MY ROAD TO STEEMFEST4

Two weeks ago I celebrated my third anniversary on Steem. Now, as I start my journey to Bangkok, to attend SteemFest⁴ it gives me an opportunity to reflect over my #roadtosteemfest

Yesterday I was visiting Stockholm to celebrate @minimining's birthday, to catch up and talk about Steem. It was a very nice occasion, as I always love to meet with fellow Steemians and talk about the platform, its past, its current state and its future. Needless to say, Steem today is a very different thing that what it was when I just joined. And it is different from just two years ago, when I attended SteemFest². I remember getting really psyched up about the future of the platform, with SMT's launch being promised "very soon", SteemMonsters' imminent release, and lots of other cool and exciting features in the works.

Steem today feels much less exciting, at least to me personally. Partly because I didn't have time or energy to stay fully engaged with the platform over the past year, when I was back in school, pursuing a graduate degree in finance. I naively believed that it would be easier to stay active on Steem, after I graduated and started working. Ha-ha... Work life proved to be even more time- and energy-consuming than university studies. I am not complaining, as I truly love my job and my new company, but I also miss making regular posts and interacting with my Steemian friends on the platform.

I keep in touch with selected few people, but these days it has a character of a more personal friendship relationship rather than a Steem-centred collaboration. Some of the projects I was actively involved with have been put on ice after the latest hardfork. And it feels like Steem as a blockchain platform still holds a lot of promise (I am particularly excited about applications like @appics and @steemmonsters), but it feels that its heydays as a social blogging platform are in the past.

Maybe I am wrong and the upcoming community features and SMT's will breath a new life into the platform. Or maybe I'll regain my personal enthusiasm for Steem and for blogging in Bangkok during the SteemFest⁴ this week. I hope I will. Either way, I am particularly excited about meeting old friends and making new ones, and learning about the upcoming new features on Steem first-hand from the Steem.com team's representatives.

Please leave a comment, if you are going to be attending SteemFest⁴ too. And please come up and say hi, when you see me in Bangkok! I am really looking forward to meeting you all!

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