Yes, Calckey is undergoing a full rebranding!! But it's more than that. We've worked for MONTHS on this, and there's going to be a lot of changes and exciting things coming up. This includes:
Press releases?!?!
A super sick trailer video
A full roadmap for the next couple YEARS
A new flagship server that will be AUTOMATICALLY MIGRATED TO from calckey.social (a Fediverse first!)
A cute new mascot :calc_swear: <(I'm not cute?!)
A new code hosting service with better CI/CD
The stable release you've all been waiting for, but not as v14.0.0... as v1!!
Many people are asking me, "How will #ActivityPub ultimately be #Meta's own undoing?"
Meta's current business model is not built for an open protocol like ActivityPub. It's very much dependent on them owning and controlling the network effect of services like Facebook and Instagram.
Not only does Meta want to collect all your personal data -- they want to control it too. They enforce this control through proprietary APIs. In this sense, they're not different from Twitter and Reddit.
The point of ActivityPub is that services, such as #Mastodon, #Kbin, and #Calckey, can depend on an open protocol instead of a proprietary API.
What if I, the admin of calckey.social, don't like what a dev is doing? Well, too bad. The protocol is open. I might be able to twiddle with my own server, but I can't do jack with anyone else's.
And what if I'm a greedy asshole who wants to monetize the user data on my server? Too bad for me, everyone on my server can migrate elsewhere.
This is not how Meta does business. In almost all ways, ActivityPub is counter to their business. Yet, here they are -- wanting to join the Fediverse.
The tech industry is awash in stories of big corporations that own proprietary tech that become undone by open standards.
Remember IBM's dominance of PCs? It was undone by the EISA standard.
Remember Novell's dominance of networking? It was undone by the bundling of TCP/IP in operating systems.
Remember AOL's dominance of online services? It was undone by the World Wide Web.
ActivityPub is yet another standard that pierces the opaque walled gardens that largely depend on proprietary technology owned by one company. And Meta happens to be one company that owns an opaque walled garden.
If history is to be repeated -- and usually it's worth learning from history -- then Meta opening the door to ActivityPub is company suicide. It's the first domino to fall before everything else in their catalogue of walled gardens also falls. Contrary to popular opinion, creating an ActivityPub enabled social network does not "kill" ActivityPub -- it validates it.
As it happens, I've known quite a few people who work at Meta. I have a little insight into what they're thinking.
Most folks at Meta know very well that Facebook will eventually die. But not just Facebook, Instagram too. Social networks, by their nature, are generational and transient. They have a shelf life.
Meta very much wants to build the app that kills Facebook and Instagram.
They have to build it because they can't acquire competition. That will raise the ire of regulators.
Likewise, Meta have already tried to leverage their own proprietary APIs to build compelling platforms. We've already seen this with the likes of Portal and Oculus.
What's apparent is that, even for a Big Social company like Meta, it is extremely hard to build a network effect from scratch. Sure, billions of people use Facebook and Instagram, but it was a whole lot of work for Meta to do that themselves.
And what was the end result of building Facebook and Instagram's network effect? More regulation by governments.
Thus, ActivityPub gives Meta two things it craves: the ability to piggyback on the network effect of an open protocol, and the ability to head off regulators by saying, "Hey, we don't own this protocol -- we're no different from Mastodon and Calckey."
Again, open protocols usually mean the demise of big corporations who leverage success through proprietary APIs. And ActivityPub will be no different.
Meta joining the Fediverse means that Automattic was right to build ActivityPub plugin for WordPress. It also means competitors, such as Apple and Microsoft, should probably start investing in ActivityPub.
What else does it mean? That small developers should start building apps that appeal to people who use Meta services. They should build these apps based on garden-variety ActivityPub -- because Meta can't own or control ActivityPub.
Yet another question people are asking me: "How can I, a common person, help hasten the demise of #Meta through #ActivityPub?"
Again, I want to re-emphasize this. #Fediblock is not an all-purpose tool. It's useful as a hammer. But in this scenario, we don't just need a hammer. We need drills, pliers, saws, and blowtorches.
That said, we must protect communities that choose to defederate from Meta. Which means that if those servers don't want to receive messages from any Meta-owned services, we must not only be respectful of that, we should make damn sure that those servers are quarantined from Meta. So much of the success of fighting Meta will require safe spaces from Meta.
The next thing we need is lots and lots of nodes. Currently, we only have ~25,000 nodes on the Fediverse but we need more. Preferably, these nodes should be small, agile, and well-moderated. If you have the finances and/or skill to run a node, it's important that you do so. To compete with Meta, we need to build scale -- and the easiest way to build scale is by adding more nodes to the Fediverse.
What will also be key is lobby servers. These will be servers specifically set up for migrants from Meta-owned services to help onboard them towards the rest of the Fediverse. To run such a lobby server, they need to be welcoming, moderated well, and free of the elitists and gatekeepers that poison so much of the Fediverse currently.
How to get people from Meta to try out the rest of the Fediverse? We need people willing to be ambassadors on #P92 who are ready and willing to evangelize the rest of the Fediverse. Folks like @tchambers are very good at this on Twitter, and I have no doubt that we can do the same with P92. Except this time we'll have the benefit of federation already happening 😉
Now if there's one thing I've learned about the growth of the Fediverse it's that bad corporate decisions pay dividends. We've already experienced waves of migration from Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit. And I have no doubt that it's only a matter of time before Meta makes another corporate mistake -- as they tend to do.
In which case, we need to strike fast. When another Cambridge Analytica happens, we need to remind everyone on Meta about the lobby servers that are on standby, and ready to take them on. Unlike previous migrations, let's not be unprepared for this. Let's be especially prepared since Meta plans to join the Fediverse.
Finally, we need more devs. Specifically, we need devs willing to build innovative server and client software that takes aim at Meta. And to do that, we need to support the devs that currently exist -- show evergreen devs pondering whether they should invest here that we, as a community, are appreciative of our current devs.
If you like #Mastodon, #Calckey, #Kbin, #Friendica, etc., it's important that you open up your hearts as well as your wallets and fund the next stage of Fediverse development.
This will take a lot of work. But if you want to fight Meta, challenge their dominance of social media, this is what must be done.
Personally, I'm hyped about the future of the Fediverse -- regardless of whether Meta eventually lives to tell the tale.
The Feditext iOS client for Mastodon, GotoSocial, Firefish, etc. now has its own account on fedi.software! Please follow us here for official Feditext updates and announcements.
Follow generously. If you don't follow anyone, you won't have anything in your Home feed! That's fine if you're here to broadcast, but it might be hard to find followers if you don't follow.
Lead generously. If you don't let anyone follow you, you won't have any reach into networks outside your own. That's fine if you want a private experience, but remember: nothing is really private in the Fediverse. Even DMs are not really private.
Mute on a whim. You can silence users and threads with a click, either temporarily or permanently. You don't have to take any shit.
Block at will. Silencing the bigot not good enough? You can block individual users, or whole domains. Probably most of the worst of the worst are already defederated from your instance. But if not, you can do it yourself, for yourself.
#Mastodon is NOT the #Fediverse. You can migrate from Mastodon instance to Mastodon instance. Or, you can migrate from Mastodon to #Calckey. You can have a #Pixelfed user, and see and boost your pics in your Calckey timeline, or Mastodon timeline, or #Lemmy or #kbin or, or, ... Don't limit yourself to this one playground. YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL.
For those who don’t know @kainoa, he’s the very sharp college student and developer who had the insight to realize Misskey was a great alternative to Mastodon for building a future-facing Fedi platform, so he forked it to #Calckey and built a team to grow it. #Calckey’s development has already influenced other platforms, so I feel he’s quite worthy of support from all quarters. I try to do my part. Can you help him out, too?
This is just a friendly reminder to donate to the admins of whatever flavor of the #fediverse you're on. Server space, electricity, bills n shit. Those cost money.
It is up and running -- and everything is functioning great!
However, it is not yet open for registrations. I have a little more configuring to do, particularly with the TOS. However, it will be open and available to more people soon 🎉
Here's what the landing page currently looks like. I might eventually change the background image -- I want something more welcoming and positive 😊
I'm very sorry for all of the degraded performance lately on calckey.social. As you may or may not know, we've been testing changes with our codebase, database deployment, ims deployment, and a whole lot more. After a lot of testing and changes, I thought that we were good enough to start opening signups again. Turns out... we're not. As I continue to work on things and start team up with some very smart people who've worked in deployment and scaling systems, we're going to do our absolute best to make sure that we can handle things on all ends, and hopefully get extra hands on deck for day-to-day operations, so it's not all on my shoulders. I was sadly unable to attend to a lot of things yesterday due to being out of town for the holiday, and being in a no-service area for the majority of the day, so I didn't know that there were issues until it was too late. Thank you for your patience as we go through growing pains. A full write-up on what went wrong, the steps we took, and how it's fixed (once it's fixed!) will be made after all this is done. For real.
I did NOT expect this amount of support, interest, and coverage! Hitting 13k from 11k in a little over 2 days across all servers is still boggling my mind. And it's not just calckey.social -- so many other servers are getting new users, and even ~30 new servers cropped up! Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. I'll make sure that I do my hardest to make sure you all have a great experience.
As promised, you all deserve a peak into what we've been working on in secret for months. More details to come tonight/tomorrow. Stay tuned. 😉
There is no question kbin is the stronger product right now. It feels more mature than Lemmy , even where it isn't. What we're discussing right now is #Calckey implementing the group actor ahead of schedule, at which point, it will basically have precisely the same features as Kbin/Lemmy (it already has threading). With all the rest of the tools already in Calckey, it will a good solution for ambitious communities.
Waiting for the next version of #calckey to be released! Looks really good. If more mobile apps come with support, I think it’ll be a serious competitor to Mastodon and many people who bailed in the early days of the twitter migration would probably find it a better fit.
So, I tried installing #Threads to check it out, but I ended up uninstalling it pretty quickly. Here's the deal: it's just another Twitter clone that's all about algorithms.
I get it, that's what most people are into. I understand that influencers, media, and celebrities attract a lot of attention. But that's just not my thing.
I might sound a bit "weird," but I actually prefer my reverse chronological feed where I have complete control over what and who I see. If I want to discover more stuff, I'll just use #Calckey's search feature, which may not be the best but works well enough for me.
Oh, and I deleted my Meta accounts for a good reason. Whenever I'm there, I feel this weird sense of discomfort, like I need a good shower afterwards.
I know I'm not your typical user. I've been part of the Fediverse since 2018 and have genuinely enjoyed it, even when it was just a small community of a few thousand people. We have a nice little community going on over here, and I don't need all the fancy stuff that Threads is offering right now.
I'm not trying to bash Threads or judge anyone who uses it. It's just not the right fit for me, plain and simple.
"Calckey heißt jetzt Firefish, … sonst ändert sich nüscht." 😉
Hab die Meldung mal aktualisiert:
Alles was auf Mastodon fehlt: Firefish im Fediverse mit zig Zusatzfunktionen
Die Zahl der Twitter-Alternativen wächst und wächst. Während die meisten das Vorbild ziemlich stark nachbauen, gibt es aber auch Versuche, weiterzudenken.
It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
I need any resources, guides, HOWTOs, man pages, codices, papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, and anything else you might have, by yourself or others, on the topic of running a Fediverse instance.