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
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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.
About time we start taking away some users from Instagram...It is just starting.
Any comment for this post from @onwith?
https://steemit.com/spanish/@omwith/is-it-safe-using-steepshot-or-es-seguro-usar-steepshot
Hello. The answer is given in this post (1. Private keys)
ok so i can post my pictures using steepshot ? and will they be seen by a wider audience ? i am interested am following you now to learn more
Sure, you can! It works! :) Simply download the app, make a photo by your phone or take it from your gallery & post this photo.
That's Really Cool. I will Try this One Definately . Good Features . Thanks for Sharing and Telling us about it. Great Work. Thumps Up! Cheers:)
Just downloaded and signed up! I have an Instagram following of 45k+, would love to chat and see how we can collaborate!
really great job! you keep the community informed of what happens thanks for sharing this keep it up
Very nice idea, I think I will use it as soon as possible
Looking forward to this!
Keep up the good work and shared on twitter
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Can't wait for this project to take-off, lots of new creative ideas are kicking in
This a fantastic idea. Looks like Steem is gonna one day be FB, Twitter and the Bank all rolled into one in the coming months/years. Great article and looking forward to seeing it up and running full tilt. I have a query and maybe someone can answer or put me in the right direction. Most people have a google photos app where all our images from our phones get uploaded to ... but Steemit does not recognize/wont use the URL.. Any ideas? Once again... thanks :)
Thanks for sharing! A link to your post was included in the Steem.center wiki page about SteepShot. Thanks and good luck again!
I am new to steemit and I also tried to access the steemit through this app. But this app is not letting me in with post key.
Hi. Try using the FAQ link at the bottom of the post. I assume you didn`t press "show private posting key".
Make sure to use the 'private' post key
Great post, separating the content to different pools is gonna take things to another level!! Thanks for putting this together yall are doing a great job.
Good advice Boss, this is really helpful, thank you. I always look forward to more of your post. I resteemed so this can help more people.
Whoa, I feel like this will overtake IG! Lately I've gotten bored with IG and have been looking for another platform to take it's place
Why to pick steepshot over other apps developed by other users? Because not accessing to full blog posts it is a little bit inconvenient for me.
Hi. This is a very temporary application feature, as it was explained above in the post. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Thanks steepshot and your efforts. Some of members in steemit korean community are interested in your post. So I am translating your post and hope it would helpful to let them understood. I will share with you if i get rewards later. Thanks again.
I started using Steepshots since the release of the iOs version. Works ok but what I miss the most are some effects or ways to manipulate the color of the pic, add some color effects like Instagram.
When I used it, I take the pic with the camera app, fix the colors and then open the Steepshot to post the pic on Steemit... Til now I need to open 2 apps to do what I want and just because of that.... I do not know how it goes the development in this aspect and would like to know for sure :) other than that I am very happy to have an app to post just photos on Steemit like Instagram.
Go Steepshot! :)
Pd: If you need some test-users for new iOs versions of the app just let me know, I will be more than happy to help.
Thank you for your loyalty. Currently, in addition to Instagram, there are thousands of applications that create beautiful effects to photos. But there are no any of those who publish photos in a blockchain) So it`s normal to use them both.
Yes, we are planning, but not in the near future. You can find this feature actually in our early roadmap.
Would love it if posts go back up to the top everytime someone (maybe other than the author) comments, as that shows interest and it will be an even playing ground for minnows so their posts would not sink down to invisibility so fast.
Anyone think that is a good idea?
Applause! This is exactly what we discussed today with the team again. And we also have a mockup for this to implement. Not sure that a good solution will be found quickly. Will see.
Fingers crossed. That will make a big difference to pat of us:)
What about a nose of upvote function for our own comments... that would be the hottest topic out there.
I can't seem to login. It doesn't recognise my posting key.
would love to implement once fully functional
loving the progress with this, noticed my name was mentioned, but don't understand the context, looks like i'm dealing with bug reports?! :) what's that about! looking forward to using it more, setting up a seperate account for it.
Trying it out right now! Loving it so far!
nice....sharing....upvote and resteem
interesting idea
BOOM! Downloading now.
Nice post!
I upvoted resteemit and following you.
How to download this app please guide me
Keep up the awesome work. ✌
I'll start bringing my Instagram community into Steemit and Steepshot over the coming weeks when #Steepshot will fully ready... 😍😍😍
Count me in, already installed!
Didn't know about this app until now. Good informative post.
cool
Great product which will hopefully reward amazing/interesting content. Noted about the cloud storage of images for now. Hope to see the development to full decentralised image storage solution come soon. No idea how this can happen or if it's possible on IPFS thingy, as I'm no techie. But best wishes guys to reach that target.
Interesting indeed.
Very good post :)
looks interesting. thanks
thats great. please support my channel , i nned help to get good start thanks
https://steemit.com/photography/@talharai/language-of-nature-the-beautiful-way-of-talk
Looks awesome! Can't wait to try it out!
Waoo this a good development
o i gotta check it out, great post
Вот про ключи надо было сразу написать..