Roadmap 2017
Introduction
Thank you for taking the time to review our 2017 Roadmap. This document is composed of three sections, one each for Steemit, Inc: the organization, steemit.com: the social media application, and the decentralized Steem Blockchain and Platform.
Note well that this document does not include a complete view of the functionality that we will eventually implement: some smaller features not included here we will ship in 2017, and many important things we will tackle only after these major initiatives are complete, in 2017 or beyond. This document outlines only those we have identified as the most pressing in the short term.
One thing that may seem missing from this document is our communications plan for serving the existing social community—we haven’t forgotten about you! This document is not all-encompassing and we are currently evaluating various plans for establishing a dedicated team to manage and improve external communication, both with the existing steemit.com
user community as well as the wider world of blockchain and liberty enthusiasts. Stay tuned!
We have a ton of huge plans for the platform and steemit.com (far more than can fit into one document!), and are tremendously excited to share this first set with our amazing community.
Goals
Our long-term goal remains the same: to provide the best platform for censorship-resistant publishing and store of value to the widest user base possible, in an effort to increase human freedom and accelerate the spread of access to basic rights for all people on Earth.
In doing so, by growing the Steem Blockchain, we will have created a permissionless, censorship-resistant data layer for the entire Internet. The first obvious application is publishing, but the possibilities for applications on the platform are limitless. Vastly
expanding this community has the notable side-effect of placing STEEM in the forefront as the ultimate blockchain-based currency.
Our primary short-term goal is to drastically increase the number of weekly signups, weekly active users, and weekly social interaction events on steemit.com. It is our belief that in our attention economy, more readers, reading more writers, performing more interactions is the single best way to develop the overall value of and to the community, and thus the Steem Blockchain and its economy and token.
Simultaneously with user growth, it is essential that we provide support and resources to entrepreneurs and developers building upon the Steem Blockchain as a platform. We recognize that steemit.com will be only one of many killer apps built upon the Steem
Blockchain, and it is our goal to empower as many as possible who wish to build upon our platform and incredible community.
To this end we have established a set of priorities for the near future upon which to focus our efforts.
Summary
This document exists for you: the user: the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer, the reader.
We understand the challenges you face, and want to provide a predictably moving target for our ecosystem so that we can grow together.
It includes our organizational plan for Steemit, the company, and how we work. It partially specifies the social features and functionality we will implement presently for steemit.com, the social application. Finally, it dives into the underlying blockchain technology we will design and implement to support the use and scaling of the network far into the future.
TL,DR. (Roadmap Overview)
1. steemit.com
2. Steem Blockchain
steemit.com, The Social Application
High Availability, Scalable Infrastructure
The use of a blockchain allows for nearly unlimited horizontal scalability of read operations, however the current steemit.com beta web hosting infrastructure has been architected to provide service on a best-effort basis. We are in the process of automating the deployment of our software into Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing for nearly unlimited, automatic horizontal read scalability of web site hosting as site traffic grows. Additionally, the use of a self-healing, automatically expanding and contracting pool of services provides high availability (HA) in the event of any system failures or disasters, ensuring no single points of failure (SPoFs) in the supporting services for the public-facing web site. This 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. This
project should complete in early Q1 2017.
Developer and Startup Friendliness
While the peer-to-peer nature of the blockchain allows every participant to build out their own infrastructure in a decentralized manner, many new developers and startups coming to the platform have neither the time nor resources yet to operate their own. Between our
infrastructure upgrades allowing users and developers to depend 24/7/365 on our highly available web service endpoints to run their businesses, as well as specific site and service features designed with rapid prototyping and ease of developer access in mind, we provide a clear upgrade path for new users to the platform: from quick weekend hacks all the way up to Serious Business—without having to learn new blockchain-specific paradigms or programming APIs.
We operate a web site and experienced web developers should not need to learn new technologies to build new applications and businesses atop the Steem Platform. Such a circumstance is achieved by features available via the web at steemit.com specifically designed for rapid development by third parties.
All such functionality will be clearly and simply documented on our developer site, reducing
time-to-market for newcomers.