That makes a lot of sense to me and I'm glad it happened. Some people, who use their private keys or the master password without much concern for the security of their account might see it as a minor inconvenience at first, before they get used to it.
It's almost 5 o'clock in the afternoon and I finally reached the point to go through my Ginabot notifications. One of them came from @steemitblog, and their new post announcing the hard split of the condenser (steemit.com) and the wallet apps (steemitwallet.com).
Going forward, all functionalities previously found under the "Wallet" menu in the steemit.com will be performed on the steemitwallet.com website. The "Wallet" menu remains in the social app, but it redirects you to steemitwallet.com, where you'll need to login separately.
On the wallet app, you can log in with any private key, but you won't be able to make transactions or cast witness votes, for example, without logging in with the private active key.
One interesting addition to the wallet app is that it explains private keys and their level of permissions, something many users are still confused about.
So, on steemitwallet.com, we've got this new page, which looks like this:
Read it, especially if you are vaguely familiar with the permissions of the private keys! Read it anyway!
Did you know the owner private key has the permission to "decline voting rights"? I didn't, and am not really sure what that means either. And what's the difference between "declining voting rights" and not voting, since this doesn't seem a penalty, but more like a choice of the account owner?
Anyway, I digress. Or at least, I dive deeper than I planned to.
So, going forward we can only log in using our private posting keys to steemit.com. And that's an excellent thing in my opinion!
Here's what happens if you try to log in with your private active key now:
Or, if you use your master password (stop doing that and start using your private posting key!):
Image from steemitblog's post, I didn't actually test this!
If you lost (or never saved) your private keys and only use your master password, this is a very useful tool to get them for you in the form of a PDF file. As far as I understood a while back, this will be a temporary feature, so I suggest that you recover your private keys as soon as possible, if you only used your master password until now, and then start using them accordingly!
If you use your private keys, then you shouldn't see the above image. That only shows for people who are trying to log in with their master password instead of a private key.
Now that the condenser split is over, let's see what else should we expect. I heard there will be a new roadmap, now that the survival mode is almost over at Steemit Inc... Personally, I'd like to see a roadmap that can be followed and needs no more significant changes.