Decentralized social media platform Steemit today unveiled a comprehensive roadmap detailing improvements to its company structure, its blockchain, and its website.
The platform, which went live in beta in May 2016, has over 120,000 users and close to a million monthly uniques. The roadmap for 2017 follows a successful hardfork aimed at modifying the economic model and enhancing investor accessibility.
According to the official release, Steemit is creating native apps for use on mobile iOS and Android, as well as migrating its servers to the largest hosting provider in the world, Amazon. It is automating the deployment of its software into Amazon Web Services and Elastic Compute Cloud, providing for a self-healing, automatically expanding, High Availability hosting service as site traffic grows.
Steemit will also undergo a feature-heavy redesign to improve aesthetics and functionality; users will soon have access to free drag and drop image hosting, comment moderation for post authors, community namespaces and moderation (similar to subreddits), achievements (similar to video game milestones), user insignia, mobile notifications and an easy to navigate status bar.
“2017 will be our banner year and the community will see a ton of upgrades from now until the end of March. Migrating hosting to reputable third parties allows us to focus all of our time and attention on development of the site, software, and community, not on scaling or maintaining servers or hosting infrastructure. The features we are adding will make the user experience even more enjoyable and continue to build on the small town community feel, reputation building and incentivizing great, uncensored discussions”, CEO of Steemit Ned Scott said.
Along with the website upgrades, the Steem blockchain will receive some fine tuning, the release said. The Steem blockchain, which currently records a transaction every second, now officially supports client libraries for JavaScript and Python, and will boast an in-built feature allowing per post revenue to be shared between an author and community into which the post is published while blocking undeserving reward recipients.
Hinting at changes to the company headquarters, Steemit said that while recruiting top-tier talent from across the world remains paramount, its employees will start becoming more geographically decentralized. In a further motion of decentralization, the Steemit, Inc. controlled primary account, 
Moreover, Steemit will roll out a cutting edge parallel blockchain architecture system called “Fabric”, later this year, which will set the groundwork for Steemit’s long term growth while dramatically enhancing scalability, performance, fault isolation and modularity. Using Fabric, multiple blockchains can be created, each handling separate features within the Steemit platform, nullifying any risk of a blockchain bottleneck due to single core processing demands. Also set for Q4, is the widely anticipated launch of sleek Steemit mobile apps.
“November 2016 was the first time in history that mobile internet usage surpassed desktop usage, meaning more people browse the internet on their smartphones than they do on their computers. For this reason, coupled with countless requests from our community, we are prioritizing the development of sleek Steemit apps for Apple and Android users,” Scott said.
More: http://www.econotimes.com/Blockchain-social-platform-Steemit-unveils-2017-roadmap-492425