I've updated my witness to support hardfork 28. (For those who don't know, a hardfork is an upgrade to the blockchain network, essentially an update to the constitution of the network, changing the underlying rules.)
My node has been running with the new version for a few days now without any issue. If all goes well, the hardfork is scheduled to automatically become activated on November 19th.
Hive node software improvements
Like others have commented, I also want to celebrate the great improvements from the core devs on the Hive node software. It has really become very lightweight and fast. It replayed in a day even on my MiniPC.
Why is this important? It allows folks from around the world to get a small, inexpensive device that consumes very little electricity and to run a Hive node on it. This creates a very resilient and decentralized infrastructure for the blockchain. I hope more people take this step.
Noteworthy hardfork changes
One of the jobs of witnesses is to keep up with proposed changes to the network, review them and upgrade their node to the new version if they agree with the changes. It's also important for non-technical folks to understand what changes are happening, so let's go over the main ones (I'll skip purely technical changes which only result in performance improvements and such. Also note this is my own understanding and it's possible it may be incorrect or limited.):
Transaction signing expiration time increased to 24 hours
This change was requested by people who use multisig accounts. In a multisig, you have multiple people who have to sign (approve) a transaction. Previously, they all had to sign within a 1-hour window, which can be a bit difficult to coordinate if you have a number of people around the world. With the new change, they have to sign within 24 hours. Very beneficial if you use accounts that are controlled by multiple people.
HBD in treasury removed from inflation calculation, resulting in reduced Hive rewards
There is a substantial amount of HBD held in the treasury (aka DHF). This change removes this HBD from the calculation of how much inflation there is (how much Hive rewards are given out by the network every day). The effect of this is that all rewards, i.e. all newly-created Hive per day, will be reduced by about 10% (Update: At the time of the hardfork, this has gone to about 25%). So authors, curators, witnesses and the DHF will all get 25% less (in terms of Hive) rewards. (In terms of e.g. USD, the ultimate rewards you end up getting depend on the price of HIVE.)
This change avoids a potential inflationary spiral where the amount of new Hive created per day becomes ever-growing due to an ever-growing amount of HBD in the treasury (and the two fuel each other).
I support the change, it makes sense to me, and reduced inflation might have a positive effect on the price (all other factors being equal) which might negate the 25% loss. More importantly, less Hive given away per day might motivate us to improve our ways of distributing it.
But still, I feel like it would have been good to have more people involved in the discussion around this change. To my mind, more people involved can lead to much slower but better decisions in the end, or at least to more ideas for improvement of other aspects of our monetary policy. (Even if more people are participating in a discussion, it doesn't affect the clarity of who makes the final decision - it's the top 20 witnesses, and indirectly the stakeholders who vote for them.)
Accept only the account authority required for signing a transaction, and not a higher authority
As you know, every account has four authorities: posting (for making posts, upvoting, etc.), active (for financial operations), memo (for encryption of transfer memos) and owner (for changing all the other authorities). The new change prevents signing a transaction with a higher authority (say, active or owner) if it simply requires a lower authority (say, posting).
Seems like a nice change for better security. An app shouldn't be asking you to sign with active or owner if only posting will do. With that said, you shouldn't put any of your private keys into any app - they belong just in a wallet that you trust. And the app then requests your wallet to sign a transaction.
Use full voting power instead of currently available mana
Currently, if you make a vote, your voting mana goes down, so the next vote you make will have less power. This is not very intuitive to users since if you can upvote something with $0.01, your next upvote will be for less than that because your mana will take 2 hours to recharge. These kinds of internal intricacies just make the system more difficult. To remove away the difficulty, this change allows you to vote like you have full mana, but limits the number of votes you can make in a given timeframe. So you have 50 full mana votes within a 5-day window, instead of gradually-reducing votes.
Remove limits on how many times you can change your vote on a post/comment
It used to be that you can change your vote on a post or comment up to 5 times. Now there will be no limit.
Allow multiple recurrent transfers between the same sender and receiver
It used to be that you can have only one active recurrent transfer to a given account. Now you will be able to have more than one.
I'm really glad this change is happening. There are many use cases where you can have multiple subscriptions to someone. Let's say the same account offers a TV service and an Internet service - those are two separate subscriptions. It's good to be able to have and manage them both.
That's it. Enjoy your hardfork. And comment if you have some input.