You may have noticed that Steemit.Chat was down for a day or so — it seems like everyone on the platform is talking about it! But don't worry: Steemit.Chat is already back, and ready for action!

Running Steemit.chat is a big deal. The chat is a integral part of the Steemit experience, and for a long time, @Riverhead did an incredible job taking care of everything required to make it available to everyone. Yesterday, the announcement was made that Steemit.chat would be down until it was migrated to a new team. Since the time and expenses were getting a bit high, and @Riverhead is focusing on some new ventures, someone needed to step up. There was a bit of speculation as people only skimmed the message, or as they worried if we would actually be taking over.

It's true, we are: @followbtcnews is now hosting Steemit.Chat!

We worked tirelessly to get chat everything up and running and to minimize the downtime, and we're happy to say everything is already back up and ready to go! You can use chat exactly as before. Nothing has changed or been lost.

I need to take the time right now to acknowledge @Riverhead for all of his service to Steemit.Chat, Steemit, and the STEEM blockchain. Before any thing else existed, Steemit.Chat was there for Steemians of all walks of life to meet and share. He guided it through expansion, development, and took on the costs in both time and money to help it become the place it is today. We are thankful to him for his gracious help in allowing us to take the torch, for getting all the data ready, and being there for us during this really quick changeover period. Everyone should give him a round of applause for his service to our community, and follow his future ventures! 👏👏👏

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You will start seeing some performance improvements right away as we have moved to our dedicated servers, and you will continue to see speed and reliability improvements over the next few days as we begin tweaking things to make Steemit.Chat even better.

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Now I need to take a bit more time to thank @GTG. Without his help, we simply would not have been able to get Steemit.Chat ready to go this fast. He worked side by side with us to get the database installed, migrated, and set up. We'll be continuing to work with him over the course of this week to explore more performance improvements at a base level. He has been an integral part of saving Steemit.Chat, and also deserves a huge round of applause. 👏👏👏

Yay! Steemit.Chat is back! What's next?

Good question. Over the coming weeks, we'll be working on what I've already discussed above. Changing and further developing new features for Steemit.Chat is on the horizon, but not here yet. We want to get everything stabilised and optimised, and then we will continue working on a few of our big upcoming projects. In the interim, if you have suggestions for Steemit.Chat, here are two links you'll want to know:

• https://github.com/sciborg/Steemit-Chat This is a GIThub repo specific to Steemit.Chat.
• https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat
  And this is a GIThub repo for the overall client, which is open source.

You can also contact me, @followbtcnews, or witness partner @crimsonclad on Steemit.Chat or Discord. Both of us keep an eye on both places and are available to help or chat whenever you may need us.

Thanks for being patient with all the crazy stuff happening over the last few days. We're proud to be able to help keep this important component of our platform alive, as well as to be a part of the development of other important Steemian communities on Discord. The more places we have for witnesses, curators, creators, developers, and investors to work together for Steemit, the better.

Bringing together more Steemians to network, chat, make friends, and grow is one of our biggest goals. On behalf of Crimmi and myself, thanks for letting us be a part of your Steemit experience.

I'm Jeff, and I'm @followbtcnews.
I'm a top 30 witness, along with my project partner @crimsonclad. Feel free to reach out to us on Steemit Chat or Discord any time! If we haven't earned your vote yet, please take some time to look at our tools and our work. We hope you decide to place a vote for followbtcnews at https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=followbtcnews&approve=1