Just happened to visit Steemit.com today and saw that it was being hard-forked. Awesome.
I haven't been paying a lot of attention and have only visited Steemit sporadically to see what had changed during my 2 years off. The lack of obvious updates to Steem and the Steemit UI turned me off. It also felt like more of a cash cow than a real platform that was looking to expand and grow.
I also saw them admit to censoring posts on Hive, which is the reason I came here in the first place. You guys are right, it's great marketing for Hive. Meanwhile, the UI updates I see here on Hive are already an improvement over what I've seen there.
I am curious what caused the hard fork to actually happen, as I've been totally out of the loop - my visits to Steemit were only surface-level and I didn't look much at the "news" or "updates" that were put out, because it didn't seem like anything had actually changed. (Maybe that was it, just lack of updates? I also saw something to do with the Steem branding?)
Anyway, if someone could summarize or point me to the reasons why this is happening, I'd love to see them. Thanks all!
It's a long story. Ultra shortened:
The Steemit stake (about 70 million Steem) was frozen by the witnesses after Justin Sun bought Steemit. They did this so he could not vote witnesses or posts. He then lied to Binance and Huobi and they powered up their customers' Steem to elect 20 witnesses by Justin Sun, thus he unfroze his stake. So the complete chain was temporary under his control, witnesses regained control partly. It was a stalemate, nobody could fork, negotiations didn't have any real results. Community decided to fork away, putting the Steemit stake into the DHV (Decentralized Hive Fund). And here we are.
You can use https://peakd.com/ for a better UI. Not sure how much you know about the developements on Steem, but we have Steem-Engine now, which allows for tokens, Steemit-clones with your own token and NFTs and some other stuff.
Check out https://steemapps.com/ for a list of other Steem apps. Most of them will eventually move to Hive but that will take some time, mainly because Steem-Engine will take some time to move.
Feel free to ask any questions.