ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

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!

​:blahaj_is_fine:​ ​:BlahajSpin:​ ​:Blobhaj_Ani_Hophop:​ ​:Blobhaj_Heart_Trans:​ ​:Blobhaj_Thanks_Wow:​

jo, to random

Some of my changes:

  • Added my ListenBrainz username to the integration located in Profile.
  • Reduced the reaction size to small.
  • Changed reaction acceptance to All.
  • Disabled animations.
  • Moved notifications to bottom left and stacking vertically.
  • Toggle to use the system's default font. It looks similar to Iceshrimp / Firefish font we had previously, instead of Misskey.
  • Enabled the Loading Media Data Saver option.
  • Disabled notification sounds.
  • Added Lookup, Antennas, Lists, and Pages; removed Achievements from Navigation bar. Reordered the menu.

jo, to random

My first post since blahajzone migrated to Sharkey, yay! 🦈 🦈

ArtBear, (edited ) to fediverse

So, with there being so many, should we collectively refer to all the different forks of etc as

?😂

A partial list here
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps/issues/47

ArtBear, (edited ) to uk

Almost no-one in MSM seems to put certain things in context together.

Public spending is planned to be cut by 16.7% over 5yrs by Hunt the C-word, & I don't mean Chancellor.
+
Sunak as a previous C-word, (this time I also mean Chancellor), almost uniquely amongst countries allowed tax dodger companies based in tax havens to claim Covid loans, £253 BILLION worth that public accounts said we will never likely see again.

ArtBear, (edited )

@Maikel

So..

I have been considering for months moving my account off firefish.social.
Flagship servers vs. federation + performance.

I have been trying to find out.
Does blahaj.zone have a?unique? function that groups boosts together so they repeat less frequently? Is that something on firefish I missed or is it a blahaj thing?

Can you deactivate boosts on blahaj.zone timelines, so sometimes you can just see what people you follow are saying, but without their boosts if you choose?

Uraael, to random

I ♥️ MissCalcHajFireShrimpSharKey

testing, to fediverse

haaaaa

i knew that it is possible to delete other *key users' replies to my posts by deleting my original post, but i haven't known that deleting an original post entails deletion of other *key users' quotes of the deleted post > this is so cool ​:abunhdhappy:​

<center>i like it ​:Blobhaj_Ani_Hearts:​</center>

jo, (edited ) to mastodon

It's interesting sitting here on an old version of seeing someone on server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [ / 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 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 connected platforms like and it's forks, and , or rapidly growing platforms like and . 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 and 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.

jo,

@skymtf Yes, until Kaity is able to do the merge of with current we remain on buggy Calckey 14.

voidf1sh, to random

Is there any way to get the blinking dot to go away? I don't have any pending follow requests 😭

Also is there a way to disable all sounds in ? I tried turning the master volume all the way down but it still plays the alert and it hijacks my audio every single time :(

valpackett, to random

missing from ( too?): a "mute thread" that would actually disappear the thread and all boosts of it from the timeline

HaruEb, to random

I thought following 1600 accounts would be untenable, but with a bit of effort and a great help from filtering boosts on when the feed gets too fast, or I just want things to feel a bit more personal, I'm super stoked with my feed as of this moment.

It's a great privilege to have a post go "viral" here, and not just any post, but one that I think represents me in some way (oblique as it may be). The quantity of reacts is nice, but what I really value, is checking the notifications for who is reacting and finding some absolute banger accounts!

​:BlahajSpin:​ ​:shinx_hug:​ ​:shinx_happy:​ ​:shinx_jammies:​

jo, to fediverse

While sadomisskists love the rush of a fork. ⛓️🔒🔑

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9hy3rp7is7

HaruEb, to fediverse

how to have a good time on a guide by me based on my first month here!

  1. buy blahaj
  2. attach blahaj to ceiling fan
  3. film spinning fan with vlahaj attached
  4. edit video to form a nice loop
  5. make video into gif
  6. post that shit with alt-text if you can
  7. check everyone who likes that post, there are cool peeps there, follow them!
  8. enjoy your rich home feed!

That's it! That's the whole guide!

hollyberries, to random

is a bit of a difference from whatever tech.lgbt uses, this is going to be an adventure xD

jo, to random

Meanwhile me, also using #Hajkey #Iceshrimp, has #MFM animations turned off and @ada wrote me a bit of CSS to minimise it too cos I can't stand too much of it lol.

.mfm-x2 {
  --mfm-zoom-size: 100%;
}

.mfm-x3 {
  --mfm-zoom-size: 100%;
}

.mfm-x4 {
  --mfm-zoom-size: 100%;
}

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9hxaz276cr

jo, to random

I think we need someone to design a vector image of the shork side-hugging a shrimp character lol 🦈🦐

jo, (edited ) to fediverse

I've left a comment on the original GitHub issue thread re
-like awards to Lemmy to help fund instance infrastructure that references @ada and @supakaity 's response to said suggestion being raised in a Lemmy post. The short answer is no thanks.

Feditext, to random

Feditext beta users, today's TestFlight build 69 includes various fixes and workarounds for Firefish and Hajkey.

we will be working with server devs to get some of those fixed on the server side (for Hajkey's case, in Iceshrimp), so that future clients won't have to special-case anything.

known not to work in this release:

  • Hajkey's suggested accounts to follow: displays an error message
  • intermittent foreign key constraint error when browsing Firefish or Hajkey timelines: you don't need to report this one, we're already investigating

#Feditext #Metatext #Hajkey #Firefish #Iceshrimp

jo, to iOS

This is a post from my #blahajzone #Hajkey account using the #Feditext beta app for #iOS build 1.7.2(68) ping @vyr

voidf1sh, to Help

Is there any way to have my instance fetch posts/notes after they've been sent? For example if I encounter a new person, I can't see any of their posts unless they're pinned. Or is that just a limitation of the fediverse, if your instance didn't see it when it happened, it doesn't exist?

jo, to fediverse

Nice brief for newcomers written by @HaruEb that isn't overwhelming. 👏 Folks on & servers can use antennas to follow .

Please give Haru some reaction emoji love on their original post. 🎉 ​:blobcat_rainbowheart:​

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9h8juj26im

jo, to main in State of the shork!

@supakaity I'm pleased that this post has been up for 30 minutes and no one has jumped in with "Acktually..." and proceeded to tell you how you're doing it wrong. jk /jk

Thankfully I have no clue about this stuff, but appreciate the detailed update nonetheless.

vyr, to random

wow, this instance is really gay

hi, blahaj.zone! i'm here for #Feditext testing purposes, so i'll just quote my original #introduction.

RE: https://demon.social/users/vyr/statuses/103103685691601104

jo,

@vyr Lovely to have you here! #Hajkey is still running a mergebase with Calckey v14 so there's even more errors in the #Feditext app than FF & IS atm.

maikel, to random

Ultimately what I use depends on FEATURES. I don't care about fedidrama.

If Firefish develops features faster than Iceshrimp I'll switch.
If Iceshrimp develops features faster than Firefish I'll stay.

So FAR, I'm finding very hard to run my own dev version with Iceshrimp while with FF it's damn easy.

I might drop them both and use the one of my goddess since she's much better coder than I'll ever be, and she'll merge whatever's good from either anyway.

We'll see.

jo, to random

You can follow the and hashtags from your secondary accounts should performance further degrade here while @supakaity does the backend migrations etc

I'm also posting to these hashtags from my @jo account.

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9hqsvfdnu6

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