Steepshot - Some stats & explanations
Hi Steem Community!
No release today. Just revealing some info on the stats, plans, user questions and more. Let`s start!
User interface
We are making some efforts to find a new nice looking interface design and planning to adapt it in the near future.
Steepshot is growing steadily
We are experiencing growth of the user base and overall activity. Steepshot has been used by 350 users (MAU) and 1000+ posts have been created over the last 30 days.
We did not expect that some instagrammers will start using our application at such an early stage. This gives us more and more confidence that we are moving the right way.
@daxon is popular in Instagram (440K+ subs)
@milanademort is popular in Instagram as well (98K+ subs).
They have connected to Steemit community and are welcomed to Steepshot app ;)
User questions
To make sure that everyone in the community know that the team hear and study their responses, we would like to review the most pressing issues.
1. Private keys
We have finished the .NET library for the client side encryption. Placed open source on Github, you can git clone and use it! (See our ANN)
As it is written in our official FAQ:
Our app never asks you for your active key or owner key. However, it sends your posting key (encrypted) to our server for posting transactions signing. If you don't trust us your posting key but still want to try Steepshot, feel free to register a separate account on Steemit or wait until we release the .NET lib and integrate it with Steepshot that will help us in moving transaction signing to the client side.
We understand the importance of security of user private keys. We ask for posting keys only and that’s a temporary solution.
All private keys are encrypted and we do not address them. As soon as we connect the transaction signing on the client side, all the private keys on the server will be burned and never stored anymore.
Wanted to give special thanks to Arhag (@arhag in Steemit.chat) for giving us some pieces of advice & providing useful links.
2. Content visibility
Users (especially new ones) usually have a lot of questions. (Some of the questions regarding the visibility of content apply equally to other third-party applications on Steemit, such as Zappl.)
If to sum them up, we can highlight 2 main issues:
[1] @cryptoctopus what about showing only Steepshot photos in the app?
That’s in progress. We have already laid the background for that functionality and continue the development of that feature.
[2] @decimus will we eventually be able to have it not post to our Steemit blog?
Good question that deserves to pay attention to. Well, the answer seems to be thorough...
Steepshot photos are posted in Steem blockchain. Steemit.com is a client app for Steem blockchain. That is why you see photos there.
Yes, it is possible to ask Steemit to hide Steepshot photos from the Steemit.com. But hiding is a problem itself. Steemit users won't be able to react, and therefore Steepshot users will earn lower rewards.
Good news is that Steemit team is working on Community namespaces functionality that is planned to be released in 2017 3rd quarter. What is that? That means that all the content in Steem blockchain goes to separate pools. It will hopefully solve some issues related to the content differences (photos vs micro blogging, for example).
We can illustrate the current status with the diagram:
Best answer on the details of this feature should be provided by the Steemit team.
3. Photo storage / IPFS
IPFS technology will make Steepshot platform fully decentralized. We are working on integration with IPFS and it is already set and tested on our servers.
However, there are two main reasons why we still use non-IPFS centralized cloud storages for image hosting:
- IPFS protocol never guarantees you that the image/file is going to be received by the end user that requested the photo.
- Based on our tests it may take up to 20 minutes to fetch a photo by its hash through IPFS, while the upper bound we can allow ourselves for robust user experience is a few seconds.
So we are planning the integration with IPFS but we keep looking for solutions for the issues described.
Bounty & collaboration
As we said earlier Steepshot is community project. Made by the community members with love and belongs to the community.
promoting
We noticed a lot of interest in the joint promotion of the project, advertising in social networks. And that's fine. It was nice to see the reviews:
- @rulesforrebels video
- @winstonwolfe video
- @andarchy review
- @daxon review
- and many more ...
bug reports
@katlegochagane Could you please address any reward regarding bug reports if any!
thanks you all: @teamhumble
At the moment we are trying to find the most successful ways to do this, we are developing models of reward for user activity. Wait for future announcements. If someone has suggestions, we will be happy to consider.
Community manager
We’re looking for a community manager to help us improve communication with the community and respond regularly to user requests. Are you interested in this position? Don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected]
Previously announced
- Steepshot Android alpha 3
- Steepshot iOS alpha 1
- Steepshot Android alpha 2. New registration, new set of identity, QR-codes and more.
- Steepshot at Fintech Hackathon Minsk 2017 report
- Browser version announcement
- 1st announcement & video guide how to find posting key in steemit wallet
Team progress on .Net encryption & signing
- C# library Cryptography.ECDSA 2.1 for Graphene
- Ditch 1.0 for Graphene
- C# library Cryptography.ECDSA 1.0 for Graphene
 | Announcement Post / FAQ / Google Play / App Store |
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Thank you for mentioning my review and myself! Keep up the awesome work. I'll start bringing my Instagram community into Steemit and Steepshot over the coming weeks when I get time.
@daxon great effort! I'm from instagram too, thinking to switch over here.
This is wonderful! thank you Daxon!
Cool! Keep up the good work of you! Love the work you doing, thanks for helping the community.
Great so see some progress! I LOVE the idea and I think it has a lot of potential. The new screenshot I see there looks neat though :)
However, I do think we both agree that it is definitely open to some more improvements! I am not using it YET, but I hope to do use it more intensive in the near future. I have downloaded it again, and will write a review later today from a UX/UI perspective on the Android App :)
This is the first I've heard of Steepshot. This is excellent, however, I have some issues with actually using this app for a few reasons.
Keep up the great work. I won't be using it until some of those issues are addressed, but I love what you're doing.
We try not to dive into technical details when answering questions. In short, you just have to be patient and wait for the release, which solves all the main issues :)
Well, let me try to provide more explanations.
I know only the one 3rd party app for Steemit that is already able to handle with content filtering - mapala.net. There are ways to do that on a technical part. And we are still in a progress of that. When we are dealing with blokchain, many simple and ordinary things is not so easy to implement.
If you have read this far.. TY for the report, all in all we understand the inconvenience and we do not expect any explosive growth of the user base for the alpha. Lets wait for the beta.
I'm very new, and may well be missing the point, but why is photography considered to be "polluting the blockchain". Personally, sharing (and perhaps finding people to help create) my photography is basically the reason I'm here, although I expect to have many other forms of interaction.
For sure I will install and use this app.
Good post man
Absolutely loving Steepshot!
Keep up the great work guys!
Here are some recommended features:
It's my first time hearing this app and I really like this idea because I'm in the photography niche and I'm an Instagrammer. Thanks for making this, I'm downloading it on my phone now.
Guys this is an amazing app. I truely love it but I think it ia going to blled the hell out of my feed if I use it.
If there was a way the locs didnt come out as articles that would be amazing really.
About the showing only steelshots make the app use a specific tag ao they are collected over there.