I'll start, as I often do, with a bit of some of my art. This is a sketch for an 'Animals in chairs' painting I'm working on.

In some ways, as an artist, I often feel the need to lead in with my artwork. It's the thing I do most often and thus it's a sort of 'how'd you do?" sort of greeting. The nicety of friends meeting on a quiet street in a lovely little town. That is how I have been thinking about Steemit as of late: a wonderful small village full of good-hearted people.

In many ways Steemit to me seems like a friendly small village or town where we can stop and chat in the village square or have a chin-wag over the back garden fence.

There is a sense of community here that I have not found in any other social media. And maybe I simply seek out others who also seem to treat it this way, but overall I find so many people are engaging and interesting either in comments section or just simply in what they choose to share in posts.

I often compare comments and posts like letters long awaited sitting in our mail and post boxes.

I can't wait of a morning to see what has 'arrived' and to sit down with a good cup of coffee and get into reading what is going on in their life.

Recently, in my own comment section, I was noting this action of friendly neighbours stopping by. @ddschteinn , who is as wordy as me if not more so in comments, had stooped by my latest post and was pontificating on how it made him recall the joy of writing for @mariannewest wonderful 'free-writes'. and Low and behold later on, I see comments from she, joining in as well. She even paid me the honour to ask if she could use one of my works as a prompt for her free write, of course I said yes.

This again had that small town feel, "Say, DDA, could we borrow your old painting to hand down at the village hall for the ladies club paint-a-thon? That'd be jim dandy" That sort of thing.

And this back and forth in the comments has also lead me to inspiration in my own work as well. Including the freewrite in which I penned a nonsensical story about a witch and her fat cat which lead to me doing a series of random drawings about the said made up characters, which only came to me because I participated in my community here.

Another small town feeling I found in our community here is the need to help one another. When someone needs something, like a new camera, as they are a bit down and out, but want to feed their dreams of creativity, residents of our 'small Steemit town' step up and help, as did @ruth-girl in this post here introuducing us to a new resident of our town who is in need of just a bit of help for something as simple as a new camera. These are the sort of actions we often think are lost to the past, when we all lived more simply in safe hometowns.

I think Steemit is a safe little village in our burgeoning digital world

We are all interested in our own little crafts and hobbies and skills and life work and I think there is a real value added to them when we share them here, with one another. I know I feel more as if I am reaching other people here than I do when in places like FB. There it is like the mean city where people push and jostle to get by you and if you ask to share your joys with them, they either ignore you or go off on their own tirade.

Yes, Facebook is a mean cold city whilst Steemit is a small friendly village.

Perhaps I am simply waxing romantic, it certainly is a foible of mine, but I also feel that what we do and what we perceive also helps to draw that to us. Maybe I am just lucky in the wonderful group of people that I always seem to run into here in my little Steemit village, either way it is the one social network I look forward to each day.

Sometimes, when I see how many people I like to follow and comment on, I can become anxious thinking, "Oh I must have left someone out today?" But, then I remember I don't want to bring that anxiety to this platform.

That very studied and purposefully used tactic in most social media which is to give just enough joy to bait someone in and then to give them stress and anxiety, just enough, to not feel they are caught up or fulfilled and thus they need to go back in again. That is the sort of anxiousness that accompanies many social media platforms, but here, if I feel that, I just tell myself, "Don't be silly, you'll find and catch up with them again" and I always do.

I seem to do it often, like finding @cookiespooky in my comments again. He is a wonderful artist and sometimes, in the myriad of people I follow, he gets lost in the shuffle. Yet, because he stopped by and gave a 'hello' in my post, I thought, heavens I haven't checked out his latest work and off I go. There really is something about the comments section here that has that 'I just ran into a neighbour I hadn't seen in awhile' feel to it.

I know some people get angry with bad random comments that are not heart felt and just trolling for votes, but this is just part of life in a village.

I think if you have those annoying people in a village that just don't play by the rules and jostle and make a general nuisance of themselves, it is best to just ignore them; they move on. Or reach out and say, 'hey we don't act that way in this village' and you never know what may become of it, they may not be used to a kind digital village where they are heard. Who knows, they may even change their ways and want to act accordingly to fit into a place that might be a respite from the cold mean city of most social media. And if not, who cares, just move forward and chat with the good people or have conversations with the bots, like @ddschteinn and I are wont to.

I know this entire post seems a bit sappy and certainly I am overly romanticizing this platform, but it's what I do. I do honestly see that we are all moving more towards a digital life. We are getting closer to being more online not less, so if that is to be our fate, is it not important that we try to cultivate a safe harbour; a kind village in which we can go to. Even if we can't afford to live in it full time, we can at least spend a holiday there away from the rat race of other social media.

What do you think? Can you see our Steemit as a kind village of people with a kind word and a general sense of interest in one another's hobbies and skills or do you just see it as another social media platform that we 'have' to use?

I feel like if I have anyone who has made it his far in this wordy nonsensical post, they might be just my sort, so if so , comment down below and we can have a good chin-wag and gossip in the comments. You never know, you might just find a new friend.