[This article has been updated to account for recent changes and to address subsequent comments.]

The Hiveway platform raised more than a few eyebrows today with an announcement by none other than John McAfee, unveiling the startup’s rebrand from Etherhive to Hiveway. At this time, McAfee’s affiliation with the project remains unclear, but he nevertheless appears to be providing consultation to the team.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem to be anything new. Blockchain-powered social networking startups come and go all the time, with relatively few of them capturing much market attention. Many implementations face technical roadblocks and scaling problems, and most provide an obscure whitepaper detailing how they intend to use a token for purposes related to identity management or promoting content with currency.

The platform describes itself as such:

The Hiveway Social Network will be the first democratic social network, running fully autonomously. Its users will be able to post and interact with messages, photos and videos. The social platform will be ruled by its users, through an electoral system. Its goal is to offer the alternative everyone expects: a fair social platform. One that does not treat its users as merchandise, take away their rights or sell their attention to third parties for its own benefit.

Additionally, the platform is having a pre-ICO sale of The Way Token, which this startup is probably using to bootstrap itself. In the cryptocurrency space, this is hardly an uncommon practice for blockchain startups to do.

This is all fine and good, however, one detail sticks out like a sore thumb: Hiveway is totally just Mastodon with a skin.

Oh! Uhh, coincidence?

What’s curious about this is that it’s not uncommon to run a custom-branded instance of Mastodon. In fact, doing so is normally encouraged, provided that the Mastodon branding is still prominent in some fashion, and credit is given where credit is due.

The problem here regards the nature of how Mastodon is being forked. Unfortunately for Hiveway, they give the impression of trying to actively avoid affiliation with Mastodon, going as far as setting up a separate code repository and overwriting commits that had been attributed to the original people who did the work. For Open Source contributors, this kind of thing comes across as distasteful.

Hiveaway has also mentioned the release of an Android app, which itself is a fork of Tusky, a popular Mastodon client. Effectively, they did the same thing there.

For most of the repo’s life, a single copyright file makes passing reference to Mastodon. As of a few hours ago, the project has updated its README to clarify its derived work status.

Other Differences

The most dubious aspect of Hiveaway’s copy and whitepaper is in how it ignores the federation aspect of what it is building upon. Mastodon itself is built as a frontend client for the Fediverse, a communication supernetwork of independent instances all passing messages to each other.

Another curious aspect here is that this fork of Mastodon purposefully limits the multicolumn interface that Mastodon is best known for, which limits some of its defining functionality.

Hiveway’s fork forgoes a core concept of the system and exchanges it for a blockchain that would purportedly leverage smart contracts, and some of the ideas in the whitepaper raise questions about compatibility with the rest of the federated web. The federation still works for now, but there’s not a guarantee of how this could change in the future.