24 responses. A growing community. And a clearer picture of where Hive should go next.

A few days ago, we sent the first Hive community survey to everyone on the early bird list. The goal wasn’t to collect data for a marketing dashboard. It was to learn who is following the project, what they want to do with Hive, and where we should focus our efforts as we move closer to Kickstarter.

First of all, thank you to everyone who took the time to participate. The number of responses may seem small, but that’s exactly what makes them valuable. Hive is still in its early stages, which means every response carries weight. Every comment gets read. Every suggestion gets considered. And, in some cases, a single response can lead to real conversations and influence real decisions.

Here is what we learned.

Who is following Hive?

The first thing that stood out was the profile of the people joining the project.
Developers, sysadmins, homelab enthusiasts, self-hosters and infrastructure builders dominate the audience.

This is encouraging because it aligns closely with the people we originally designed Hive for.
We are not attracting a generic crowdfunding audience looking for the next gadget.
The people joining Hive already understand containers, distributed systems, Kubernetes, self-hosting, automation, edge computing, and local infrastructure.

That gives us confidence to continue creating technical content, sharing development details, and discussing real-world workloads rather than oversimplifying the project.

Hive mini and Hive are not competing

One of the questions asked which format interested people the most.

The most common answer wasn’t Hive Mini.
It wasn’t Hive either
It was: Both, depending on the use case.

That tells us something important:

• People understand the philosophy behind the ecosystem.
• Hive Mini and Hive are not perceived as competing products. They’re viewed as different deployment formats for different environments.
• A compact desktop or mini-rack system might make sense for experimentation, learning, development, and home infrastructure. A full rackmount Hive might make more sense for larger homelabs, edge deployments, teams, or production workloads.

That reinforces our belief that supporting both formats is the right direction.

What do people want to run on Hive?

The results here were remarkably consistent.

The strongest categories were:

• Self-hosted services
• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Local AI workloads
• CI/CD and development environments

This closely matches the vision we have for Hive. It also gives us a clear direction for future content.
Over the coming months, we’ll be focusing more heavily on practical demonstrations, tutorials, benchmarks, and real-world examples around these workloads.

If a large portion of the community wants to run Kubernetes, local AI, self-hosted infrastructure, and development pipelines, then those are the scenarios we should be demonstrating.

Interest in remote beta access is higher than expected

One of the more surprising results came from the question about remote access to a real Hive system.

A majority of respondents expressed strong interest in being able to access a Hive remotely, deploy workloads, experiment, and share what they build.
This is particularly interesting because it validates an idea we’ve been discussing internally for some time.

While we’re not ready to announce anything yet, we’re continuing to explore ways for early community members to gain hands-on experience with Hive before hardware becomes widely available.

What matters most to early backers?

When asked about Kickstarter benefits, one answer clearly stood out.

The strongest signal was straightforward: People value the best available Kickstarter pricing.
Other benefits were appreciated, but pricing remains the primary incentive for many early adopters.
This insight will help us design future Kickstarter tiers and rewards more effectively.

Community: where should Hive live?

We also asked where people would prefer to interact with the Hive community.
The results were interesting.

There wasn’t a single dominant winner. Instead, responses were distributed mostly across forums, Reddit or Discord.
What we take from this is that the community values the quality of discussion more than the platform itself.
For now, we’re taking a practical approach. We’ve created a presence on Reddit and will be opening a dedicated Hive subreddit shortly.
Longer term, we still believe a dedicated forum will become important as the project grows, documentation expands, and more technical discussions, tutorials, and workload guides become available.

The most valuable feedback came from the open responses

The final question allowed participants to share anything they wanted.
These responses were incredibly useful. Several recurring themes appeared.

Documentation matters

One message appeared repeatedly in different forms:

• People want documentation
• Not just hardware specifications
• Not just product pages

They want examples, tutorials, deployment guides, architecture explanations, benchmarks, and practical use cases.
This wasn’t surprising, but it was valuable to hear so clearly.

A platform becomes significantly more useful when people can quickly understand what to build with it and how to get started.
As a result, expanding documentation, technical content, and real-world examples remains one of our highest priorities.

Hive has potential beyond current formats

A few respondents suggested additional form factors, including smaller home-oriented versions and different rack configurations.
These aren’t plans today. But they do reinforce something we’ve believed from the beginning:

The underlying architecture of Hive is flexible enough to support many different directions in the future.

What Happens Next?

The biggest takeaway from this survey isn’t a statistic.
It’s confirmation that we’re building alongside a community of people who genuinely care about infrastructure, self-hosting, open systems, experimentation, and learning.

That’s exactly the kind of community we hoped would form around Hive.
We’ll continue sharing development updates, technical insights, benchmarks, design decisions, and lessons learned as we move closer to Kickstarter.
And we’ll continue listening.
Because one of the advantages of being early is that your feedback can still influence the direction of the project.

Thank you to everyone who participated.

We’re looking forward to showing you what’s next.

Want to help shape Hive?

Join the early bird list and become part of the conversation:
hive.blackdevice.com 🐝