So, after reading a post from @atomicpoet I moved over to #Calckey from #Mastodon a few days ago to give it a whirl.
Clearly I'm a expert now, so thought I'd share a few thoughts.
Lets get the elephant in the room dealt with first; Mastodon is ugly.
There, I said it.
I know a lot of people appreciate the simplicity of it but from a design aesthetic, well, there isn't any.
Calckey really is the diametric opposite from a UI perspective.
Migrating
Super simple, set up an alias, hit the move button and your followers will, well, follow you.
Import/Export
Simple to Import your list of who you follow.
Notably, you can Export your Posts, so that they can be Imported if you migrate again. This bit is kinda key as I don't think a lot of people realise you can do this.
Posting
It's the difference between sending an email in plain text to sending one in rich text.
3000 character limit
Markdown, well, MFM anyway
Quoting
Customisation
Custom Layouts
Installed and Custom Themes
Wallpapers
Drive
Really useful, a place to store files so you are not scrabbling around looking for that image / document you wanted to post.
Widgets
All sorts of stuff like Calendars, Clock and some stuff I'll never use like Server Info.
Stuff To Try
Actually there are too many things to list but a couple are:
CustomCSS
Channels and Groups
Niggles
Antennas sometimes produce an error page.
Sometimes the Timeline goes a bit wonky and 'splits', I dunno a better way to describe it.
Will I Stay?
I dunno but I'm glad I tried a different instance out, and if I want to, I can move from here and take my Followers and Posts with me, the way the Protocol intended.
Is it for everyone
Nope, but I think people might like it if they tried it.
If you are the sort of person who likes tinkering with stuff, and has tried every Windows Manager and Desktop Enviroment under the sun I think you're going to like it.
@Simon
"I know a lot of people appreciate the simplicity of it...."
Yes. I tried a Calckey account for a month, and it overloaded me. It was like a Japanese game show, with colored text and huge quote-tweets and loads of emojis and all sorts of stuff. Way too sparkly for me, when all I'd like as extra message appearance add-ons is stuff like italic/bold text.
@Simon@atomicpoet I enjoy sinking hours into random things that are not my business at all so this feels like my jam. Looks very pretty too! How did you find the web performance?
@Simon Great post! Agree with a lot of these observations. I signed up here a while ago but never explored much, but now I have - it's really nice!
One non-obvious aspect of the UI that is kind of interesting - it saves draft posts automatically.
By which I mean - click post, type some stuff, close the box. Go and do something else. Come back. Click post - it's all still there. No idea how long it persists - I have a draft in my post box for a few days now. And not only that - the drafts are unique to the post to which one is replying. Like, I can close this box I'm drafting in here, open a different box to reply to a different post, this one here will remain when I come back to it. How cool is that?
Love love love the existence of a Post Export/Import when moving
Do we know, for someone who has moved across a couple of Mastodon servers (1) and (2) over time, is it possible to consolidate both Post histories onto a new CalcKey server (3) via two runs of post export/import?
Because I bungled my accout creation here (I capitalised some random letters in my username), I'm about to jump our of here, to Masto, then back to here on a new username.
@Simon@atomicpoet Ahhh I should have said I’m on iOS. I’ve just created a Calckey profile and also downloaded an app called Kimis - designed with Misskey in mind but I’ll see how it goes!! Thanks.
@Simon@greenback@atomicpoet 100% agree, it should be a full cross-pollination thing between all these platforms. That's the beauty of open licences - all these services can (and should!) be learning from each other and implementing cool new features that improve everyone's experience regardless where we are.
People often talk about how competition spurs innovation - but so can co-operation!
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