Hello everyone,

For those closely following us, you may have noticed that Steempress has been somewhat dormant in recent years. This stagnation stems from both @howo and @fredrikaa being engaged in other ventures, leaving little room to work on the plugin. We have therefore decided to sunset the plugin as of the 15th of December.

It's hard to believe that it is nearly 6 years since the two of us got together back when both were living in Paris with the goal of building something using this blockchain. Since then, our plugin helped onboard more than 5000 bloggers who published more than 500 000 posts over the years.

Since that start, however, we've moved on to now live on different continents and living very different lives. Despite the limited time available for the plugin, we've kept it running as we knew that for some of you it has been a useful tool. And for a while, we though that if it meant providing some small benefit to Hive, then we wanted to keep it up. But we've now concluded that without the necessary time to give the plugin the attention it needs to function at a decent level, and where it's instead slowly deteriorating without active support, it is more of a disservice to Hive and not what our users deserve. Therefore, we think it is better for everyone to close down the service.

To give our active users a heads up well in advance, we've set the December 15th as the end date for the plugin. Our servers will go offline, and the WordPress plugin will stop to functioning.

What now ?

As mentioned, we have poured a lot of time and energy both into te development of a plugin and in forming the vision of "WordPress to Hive" integration and strategy of onboarding outsiders to the Hive blockchain. Although we are no longer looking to work on the plugin ourselves directly, we are considering options where we could still make it available to the community if there is sufficient interest.

Shutting down the Witness

Additionally, we will be shutting down the witness and withdrawing the steempress account from top 20 governance. It has been a real pleasure to provide our voices during all these years from the Steem days to where the blockchain is now. Like many others, we are proud of what we did and helped achieve back in early 2020 when giving birth to Hive, and appreciate the support that so many of you have given to us throughout the years.

As a duo, we believe that we have been able to provide both technical competence and blockchain expertice, as well as to make contibutions on discussions related to topics tokenomics and strategic directions for the blockchain. Since long before entering the top 20, we have insisted on carrying out our own tests of proposed hard forks (and sometimes crashing testnets providing valuable insights to the Steemit team), as well as forming our own stances on key issues facing the blockchain and ensured that we were part of vital discussions going on at crucial parts of the blockchain's history.

Thank you

When we embarked on this adventure six years ago - having first met through the blockchain and then connected on steemitchat - we had no idea that our hackathons and attempts to build a dApp would result in us working as a team for half a decade helping to run and develop what is now a community run blockchain with one of the most unique histories in the blockchain space.

Thank you for letting us be such a part of this amazing story!

@howo, @fredrikaa

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^{From hacking together a dApp over a weekend hackathon with some French baguettes and cheese to pitching and presenting Steempress at various conferences and joining up with community members across the world, it's been an awesome journey!}

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