Hive has been running for many months now. We're just moving more data over to it. We can always switch from Hive back to steemd very quickly and I believe this is actually part of the testing plans. More details coming, but this is a very low risk change due to it being so easily reversible and having nothing to do with the blockchain.

Andy beat me to the punch. I do hope so. We've seen hive making things faster and smoother in some cases for a while now already, but tags and follows especially is a biggie, hurdle wise. One week should be enough to suss out if things aren't forwarding properly, I imagine... It just means that people actually *have* to point their services at it sometime in the next week and see if it all goes tits up. Won't know if people don't try.