I've been on Steemit for a year now

I have been active on Steemit for a year now. Although that may not seem like a very long time, it still means something to me. I have never kept a blog for more than one year in my life. My attempts took place on various platforms like LiveJournal and Facebook posts. Nowhere else did I achieve this kind of progress. Not that I’m particularly proud of it, but I wanted to write a few words about it. It all started in October 2024, when I was on vacation for the Sukkot holiday, and out of boredom I checked Steemit, since it had been at least three years since I’d been active here. I noticed there was real human activity on the platform, and all the rumors about the collapse of this project remain just rumors. OK. I tried to find something that would interest me, to understand what users write about so people would read them. As it turned out, they write about everything. To my surprise I even discovered and found the Ukrainian community. I wasn’t specifically looking, but I was glad to have found it. I am extremely grateful to the members of the “Ukraine on Steem” community for their support and for correcting my path on Steemit. Without some of the advice I received I would have learned only from my own mistakes. And I must mention that I started writing from another account, but was forced to switch to this one (maxart) for certain reasons in early January 2025.

The reality is that I almost always live in a constant “squeezed lemon” state. Work takes up the majority of my time. I need to pay attention to some family matters, to my wife. A vacuum of time forms, and it can be very difficult to write anything at all, to put thoughts into a form that someone would later want to read. At first I tried keeping a “diary,” writing just about anything, and frankly it turned out to be nothing but crappy text that carried neither meaning nor emotion.

I tip my hat to people like @yetaras and @cranium, who work hard, spend time with their families, and write something every day. There are many other users I could add to that “list,” but those two were the first to come to mind. Sorry for not mentioning others. I can’t write every day for one reason — I’m not ready to tell a story about how morning came and the day passed as usual. Nobody needs that. I don’t even read such “masterpieces” that appear in the feed every day. At one point I thought I would just photograph various places or moments and publish them on Steemit like on Instagram, but it’s not that simple, because every photo needs its own story. I used to have certain problems with writing stories, but gradually I learned. But today I have problems with photographs. Haha.

The longer I do something I enjoy, the more I start to study it deeply to understand how it works. I can compare myself to a child who was given a new toy car and a week later that car is already dismantled into the smallest pieces. That shows a desire to learn and move forward. In principle, this trait is characteristic of all people; it’s just more noticeable in children. My desire to learn is driven by attempts to create a web application that will interact with the Steem blockchain. One such project is a bot for automatic voting on posts in the subscription feed. I wrote about this once. I have the impression that I’m the only one using that bot, which bothers me — nevertheless, it’s useful to me; it saves me a bit of time. I also had other ideas; I’m ready to talk about two of them. One was to create a marketplace where authorization would be implemented using Steem Keychain and payments would be made in Steem tokens for goods or services. I even started basic development, but over time I realized I wouldn’t be able to bring the project to a logical finish due to lack of time. So if someone is looking for an idea — take it and build it. The second idea arose very recently — a messenger on the Steem blockchain. The idea is to send encrypted messages in the memo of microtransactions (0.001 steem) between users; secure authorization using Steem Keychain would remove the need to worry about keeping private keys (active key) safe. I probably overthink things, so I began to doubt the demand for such a messenger, since interaction between users already happens via comments and, practically speaking, nothing more is needed. Life has taught me to value time.

On Steemit I also met wonderful, high-quality people. I don’t maintain constant communication with them, but I had the honor of commenting on their posts and expressing my opinion, which was heard. Lately I can’t shake the feeling that people around have gone crazy. There is minimal tolerance toward others. Clients at work listen but don’t hear. People have become ruder to each other than they were two years ago. Increasingly I meet irrational people on the street. This phenomenon can be explained: war, economic instability in the country, lack of confidence in tomorrow. Over time I start to wonder: maybe it’s me who’s not OK? There’s an expression: “if everything around stinks of shit, maybe you shit yourself.” I would very much not like that to happen to me. The people I met on Steemit over the last year made me realize that I’m fine. I’m just out of my element. And in my opinion, quality people tend to stay on Steemit longer than others, because they correctly see their place on this platform — not as a way to earn money or to hit the jackpot and leave. They see their role in the functioning of this system and treat the efforts they put in as an investment not only in themselves, but in Steemit. If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Despite the malicious rumors over the last five or six years that Steemit is in bad shape and nearly finished, I see the process going the other way — improving. I believe in “Steem to the Moon”!

Thanks for reading! I hope it doesn't look like a suicide note :)

• Image: AI-generated, human-edited.