Steemit feed widget for any website.

Steem is a Delegated Proof of Stake social blockchain that launched on March 24, 2016, making it the first production blockchain explicitly designed for social content with on-chain reward payouts. The original architects were Daniel Larimer (who later left to build EOS) and Ned Scott, who founded Steemit Inc. as the company that operated steemit.com (the canonical front-end) and held a large pre-mined stake originally intended for ecosystem development. From 2016 through early 2020, Steem was the canonical example of crypto-incentivized publishing: authors earned STEEM tokens and SBD (Steem Dollars, a stablecoin pegged loosely to one US dollar) for posts the community upvoted on a 7-day reward window, with payouts split 50/50 between author and curators (the upvoters who staked STEEM Power to vote). The chain produced a block every 3 seconds, recorded every social operation as a permanent chain entry, and operated a witness-elected validator set similar to other DPoS chains. In February 2020, Justin Sun acquired Steemit Inc. (and with it the pre-mined stake and the steemit.com front-end). The community immediately raised concerns about governance capture, and within a few weeks the bulk of active authors, dApp builders, and witnesses organized a coordinated migration to a forked chain called Hive, which went live on March 20, 2020. Hive distributed token balances to original holders while excluding the Steemit Inc. stake. The fork was an unusually clean community exit. Almost six years later, the Steem chain still produces blocks, the full pre-fork archive remains committed and queryable, and a residual community continues to post under Justin Sun's stewardship. For an author embedding content on the open web in 2026, Steem is the right choice when the specific value you want to surface is the pre-2020 archive, the legacy STEEM holder community, or chain continuity itself rather than the active community that moved to Hive. Poper supports both chains: this widget reads Steem, the sister Hive Feed widget reads Hive, and you can run both on the same site if your story spans both chains.

The March 2020 Hive fork is the single most important context for understanding Steemit in 2026. The trigger was Justin Sun's February 2020 acquisition of Steemit Inc., which gave him technical control of a pre-mined stake originally allocated to fund ecosystem development. The community concern was that the stake had always been treated as a community resource (held by Steemit Inc. as a fiduciary) rather than as Steemit Inc. corporate property, and that a Tron-affiliated owner using that stake to influence chain governance would compromise the protocol's neutrality. A coordinated witness response in early March 2020 froze the Steemit Inc. stake from voting, Justin Sun responded by working with major exchanges to use customer-deposited STEEM to vote in replacement witnesses, and the resulting on-chain dispute convinced the bulk of the Steem developer community that staying on Steem was no longer viable. Hive forked on March 20, 2020. The fork was technically clean: a snapshot of Steem chain state was taken, all balances except the disputed Steemit Inc. stake were carried over to a new chain (Hive), and the new chain went live with the same DPoS mechanics minus the contested governance dynamics. What stayed on Steem: the Steemit Inc. stake itself, Justin Sun's ongoing involvement, the steemit.com front-end (which he owned through the acquisition), the chain history pre-fork (which is identical on both chains because it was the same chain), and a smaller residual community of authors who chose to keep posting on Steem either because they were neutral on the dispute, supported the new ownership, or were too embedded in the Steem ecosystem to migrate. Steem in 2026 is therefore a smaller, less active version of itself than 2019 Steem was, but it is structurally functional: blocks are still produced, RPC nodes are still online, posts still earn STEEM and SBD payouts on the standard 7-day curve, and the full 2016-through-present archive remains queryable through public steemd endpoints. The Steemit Feed widget exists for the use cases where this specific chain matters: legacy archives, post-2020 STEEM holders, tag communities that did not migrate, and the historical record itself.

The single biggest reason Steem authors care about which embed they ship is reward preservation. On centralized platforms an embedded post pays the author through whatever revenue model the host runs (ad share, subscription, sponsored placement). On Steem the model is fundamentally different: every post enters a 7-day voting window during which any Steem account can upvote it using their staked STEEM Power, and at the end of the window the protocol computes a payout split between the author (typically 50%) and curators who upvoted early (typically 50%, weighted by upvote timing and stake). Payouts settle in two tokens: STEEM (the chain's main coin, distributed via the inflation-funded reward pool) and SBD (Steem Dollars, a stablecoin loosely pegged to one US dollar through a debt-settlement mechanism against STEEM, though the peg has been less stable than HBD on Hive in some periods). Authors typically receive the payout split between liquid SBD and STEEM Power (vested STEEM that takes 13 weeks to power down). If your embed strips the upvote button, fakes it, or routes upvotes through your own Steem account instead of the original post permlink, you have just broken the entire reward economy for that author. Most third-party Steem embeds either ignore this completely (rendering a static post card with a link that opens steemit.com) or try to clone the upvote UI in a way that does not actually post the chain operation. Poper takes the principled path: post cards link through to steemit.com (or your preferred Steem front-end) where the official upvote button posts to chain under the reader's own account credentials. The author receives every STEEM and SBD token earned. The reader keeps custody of their own keys. Poper never sees a private posting key and never proxies an on-chain operation. Reward preservation is the whole reason a crypto-native author would consider embedding off-chain at all. The widget's job is to make the embed beautiful and fast without touching the chain semantics underneath.

Embedding posts and ranking posts are two completely different things. A bare list of post titles linking to steemit.com is invisible to Google's understanding of the underlying content because Google cannot effectively crawl what is inside an iframe and rarely executes the JavaScript needed to follow chain links. To be eligible for rich results, for the related-articles carousel that appears on long queries, and to get the byline plus publish date next to your organic listing, your page needs Schema.org Article or BlogPosting structured data for each post. Required fields include headline, datePublished (ISO 8601), author (with name and profile URL), and image. Strongly recommended fields include description, dateModified, publisher, and articleBody for full text indexing. Centralized blogging platforms like Medium hand you minimal structured data on the post page itself, and almost no third-party widget that aggregates posts emits structured data for the embedded set. Steemit.com emits structured data on its own canonical post pages, but the structured data does not propagate when the post is embedded elsewhere. Poper auto-injects a complete Article or BlogPosting JSON-LD block for every Steem post in the feed, populated from chain post metadata (title, body, tags, author handle, creation timestamp from the chain) plus reputation-weighted publisher attribution. The result is that a page with the Poper Steemit widget embedded ships richer structured data than the steemit.com watch page itself for the embedded subset, because conventional embed providers do not emit structured data at all. Validate after embedding by pasting your page URL into Google's Rich Results Test. This is the single highest-leverage SEO move available to any Steem author publishing on the open web in 2026: your blockchain-committed content becomes discoverable in conventional search alongside centralized blog content, while still living on a censorship-resistant chain that has been operating continuously since March 2016.

Six years after the fork, Steem and Hive both still exist as separate chains with shared pre-2020 history. The honest comparison for a creator choosing where to publish in 2026 is asymmetric: Hive is where the active community went, Steem is where the original chain and a smaller residual community remain. Hive in 2026 has the active dApp ecosystem (Splinterlands, LeoFinance, Inleo, 3Speak, PeakD), the ongoing protocol upgrades (HBD stability program, Resource Credit tuning, Hive Application Framework indexing), most of the witness security and developer mindshare, and a more robust HBD stablecoin program. Steem in 2026 has the original brand and front-end (steemit.com), the unbroken chain history back to March 2016, Justin Sun's continued backing of the chain operations, and a smaller community that has its own reasons for staying. For new authors deciding where to start in 2026, Hive is generally the practical answer: more active readers, more dApps, more active witness security, more ongoing protocol work. For existing Steem authors with substantial pre-fork archives and ongoing engagement on the original chain, Steem still works as a publishing platform and the chain still pays out STEEM and SBD on the standard 7-day curve. For the embedding use case specifically, the choice is determined by which chain holds the content you want to showcase: if the archive lives on Steem, use the Steemit Feed widget; if the archive lives on Hive, use the Hive Feed widget; if both, use both on the same page (they cost nothing to combine). The widget's job is not to advocate for either chain politically, it is to abstract the technical complexity (RPC failover, chain history walk, STEEM and SBD payout rendering, reward preservation) so the author can decide which content to surface based on their own narrative.