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!
Thanks to @Yukii for telling me that I could make a theme and add this bit of code so my fonts and UI colours will look much like default Firefish theme.
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:
Is there any way to get the #FollowRequests blinking dot to go away? I don't have any pending follow requests 😭
Also is there a way to disable all sounds in #HajKey? I tried turning the master volume all the way down but it still plays the alert and it hijacks my audio every single time :(
@voidf1sh The flashing not going away when it should is a bug. For now, you can just disable the flashing notification for follow requests at the bottom of the Appearance section of your settings
As for sounds, what you can do (which isn't ideal) is click on each of the notification types under the master volume slider and set the "type" to none.
@voidf1sh Perhaps that's how I got it to mute? Can't remember. I'd point you to the documentation for either Hajkey, Iceshrimp, or Firefish but... LMFAO @ada
I thought following 1600 accounts would be untenable, but with a bit of effort and a great help from filtering boosts on #hajkey 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!
@jo@HaruEb thank you all for the warm welcome! the channels feature is really neat, i was exploring that a bit last night. is that unique to this instance?
@hollyberries@HaruEb The channels themselves are currently local-only, but the Channels feature is available on Misskey and forks like Firefish & Iceshrimp
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.
@Wester_Hare It's Misskey-flavored Markdown. All *key forks have it, and Akkoma instances have some support for it. It allows you to do things like this and this