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:

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 steepshot.org@gmail.com

Previously announced

Team progress on .Net encryption & signing

	Announcement Post / FAQ / Google Play / App Store


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