subscribers spend time on your posts.

If you haven't linked your Coil account up to your gFam account, you're missing out!

Log into gFam and select the Profile menu item...

Click on the Connect Account to Coil button and then go through all the authorization funness...

Afterwards you'll see your Payment Pointer filled in and the button changed to Coil Connected.

If you want to confirm it's all set up correctly, go to your Coil settings and get your payment pointer from the Payouts section.

Once you're all hooked up, you don't even have to log in with your Email and Password anymore, you can just click on the Sign in with Coil button, just like you can log in with your Xumm credentials.

Great for those peeps who forget their password...

[[Source]](https://media.giphy.com/media/IgLIVXrBcID9cExa6r/giphy.gif)

If you have any issues with any of the above, please feel free to contact us on Twitter...

Hello hello!

Today a bunch of celebrities took on the #StopHateForProfit challenge to freeze their Facebook and Instagram accounts for a day to support StopHateForProfit.org and get the message out that Facebook in particular is profiting off disinformation...

Other social media sites like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube are actively working towards disinformation with warnings, and deletions of hate-filled subreddits and videos... while Facebook has been largely silent.

Traditional social media companies thrive on people experiencing emotional responses from content on their platform, it keeps them engaged and active on the site.

Unfortunately misinformation spreads 6 times faster than verified news because it evokes so many emotions.

[[Source]](https://imgur.com/t/facebook/DwebTgF)

Facebook literally profits off fake news and misinformation...

Our first reaction was 'people are using Instagram every day?' and then our second reaction was 'surely 24 hours is nothing...' and it's true that it's very unlikely to cost them much in revenue.

In July 2020 1000 companies scaled their advertising right back on Facebook to support this protest.

[Source]

The numbers in reduced advertising expenditure were huge, and Facebook definitely suffered a dip, but have essentially averaged out at no real loss...

[[Source]](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-boycott.html)

While the protest might not make much financial difference, the amount of exposure that the celebrities has generated for the cause is absolutely huge:

At the very least people may think twice about the information they see on Facebook, at the very most, it will convince people to stop supporting a platform that profits off hate... and maybe move away from a platform doing everything in it's power to influence you into spending as much time as possible on it.

We have no doubt that Facebook has the power to change lives, affect change and even influence democratic elections all around the world... but while they shirk and neglect that responsibility in favour for revenue then it's up to the rest of us to move away from the platform and instead support traditional social media platforms that take that responsibility seriously... or better yet, move to platforms that support creators with #webmonetization like mg.social and gfam!

Thanks for reading!

[Source]

We've had web-monetization set for the gFam platform since before we went live, and if you check out our latest stats update you can see that we've collected a healthy amount of XRP which we then funnel back into tipping our little global community.

[[Source]](https://media.giphy.com/media/gIMcYphXFot7vTxyy9/giphy.gif)

You're right...

That's not loud enough, and so we've been working for a while now to set up web-monetization for all the Coil creators too... a user will be able to earn both tips and micropayments for their content on the gFam platform.

We thought we had it working a little bit ago... but then we noticed that the payment pointers weren't changing correctly. We tried to fix that and now we have a database error.

We're taking the site down tomorrow morning for maintenance for 30 minutes, but then after that we'll need Coil creators to reconnect their Coil accounts to gFam.

[[Source]](https://media.giphy.com/media/KEnDBWBe7bmcE/giphy-downsized-large.gif)

We'll contact the affected users individually... everyone will still receive tips normally, and once creators are able to successfully reconnect their coil accounts, they'll get micropayments too.

If you have any questions, please feel free to make a comment on this gFam post...

https://gfam.live/posts/5f4fecb0ba13020017a60614

or you can hit us up on Twitter. Don't be shy, we're super friendly!

Hello hello!

We've been sharing the various statistics and analytics for the gFam platform while we've been up and running. Here is:

💙 First month for gFam

💙 Second month for gFam

We're going to include some stats from Pinterest and Instagram to measure progress, which we've recently started using after Riley's excellent post.

The second month for gFam had 494 users, so we're more trending slightly downwards...

We're not worried about that... we're still very much a word of mouth platform at this point, and social media takes a little bit to get going...

gFam is Coil-enabled... and so from those 284 users that are Coil Subscribers, gFam has raised 220.3 XRP so far... that's an increase of 61 XRP over the month.

We're expecting this to decrease dramatically now that gFam is Coil-enabled for the creators as well... so Coil creators will receive micropayments from Coil Subscribers for the time spent on their gFam content.

This is a graph of our active users since we started. It's honestly pretty identical to the previous months.

This post of NickelNDime is still the most popular post of all time with 56 views, 2 comments and 34 XRP tipped.

Obviously featuring this post last month didn't hurt it's popularity at all.... or Nick is just extremely popular.

Mobile is absolutely crushing it on gFam... up from 63%.

This is where the traffic from gFam comes from:

Direct has shrunk from 57%, which is people accessing the site from URL or bookmarks, etc.

Referrals went up 4%, which was all because of this award that we're currently in the running for:

HackerNoon's Noonies 2020 : Best Web Monetization Innovator

We'd absolutely love your vote.

Please log in with your Google account – it gives you a +10 vote instead of a +1 vote. Thanks so much!

36% of our referral traffic came from that link above.

Social (green segment in the pie chart) went up 10%, which is awesome because we've been spending a lot of time there.

Twitter was 94% last month but now Instagram has crawling out a tiny portion...

We hadn't really paid much attention to social media previously, so we don't know about our growth, but here is where we're at today:

Twitter

Instagram

Pinterest

We've got analytics set up for Pinterest

Honestly, 2 link clicks is crazy low for 2,345 impressions.

0.08% doesn't feel like a great success rate for the effort of creating 47 pins, but we'll keep it going for a little bit longer. We assume that Pinterest is a numbers game.

Not that Coil is a social media, but it makes sense to track that too...

We've written 98 Coil posts to date, with votes ranging from 2 to 19... which an average of about 8 votes.

Here are the general user analytics for gFam.

Users, Sessions and Pageviews are all down from last month and the bounce rate is higher... so we're less sticky and less novelty than we were... however the percentage of Returning Visitor is higher (it was 27%) which means we have an increasing committed group of users that we really enjoy.

We're not stressed at all by the decreasing analytics. We're still very much building the site out and haven't spent anything on marketing or advertising. We want to make sure the site is pretty solid before a big push to gain more users and traffic.

First impressions count...

[Source]

Please note that gFam does not retain any user data at all. All the stats above are anonymous, and the only data we retain on our users is their userid, e-mail and the Xumm address. The e-mail address is only for password resets. E-mail spam is the absolute worst.

Obviously we have nothing to on-sell to 3rd parties like the majority of social media platforms. Traditional social media platforms should pay you if they're making money off your data, or using your content to get views for their advertisers. Take back your data!