I have so many follow relationships with so many talented people here!
It's so great to see all of you and your interesting projects and creations across such a variety of hobbies and professions.
It's only going to get better with Threads federation under way! Future of Fedi will sure be interesting and I'm glad to be a part of something that could fundamentally change the way "Internet" is done as a whole.
The future awaits. After years of gaining steam, Fedi has arrived.
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.
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!
February is a short month, and unfortunately, much of the Fediverse was attacked this month, leaving many server admins with a costly bill now that the crisis is over.
If you're enjoying your Mastodon, Misskey, Sharkey, Pixelfed, or other platform, perhaps consider making a donation this month.
There needs to be apps for #iceshrimp, #misskey, #sharkey, #catodon, and any other misskey forks that support reactions and full push notifications on iOS. While the webapp im using on my iceshrimp instance is okay, it cannot be a permanent solution.
Or, it would be great if @IceCubesApp supported push notifications for iceshrimp/misskey forks, but i'm guessing its a server side issue :P
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.
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.
Alright, I think we now have a better idea of what's happening with #Firefish, so I might as well give a small update. Kainoa quit, and left the project to naskya, who is a person I appreciate very much, as they've always been kind and polite and willing to help. I also think they're very devoted to Firefish, and basically were the last person actively caring about the project. As far as I know, they intend to keep maintaining and developing Firefish, and a new stable version will finally soon be released. This is great news, as you don't need to worry that your server is running unmaintained and vulnerable software. So, alarm off everybody, no need to abandon ship.
As for us, we're standing by our decision to rebase #Catodon to #Iceshrimp. The changes we want to do are long term plans, but we've started redesigning some things and, whenever we are ready, I hope we'll show you something worth your attention. So yeah, firefish, iceshrimp and catodon are all alive and valid options (the first two to be precise, for the time being). All projects share code fixes and I think we're on very good terms, here in our corner of the fediverse. Enjoy the ride.
Is there an option on #IceShrimp where I could hide all boosts on a timeline? Or create a new timeline where it could only show posts and replies and not boosts?
I'm having a bit of a difficulty going through my timeline especially when pinched in time so I'd like to read all non-boost first.
After giving this a lot of thought and discussing with the wonderful people that build Iceshrimp, #Catodon will rebase to #Iceshrimp. We feel that it's the right decision for the road ahead, as Iceshrimp is another #firefish fork that focuses in improving performance and they have already done some amazing improvements, like full Mastodon API support. With Firefish's future uncertain, we think it's better to stay closer to an actively maintained project. The two projects will stay distinct, as we have different design goals, but we have a common codebase so we feel this makes sense.
Just to be clear on all fronts and to answer the obvious question in advance, yes, Iceshrimp is also currently doing a full rewrite in C#, which is a few months away, and we haven't decided if we'll adopt this yet - it's a strong possibility, but we're keeping our options open. We're confident they're doing a great job, still, we'll weigh what the best decision for Catodon is on this when it's ready and the time comes.
Just wanted to let you know that this might push Catodon's development back a little, as it's sort of a structural change, but we feel that it's worth it, and that it might be better for the broader community. Catodon development will resume once rebasing to Iceshrimp is finished, and then we'll have better foundations to build this on.
@zotan what's the motivation for using C#/.NET for the re-write of #iceshrimp ? I'm not knocking it; I'm just curious, and the matrix/knowledge base require an account to view.
It seems like there's a rivalry brewing between #Sharkey and #Iceshrimp on which one's gonna be the definitive "Western #Misskey" of the #fediverse :sagume_think:
One could even say that there's a.. cold war going on between them 🥁:laughing_cirno:
Recently I've seen posts that #Firefish project is in trouble? Its flagship server being unavailable, and people are impatient about new releases. Sad if true, though I hope its death is slightly exagerrated. Anyhow, I've learnt that people are migrating to other Misskey forks (mainly #IceShrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon) And Iceshrimp devs are rewriting the JS backend on C# 😯
I completely missed that #IceShrimp was doing a .NET rewriting. That's quite exciting, there wasn't a lot of .NET #ActivityPub implementation so far, and I'm curious to see how they will tackle some of the tricky parts of the protocol.