I'm super happy I finally got my instance migrated over to software that's actually still maintained. I enjoyed using Firefish but the project imploding kinda made it hard to keep using it.
I'm grateful that the Sharkey project is continuing despite some dev team changes.
I thought migrating #Iceshrimp ’s Mastodon API to #Firefish would be as easy as copy over the folder and change some imports, until I realized that Iceshrimp is using Redis but Firefish has dropped support of that.
How much time is ok to wait after an account is moved from server A to server B, to bring down server A?
My old #Firefish instance is abandoned, just forwarding any request to my new #Mastodon#Glitch instance for the last 2 months, and I want to bring the first down finally.
I've been meaning to do a "State of the Shark" post for a while, and go through and explain some of the history and important moments that blahaj.zone has been through. For those of you who have been here for a while, you know it got a bit rough at points, and I want to take the chance to explain some of what happened.
I joined the fediverse in April 2022, around 6 months before the big twitter exodus in November 2022.
I fell in love with what I perceived to be the freedom of instances to create safe spaces for trans folk that had been harassed on twitter (At the time, I didn't have an awareness of how that inclusion doesn't always extend to trans folk that don't have white privilege)
I was talking to a friend @supakaity (well, friend at the time. Now we're partners, together with @internutter) and she said that she was planning on spinning up a fediverse instance. Kaity would supply the technical skills, and I would bring my community building and development experience and be "front of house". We did some brain storming, and came up with several names centered on blåhaj, because we wanted the instance to be focused on trans and gender diverse folk, without being specifically restricted to trans users. And so, in late November 2022, blahaj.zone was born.
Initially, we tried Misskey, mostly because I hated the Mastodon interface and wanted something prettier. But Misskey has very little documentation in english, and not much usage outside of Japan. At the time, there weren't many Misskey forks, with FoundKey and Calckey being the main options.
We had a look at Calckey, and decided to go with it. It had a small but active development team, and several instances already running it. And so we went live with Calckey. Kaity, being Kaity, would listen to some of my frustrations around usability, and started to expand the feature set of Calckey. Many of these fixes got pushed back to Calckey main, but not all of them. Those that were not pushed up to Calckey stayed in use on blahaj.zone though, and eventually we named our little soft fork of Calckey "Hajkey" (pronounced Hi-Key).
Around this time, Calckey was starting to get traction, and we were starting to get users who would join, just to try out some of the features that Kaity was working on. And for a while, all was good.
But for reasons that don't belong in this post, we eventually fell out of step with the Calckey development team and decided to go our own way. When Calckey rebranded as Firefish, we formally parted ways.
But that left us a dilemma. We did not want to move to the Firefish software base, as it was moving in technical directions that we didn't want to go. And we couldn't stay on our version of Calckey/Hajkey, as some of the bugs were show stoppers. So we had to look at alternatives, and decided to rebase Hajkey off of Iceshrimp.
And then Kaity got in to a really bad accident. Concussion, broken jaw, and an injury to her arm that even now, still hasn't been resolved. So blahaj.zone entered limbo. We were partially rebased on ice-shrimp, but without the chance to fully integrate all of the Hajkey features, and with federation bugs and issues. The instance was up and running, but it was wounded, and the task of updating it seemed impossible, especially whilst recovering from a major accident.
And that's how we existed for many months...
Ultimately, we made the decision to rebase again, this time on Sharkey, but even then, the work of implementing all of the Hajkey specific changes was huge, and so, we made the decision to let Hajkey go, and move to vanilla Sharkey.
And here we are now, running Sharkey, and with the instance humming again! I've made Kaity promise to try and not end up creating a huge workload for herself by re-creating the Hajkey features as Hajkey, so our hope is that over time, we will add at least some of them to Sharkey itself. That way, every Sharkey update will not involve a day of code merging from Kaity.
As much as I miss some of our old features, I am so much happier to have blahaj.zone buzzing and alive again!
Thank you to everyone, and here's to a strong future!
Added Mastodon push notification support to my fork of #Firefish still not sure if it would work properly. I don’t get that many notifications anyway ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'm trying to sent a note to myself (as a reply to a private toot). The POST to my inbox is accepted (status 202), but it is not showing up in my inbox. Any idea why?
The note is showing up when I try this with #Firefish
Dear #Mastodon and #Firefish developers.
I beg you to add support for WebP lossy, WebP lossless and JPEG XL. Also SVG for emojis.
Encode PNG into lossless WebP, and JPEG into both WebP lossy and JPEG XL. Fedi admins will thank you for the transfer and storage saves!
Testing #Bluesky out, but it’s obvious that #Sharkey is just more fleshed out - neither are close to perfect but Sharkey (and likely other Fedi apps) are definitely closer (imo). Very jealous of them having an official mobile client though. I remember hopping on #Firefish from #Mastodon, and there was hype from the FF team that they are looking to commission for an official FF mobile client or at least for support in a general client - that official client never came in the end even after FF’s death today. Dk if it’s Sharkey’s plan to be like Mastodon and have an official mobile client eventually.
Apparently, Tumblr's CEO stepped on his crank and outed himself as a TERF. We does not abide the TERF. No we doesn't.
If you're fleeing #Tumblr and checking out the #fediverse, welcome! I hope you find a home here. You have quite a few options with #Mastodon, #Miskey, #Firefish#Sharkey (I'm posting this from sharkey.world), and the practically thousands of instances within those. Each have their own flavor and features, so don't feel you have to settle on one off the bat. It's not unusual to see new users sign up on one instance, then eventually move to another, then another before they find the community that fits them best.
Looking for something more "bloggy"? Bear Blog and Pika are two services offering simple blogging tools with an emphasis on "small blogging". They are unassociated with the major blogging platforms and offer a fresh alternative to them.
Ich werde jetzt immer mal wieder die Firefish Instanzen mit aufnehmen, die ein aktuelles Update eingespielt haben.
Bei https://firefish.fediverse.observer/list kann man die übrigens daran erkennen, dass unter Ausführung (Version) 0.0.0.0 angezeigt wird. Scheinbar kann der Observer nicht damit umgehen, dass es zwei Arten von Versionsnummern gibt.
Hello again #Fediverse, I may need your #fedihelp. So, here's a list of the Fediverse software I'm about to make temporary accounts for to test all the features and differences:
So, did I miss anything noteworthy? Does anyone have any tips or recommendations before I choose a server for any one of these? I'll probably be going for the most popular server on each for improved federation and maintenance.
Note: I'm using #Sharkey right now and Misskey forks are already overrepresented, so that's why it's not included.
@erua И? В чём проблема? #Firefishне портит картинки, в отличие от #Mastodon / #Pixelfed. И особо без разницы, будет там 200 гигов или 10 — для картинков достаточно.