TravelFeed 3.0, Independence And Cross-Posting
Read this post on TravelFeed.io for the best experience
Wow!
A lot of unthinkable things have happened since our last announcement! The TravelFeed team is finally peeking out of the rabbit hole to come up with with some exciting news looking forward into the future.
But first, a recap of the last two weeks before we dive into TravelFeed 3.0!
As many of you already know, we had a rough time with two of our team members, when they found themselves without a proper internet connection in a very difficult travel situation due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Fortunately, the entire TravelFeed Team is safe now. Huge thanks to all the community members who came in support and cared for our safety!
Many of our users have been asking us if, or when, we're going to move to Hive. The quick answer: TravelFeed, thanks to the new 3.0 release, is now an independent platform and supports Hive as well.
In order to explain to our users/community more deeply, we need to go back to the prior state of the blockchain and contextualize the driving forces behind the changes. The announcement about Hive and the subsequent split from Steem reached us through the public announcement only two days before the hardfork, just like for most of you. TravelFeed was built fully on Steem, trusting the integrity of governance; for such, we believe that we added value to the Steem apps ecosystem.
The sudden changes and problems with Steem nodes resulted in many outages on our App, resulting in partial shutdown for our users. During the two weeks since the hardfork, our daily number of users dropped by almost 50%. We had to re-evaluate the integrity of DPOS governance and concluded that it can be corrupted easily, just like any centralised financial system, where bank accounts can be frozen by authorities.
It was a wake up call for us, learning the hard way that blockchains are not a home, but a tool. We had to take deep long breaths and look at the situation after some time had passed and re-evaluate where TravelFeed.io is standing.
By building our app so close to Steem, we were dependent on the blockchain, relying on the integrity of witnesses and availability of nodes. With all that’s going on, we currently neither see Hive nor Steem as a reliable platform to build a business, nor there are any incentives for apps to build on either chain. It would be difficult for us to adapt to any future sudden split or any potential threat from both the blockchains.
Moreover, in the last weeks the uncertainty of the @delegationtrust app accelerator program ever coming alive on either chain became more clear. Since the launch of communities, we had to helplessly watch high-quality TravelFeed posts getting low payouts. We have a team of 7 curators and put several hours every day into reviewing each new TravelFeed post manually, but with our low voting power we can’t compete with large curation projects that have now become exclusive to their own communities - we knew that we had to implement changes sooner than later.
We want to build a successful platform and politics are not our main interest, that's why we let our users decide where they want to publish their content.
With the launch of TravelFeed 3.0 we're now a standalone platform fully independent of any third-party blockchain - as opposed to being a “true” dApp as before, when we were fetching all contents from the blockchain and letting users contribute from other frontends, we now operate similar to some other apps on Hive and Steem that (let users) write transactions to the blockchain, but do not read anything from the blockchain. In fact, TravelFeed can now be used without pushing any transactions to any blockchain - our users are in full control of if and where they would like to push their content outside of TravelFeed. Currently, we support pushing votes, comments and posts made on TravelFeed to Hive and Steem, but we are open to including other blockchains and platforms in the near future. We will continue to distribute upvotes to posts both on Hive and Steem, but only if they were published through TravelFeed.io. We would like to invite anyone who is powering down their STEEM and no longer using their voting power to follow our curation trail on Steemauto. With becoming a standalone platform, we will no longer support contributing posts, comments or votes through other frontends, but we have moved all existing content.
Investors and supporters of TravelFeed, please rest assured, we're still planning on releasing our own token and we will continue to honor your delegations, whether they are on Hive or Steem. With not only the security of funds, but also the future and release date of SMTs uncertain on both chains, we are now also considering other blockchains for launching our token.
There are many more changes, ideas and future plans not covered in this announcement post because, well, you would be reading until the early morning hours. Please keep an eye on our future announcements!
TravelFeed Becoming A Standalone Platform
With the release of 3.0, which is our biggest implementation of changes yet since we introduced TravelFeed.io, we're now fully independent. All content is now saved in our own database and is secure and immune to whatever blockchain trouble ahead in the future.
Content Distribution Service - Cross Posting
With this update, you don't need a blockchain account to use TravelFeed.io. That means your content stays on the TravelFeed.io platform and could be easily edited and deleted if that's your wish. If you're interested in maximising your post exposure and possible rewards offered thanks to rewards distributed on different blockchains, we're offering a cross posting service, currently supporting Hive and Steem. Please revise these settings on your dashboard.
Beneficiaries
In order to secure your content by storing all your articles and media on our servers we need to cover additional costs and decided to implement a 10% beneficiary share of the rewards your posts and comments are generating thanks to our new content distribution service. Please let us know if the percentage is too much but we hope that our new push service will offset these 10%. With just one press of a button your articles are being distributed to currently three (more to come in the future) possible platforms, this should increase your overall rewards. Additionally, it makes your post eligible for a TravelFeed upvote, which should offset the 10% for most posts.
Disabled Features
We have been working around the clock to transform the code for our 3.0 update. We started in February to turn TravelFeed into a fully independent platform supporting cross-posting to both Steem and Hive. In order to launch as soon as possible, we have temporarily disabled a few features that require more effort to migrate. While we have tested 3.0 extensively, however, the period for testing was much shorter than what we usually aim for before major releases. If you discover any bugs, we kindly ask you to report them to us, so we can fix them as soon as possible.
Why are there 3 different account types and usernames?
Since the hard fork on March 20th, Steem and Hive are completely separate blockchains. This means, that creating an account on one chain does not create it on the other chain. This causes several problems for applications supporting both chains. To illustrate this, if we were using only one username, the following exploit would be possible:
User Bob creates a new account on Hive and logs into TravelFeed. However, his username is not registered on Steem. Hacker Mallory can now create an account with Bob's username on Steem.
- Mallory logs into TravelFeed with her Steem account - but Mallory gets logged into Bob's account since the username is identical. Since TravelFeed thinks she is Bob, Mallory can post and vote on TravelFeed in Bob's name and even cross-post to Bob's Hive account.
- Alice creates a post on TravelFeed, cross-posts to Hive and Steem and sets Bob as beneficiary. However, on Steem, Mallory received Bob's share of the post reward since she owns the account with the same username.
This is why we are introducing TravelFeed usernames that are separate from Steem and Hive usernames. We have done the following migrations:
- If you registered an account on TravelFeed.io or logged in with your Steem account before March 20th, your account exists on TravelFeed with your Steem username. You can log in with Hivesigner or Steemconnect. If you logged in with EasyLogin or Steemconnect before, cross-posting to both Steem and Hive is enabled already.
- If you registered an account on TravelFeed.io or logged in with your Steem account after March 20th, your account exists on TravelFeed with your Steem username. Your Steem account is connected, but not your Hive account (if you have one). You can log in with Steemconnect (or EasySignUp, if set up) and connect a Hive account in the settings. If you logged in with EasyLogin or Steemconnect previously, cross-posting to Steem is already enabled.
- If you never logged into TravelFeed.io before but posted to TravelFeed from third-party frontends using one of the participating tags or communities, your account exists on TravelFeed with your Steem username. You can log in with Steemconnect (or EasySignUp, if set up) and connect a Hive account in the settings. You have to enable cross-posting manually.
- If you have never used TravelFeed before but own a Steem or Hive account, you do not own a TravelFeed account and your Steem/Hive username can be claimed by anyone. Log in with Hivesigner or Steemconnect today to claim your username!
If you have a profile on TravelFeed but get prompted to choose a username when logging in, you probably tried to sign in with Hivesigner without previously connecting your Hive account to your TravelFeed account. Sign in with Steemconnect and connect your Hive account in the settings.
You can link one Steem/Hive account to your TravelFeed account, the username does not have to match your TravelFeed username. A Steem/Hive account may only be linked to a single TravelFeed account at a time.
New Terms And Conditions
Please be aware that we updated our Terms and Conditions, please login to your to TravelFeed.io account and accept the new terms when prompted to you.
Changelog
New Features
- New database:
- Before, users posted from tf to the Steem blockchain, Hivemind then synced the posts from a Steem node (~10sec+). Now, all posts go directly into the tf database (super fast!)
- As common with most apps, synchronisation is now one-way from tf to the blockchains(s), but not the other way round - posts can no longer be submitted from other platforms
- Significant query performance improvements
- Using tf to its full extend is possible without requiring a blockchain account -> future one-click account creation possible
- All data are now stored in a single database and querying is much easier
- Support for geospatial queries (e.g. finding nearby posts)
- Supporting several external platforms/blockchains is possible since the database no longer syncs from an external source
- Removed all dependencies on unreliable Steem API, except for communities API (moved to Hive for now). External login services (steemconnect/hivesigner) will still be affected by API outages
- Account names were only migrated for existing TravelFeed users
- Crossposting service & Hive support:
- Blockchain account is not mandatory to use tf
- Link blockchain accounts in settings to enable automated cross-posting of posts, comments & votes.
- Can only be done by granting posting authority, client signing is no longer supported
- If nodes of supported blockchains are offline, tf will continue to work and the actions will be broadcasted as soon as the nodes are online again. Same for blockchain restrictions such as low RC, rate limits - the queue system will post as soon as possible
- For this service we are introducing a 10% beneficiary for posts/comments submitted through tf
- New community-based curation system: Any user who moderates a supported community (Currently the Hive API is used to determine the user role) can review posts submitted to this community. They then make it to the lists of posts to be curated that is reviewed by a senior curator from the tf team.
- New comment section:
- Much faster loading
- improved layout
- Removed smile display/ability to smile at comments
- Inbox-section in Dashboard replaces comments/replies/notifications. New features include an unread section to better keep track of comments
- Add announcement blogs to dashboard, show only announcements instead of all tf posts in sidebar
- Access to matomo statistics in Dashboard: monthly post views
- Support for viewing non-English posts
Improvements
- Emoji support for all browsers using tweemoji
- Render all feeds on the client (prevents caching issues)
- Fix html editor dark mode
- More details in card headers: Community, user role
- Better post recommendations: Now nearby posts are suggested instead of posts from the same country
- Increased login validity time to 90 days - especially great for app users!
Temporarily removed features
We have been coding non-stop for the past week, but in order to push out 3.0 as soon as possible, we have not upgraded all features yet and disabled some temporarily that used to be closely linked to Steem. These features will be back later this month adjusted to our new system.
- Signups
- Post scheduling
- Notifications
- Map (temporarily showing only a small selection of posts)
- Setting up EasyLogin for existing blockchain accounts
Removed features
- Payout type & beneficiary picker (steem account !== hive account if created after the fork -> cannot use same beneficiaries for both chains)
- Keychain support
- Payouts overview (payouts can be seen in the Dashboard posts tab for each chain separately)
- Wallet page
- Resteem button
Winners of This Week's Round-up
And with all this exciting news, we don't want to forget to highlight our three favorite TravelFeed.io posts from this week. The rewards will go to the first three places as follows: 1st place - 14 STEEM, 2nd place - 7 STEEM and 3rd place - 3 STEEM.
The thumbnails are directly linked to the original posts. Please, click on the image and enjoy the read!
Join TravelFeed!
Are you not on TravelFeed yet? We invite you to check out TravelFeed.io and to join over 1000 travelers on our Discord community. We’re also looking for one more curator to join our team.
We’re in Beta and continuously improve TravelFeed, meaning that there are still some bugs. If you notice anything or have feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us on Discord, leave a comment or open a bug report on Github!
Consider Delegating To Us
Once we launch our token, there will be a generous airdrop to delegators. Your delegation does not only supports the growth of this incredible project, but also helps the entire travel community. Our voting power is fully used for curation of the best TravelFeed posts. Feel free to use the following links according to the amount you would like to delegate to @travelfeed, or head to our Support Us page to delegate a custom amount with the click of a button.
Delegate Hive Power
100 HP | 250 HP | 500 HP | 1000 HP2500 HP | 5000 HP | 10000 HP
15000 HP | 25000 HP
50000 HP
Delegate Steem Power
100 SP | 250 SP | 500 SP | 1000 SP2500 SP | 5000 SP | 10000 SP
15000 SP | 25000 SP
50000 SP
We'd like to thank every single delegator who believes and trusts in us.
Vote for Our Witness
You can support TravelFeed by voting for our Hive witness @travelfeed. If you want to vote for our witness but are not sure how to do that, it's easy: Head over to our Support Us page and hit the witness voting button to vote with Hive Keychain, or Hivesigner if you are not a Keychain user. Alternatively, use this Hivesigner link.
View this post on TravelFeed for the best experience.
Is the best news of 2020!
Independence is the basis of a quality and autonomous platform. The divergences between Steem and Hive have been misused. Or rather, used for the benefit of a few witnesses.
I think the idea of compatibility with both platforms is excellent. But even better seems to me the idea that the initial publication should be done in TravelFeed.
Let's all be calm: honesty, quality and perseverance ends up paying.
And I say more: if you look at the value of the posts in Hive and Steem in the main communities we will see how the value of the contents is being atomized and concentrated in favor of a few. It doesn't work like that and they will find out soon.
Let's keep growing with TravelFeed!
That this is the best news of 2020 means a lot to us, considering that there is so much going on right now this year and it's only April!
Thank you for your kinds words!
TravelFeed hasn't been more free, by incorporating other platforms our users can diversify their content wherever they want! That way we can isolate our values and morals away from any childish war.
It is important to be able to be compatible with Hive and Steem.
But even more important is to be independent from both platforms.
I think it is important that TravelFeed does not get into the middle of that war and continues to be a quality digital content platform of its own.
Neither Hive and Steem pay too much today.
Therefore we try to point out about the quality of the content trying to convince those who have left to return.
TravelFeeders Go Back Home!
Yes, we're trying to shake awake previous users, to get them blogging again. We know not many are traveling these days but there are other ways to write about travel or recapture past trips to take people who are locked at home on a journey.
Also, this independence will give us much more freedom to bring amazing features, including the values we want for our token - I'm exicited.
This is neat. Despite everything, I've always admired the professionalism of people behind TravelFeed. Thank you for the update and keep on doing great things.
These words mean a lot to us and thank you for your continuous support.
It's lovely to hear such words, I believe our cryptospace has left some values behind somewhere.
I am honored to be on top of the podium this week, thank you for the prize travelfeed team. Regarding your official position to be an independent platform and support many blockchains, I think it is a wise decision. We need to focus on the things we can control and try to do our best work here. We need a strong foundation to build on and I think you are doing a great job with TravelFeed. Actually I see great future for you going forward with this strategy, this space needs a killer blogging platform and app that supports all the social oriented blockchains. I was thinking may be you can add Coil as well, so our content can be monetised on demand outside of the 7 days period. You should reach to XPRING for a discussion, they offer grants to promising projects like yours. Good luck guys, love your work!
Thank you so much for your support words and suggestions. We're going to look into these mentioned projects. Thank you so much!
You are always on top of our list of awesomeness!
I believe that now, with the introduction of 3.0, and soon with the creation of our token, we'll be able to create a monetization system that goes beyond the 7 days while being solely dependent on traffic and ads.
You have lost all my respect by continuing to support Steem. You clearly do not actually stand for the values you say you do. Spouting bullshit arguments like "all front ends are centralized" on Twitter when THE BACKEND OF STEEM IS 100% CENTRALIZED. One person can push though any soft/hard fork on Steem, at will, without the support of a single other stakeholder. And this is not just a hypothetical, surely you are aware that the largest stakeholders on Steem have just had their accounts frozen in a softfork? Is it going to take having your own accounts frozen and your own posts censored before you actually stand up for the values you claim to believe in? What a joke. Please just move to Facebook, it is literally more decentralized than Steem is now.
Where have you concluded that TravelFeed supports Steem? TravelFeed is independent and rely on its own database, the only thing we do is provide a service for our users to post wherever they want, it might include more platforms in the future, who knows.
It is like saying you are not a Nazi, because on two days of the week you do humanitarian work... but on the weekend you are still attending Nazi rallies and signing up people for the Nazi party. That means you are a Nazi. You can't say you are for decentralization and stay on Steem. That means, you are not for decentralization. Have you not been paying attention to what is happening on Steem? It is absolutely incredible that a business owner / website developer would choose to keep their business on this sinking ship. Steem is literally not a blockchain anymore, with a single point of failure it fails the most basic tests that a blockchain has to pass. The token is likely heading for delisting on all exchanges except for poloniex which JSun directly controls (hot tip, crypto tokens where the network is controlled by a single person that arbitrarily blocks users and funds from accounts get delisted LOL), the price is heading for the toilet with the largest stakeholder having publicly stated he is going to dump the Stinc stake on the market, there is no development on the platform, and the entire chain could freeze as soft/hardforks can be pushed through by a single person with no testing. It is idiocy of the highest degree to stay on Steem, and hypocrisy to continue to claim a decentralized experience for your users while doing so. Wake up.
You are full of conclusions without even paying attention to what I said, I'll say it one last time, ok?
TravelFeed is not on Steem, and it's not on Hive either! It's an independent project with its own database, we shutdown our witnes server and we do not fetch data from any of the blockchains. The only thing we do, is give the users a service to cross-post on other platforms (Hive, Steem, Facebook, Twitter, whatever). The only thing we are keeping is our curation on both blockchains, because that reward goes fully to the USERS.
I know exactly what's going on on Steem, and I also analyse Hive, for me both of them are collapsing (hopeflly not).
Obs.: I'll ignore you calling me a Nazi.
We're not staying on Steem .. as @mrprofessor stated we're independent. We're not claiming to be decentralized anymore because what the past has shown us, the content is at risk if we don't secure the hard work on our server.
WE GIVE OUR USERS THE OPTION TO POST ON SUPPORTED BLOCKCHAINS AND FRONTENDS!
And for now users can decide to push their articles to Stemm (well TF was build on top of Steem) and now since yesterday they can post their content to Hive. And maybe next week they're able to push the their content to whatever blockchain.
I don't understand this entire rage - it's like for Facebook to demand users that they can't use Twitter or TikTok anymore if they use FB. We give our users the choice to make the right decision for them. Freedom of choice and voice :)
The past has shown that content stored on one blockchain is just far from an ideal solution and we decided to become a standalone platform to secure the content of our users. It's just interesting that what we were working on and gained respect for over the years, is all thrown out of the window because we don't blindly follow to the new big thing. Users on TravelFeed come first. There is no black and white, especially when looking at governance and power grab as long there are humans are involved. So being independent, to have have full control over our direction and not depending on some big fish in the pond or devs, looks like the only way to move forward to for ANY app to me.
Also I would like to underline that we don't favor one blockchain over the other - TravelFeed gives the tools for our users to make their own decision. Especially when more blockchains and supported frontends are going to be introduced.
"blindly"... what you are blindly doing, apparently, is turning a blind eye to what is actually happening on Steem. It is to be expected that an average user of your travel site may not be fully aware of what has happened to Steem. But you as a developer absolutely can and should be held to a higher standard. You say you are staying on Steem to give your users a choice. A choice is only meaningful if it is made with adequate information. This is not like offering users a choice between two web browsers, or two login options. If you truly want to give your users a choice you would have to tell them: "You can keep posting on Steem but we have to tell you that the network is no longer secure and it no longer qualifies as a blockchain (100% centralized / single point of failure), your wallet funds may not be safe (funds from users already frozen arbitrarily - I would say frozen for disagreement with JSun but look at @freedom, who was not involved in attacks on JSun, not involved in Hive, and wasn't even powering down - Freedom was staying on Steem and was the second largest investor behind the stinc stake and got frozen! Look at @darthknight, not a witness, not a hive dev, not attacking jsun, just a large investor who made the horrible mistake of buying 2 million steem right before JSun bought steemit!); the token you will earn has a high likelihood of being delisted from exchanges (guess what, hot tip, crypto networks controlled by a single entity that arbitrarily block user funds including an exchange account usually get delisted from exchanges...); there is no development on the chain and the community and developers that used to be on Steem have moved to Hive. If you told them all that and they still wanted to post to Steem, that would be offering your users a choice.
As it is, at best it is negligent to continue offering Steem as a choice to your users and at worst it is a straight up fraudulent. There is no possible way that you can in good conscience recommend users to use steem. You couldn't recommend someone to invest in it, you couldn't recommend someone to hold funds in a steem wallet.
At this point it is pretty obvious that the promise of $ from JSun was enough for you to throw your morals out the window. You have lost so much respect from me and the rest of the community. Have fun on a sinking ship. I hope you take your blinders off before the water actually fills your lungs and travelfeed completely goes under.
Let me clarify some things for you.
1.: Our business target is bloggers and travel writers from all over the world, most of them are not even involved in blockchain, nor they want; their main objective is to post their content on every option they have (i.e FB, Twitter, Hive, Steem, TravelFeed, Wordpress page, YouTube), that's how content creation works.
2.: TravelFeed users are TravelFeed users, we are not encouraging them to post on Steem nor on Hive, it's up to them to decide; new TravelFeed users' accounts are not linked to Steem/Hive, they are free to sign-up to the blockchains at their own will and following their own risk/judgement. It's also their own choice to cross-post on Steem/Hive, we are not forcing them.
Again, where have you concluded that we are recommending users to invest on Steem?
don´t react on this guy he is blind of rage and whatever, he´s not willing to hear, not willing to learn, so let him do what he likes to but better ignore him, hes got more such discussions in the last days.
Guess the way you describe for travelfeed 3.0 is a very good idea to stay out of all that hutzle, we got lots of very good writers an photographers so let them do their work and still support them with the new platform that´s more than enough what you can do for them. Don´t fight the war´s of others.
@travelfeed @for91days
The post is mostly understandable given the situation. However i just have one thing to add. The 10% beneficiary aspect. The argument that one is charging for a multi posting- facility and storage of content is not tenable. Serious bloggers always keep back up of their work offline and may also have their own wordpress blogs as well. As far as multi-posting is concerned it just an extra 2 minutes to copy and paste ones own article from one place to another.
If users are giving a portion of their earnings, then in some way they are "funding" your operations. Travelfeed should see them as small investors. And when the time comes for a Travelfeed Token. The posters who have given 10% of their earnings should be compensated with tokens equivalent to the amount given by the user over a period of time.
Please do consider this suggestion since i feel it will lead to less heartburn among users over time. The amounts may look tiny when seen in USD terms. Please understand you have users from all over the world. A mere 1 USD in India becomes 75 Bucks ! That is enough money to sustain a low income family of two with good nutritious food for a day !
The best thing an organization can do is to turn its users into stakeholders :)
Namaste!
Hi @sajannair, I'm also from an emerging country, so I understand your concerns perfectly. However, I must address some points for reflection.
I do agree that it takes a few minutes to cross-post manually, but I try to consider the benefits of using TravelFeed.
As for the tokens, we can't discuss distribution yet because we are still working on the token functionalities. What I can say is that we won't create a token out of thin air that will quickly lose value, there's much more to it.
We may reconsider the 10% beneficiary, but if you analyse how much we give in rewards with our curation program, that 10% becomes nothing compared to the efforts we put on our users.
I want to become a travel blogger.
Yes, you are right if you are thinking that the COVID-19 quarantine is not the best time for starting a travel blog. BUT! Things are a little bit different in my situation. In short, I am not going to travel now, but I have great experience in traveling. So, I have a lot to say to my audience-to-be and have some video materials.
Why didn’t I become a blogger earlier? Simply, I didn’t have time to organize it all. But now I have plenty of it. I downloaded iMovie and found a great copyright free music program and ready to start. Anyways, sooner or later people will be able to travel again.
I think now it's a great time to consume travel content. Reading travel stories can take to you to any place in the world. And yes one day we can move freely again.
Does it still make sense to start a travel blog in 2021? Now the demand for domestic tourism is rising in every country, and accordingly, people are increasingly looking for opportunities on where to go inside their country, and how to spend time with their friends and family.
If you are a travel blogger or if you are going to become a travel blogger, now is the perfect time for creating a content strategy, and planning your activities for 2021-2022. I became a traveler blogger a year and a half ago and my favorite activity is creating travel videos by using free music playlists and Adobe Premiere.