The STEMsocial app - A successful Migration to Hive and STEMsocial

After a full month of spending most my free time in migrating the old SteemSTEM app to Hive (as the rebranded STEMsocial app), I decided to take a couple of hours to write a short update about everything that has been done. I will try to write those updates regularly (i.e. potentially once a month).

All the following items will be further detailed below.

First, the STEMsocial community (hive-196387) has been integrated to the app. This includes a modification of the way tags are dealt with.

Next, the cleaning of the app from Steem is almost fully achieved.

In terms of new features, the way rewards, upvotes and downvotes are displayed for the comments has been fixed and improved. Comments can also now be downvoted.

Finally, a few bugs (in particular with the markdown/html converter) have been fixed. Keeping one of the most important items for the end, I am happy to mention I have rewritten entirely how most API calls were handled. This yielded a much more efficient app on the client side.

As a side note, the items planned for this quarter (Q2 2020) and detailed in our 2020 roadmap are quite well advanced. We may actually be ahead of schedule!

---

Towards the STEMsocial community

---

The changes concern both post display and creation.

• The posts that are displayed are now those carrying the steemstem tag (backward compatibility), as well as those posted within the STEMsocial community (and hence carrying the hive-196387 tag).
• Posting from the app yields the creation of a post within the community.
• Finally, when a post is displayed within the app, any non-STEM tag is filtered away and ignored.

This setup correspondingly led to a modification of how the posts are loaded from the chain, that I made quite a bit more efficient at the same time.

In the future, post creation is planned to be greatly simplified, in particular with respect to what concerns double posting (in the community and in the user’s personal blog), the way beneficiaries are dealt with, etc. This will go together with the deployment of our future new post editor (that’s currently work in progress).

---

From Steem to Hive

---

As said above, I started to remove all mentions of Steem and Steemit from the app. For instance, the hamburger menu on the left is now Steem-free, the sign-up link redirects to signup.hive.io, I updated the about us page (on which our curators will soon be added), and so on.

In addition, login to the app is now achievable through Hive Keychain and Hivesigner.

This being said, a few images are still very SteemSTEMy. Our designer (@glass.wolf) is on it! The FAQ and the TOS will also be updated very very soon.

---

About comments and the Markdown/HTML converter

---

I have improved a few things regarding the comments to a post. See for instance the screenshot below for an example.

Upvotes and downvotes are now shown separately and correctly, and the rewards are correctly calculated. The associated bugs were affecting posts and comments. At the same time, comments can now be downvoted (this will be soon implemented for posts).

Speaking about bugs, I thank @astrophoto.kevin, @dexterdev and @mobbs for helping in further debugging the Markdown/HTML converter and to provide comments on the future dedicated post editor.

---

Summary / what’s next

---

The changes summarised above correspond to about 20 commits, that can be browsed in our GitHub folder. Our app is indeed open source!

The major improvements of the work of last month concern a more efficient communication with the chain, a sucessful migration out of Steem and integration of the STEMsocial community (hive-196387) and a better display of the comments upvotes/downvotes/rewards.

For what concern the next steps, we move on with following our roadmap. I currently work on the new post editor, which will make any article posted from our app nicely visible on any other Hive frontend.

If you like what we do, please consider:

• supporting our funding proposal;
• approving our witness (@stem.witness);
• delegating to the @steemstem account (or trailing it).

See you all in a month for the next update!

^{PS: This article has been formatted for the STEMsocial front-end. Please see here for a better reading.}