Antennas.
Antennas are effectively custom timelines. They work approximately like watching hashtags, but they can look for normal text as well. You can add as many phrases as you like and the results can be filtered with an ignore list.
You can make an antenna that just shows posts from specific users and notifies you when they post something new, you can make an antenna that collects posts containing or excluding certain key words, or you can make an antenna that collects only posts with files attached. You can even make an antenna consisting of “Posts from specific users” with “Show replies” checked.
Setting up
You can set up antenna by going to the More! section on your sidebar, and selecting Antennas. Press Add + to create your first. This is where you can also manage & edit previously created antennas.
Images:
Where to find More! on the sidebar (highlighted)
Where to find Antennas in the More! menu (highlighted)
My antennas page showing Add + button and my previously created antennas.
4 & 5) When you click Add + you get this page to set up your antenna. I've set one up as my Calckey antenna and another to alert me when PastaThief posts. There's a lot to go through here. Expect a separate post sometime soon.
6 & 7) What those antenna feeds look like.
On our progressive web app you can access your antennas by selecting the UFO in the top right corner.
Clicking on the UFO button brings up all my antennas and the link to manage/edit them
Tbh, I'm on a proactively moderated server that has preemptively kept a lot of the worst folks from being able to reach us queers here, and the feedback from a handful of black users here is that #blahajzone has also been generally been harassment free in comparison to other servers they've been on.
Imo, it's actually not to hard as a queer or trans person to find #servers on the #fediverse that will protect you from harassment, but that it is harder to find servers that will also protect indigenous, black, Asian users from racist harassment. And too many queer white folks get a free pass for ignorance tbh, a privilege that many of us have had for far too long.
It's much the same on #Bluesky where I haven't been harassed for being #queer and trans - again there's large communities and plenty of allies - but anti-black racism has been in the spotlight again recently and the devs called out for lagging behind on safety and moderation features that bigots exploit for harassment campaigns.
Far too many fediverse projects are led by men, mostly white men, who are lionised, promoted and financed by another layer of mostly white men. They ultimately get the veto on minority protections.
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.
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.
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.
A big hello and welcome to all the new people who've joined #blahajzone the past couple of days. It's great to have you here!
Our admins are @ada and @supakaity.
Ada leads the front of house and moderation side of Blåhaj Zone, while Kaity leads the back-end and maintains Hajkey for us & a small group of other instances.
We also have a #Lemmy server available for signups at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone and a #kbin server that's soon to be open, for those looking for #Reddit - like communities. They can also be interacted with from here or other places in the Fediverse.
It's almost time. We're super-excited. #FediGroups is entering public testing now, before a full live launch.
Many of us have used other Boosting Groups, but they only work well if you follow from Mastodon accounts. We know there is a wider fediverse. FediGroups works with all the favourites, including #Mastodon, #Firefish, #Iceshrimp, #Catodon, #Sharkey, and more. One big happy family 👪
The number of Misskey forks continues to expand. How do we mention them collectively? I'm veering toward Forkeys, as in "Catodon is the latest Forkey to enter the stage." or "The Forkeys have one thing in common - emoji reactions."
I suggest checking them all out - each has their own strengths. :blobcatstrong:
So maybe instead of more forks that focus on rolling out new features, could the devs of Foundkey, #Firefish, #Iceshrimp, et al work on your architecture so that even a relatively small (in comparison to some of the Misskey and Mastodon servers) 1500 user server, let alone a 4000 user one can function without falling over, suffering extended timeouts, having server costs blow out thanks to database performance issues, and then decimate it's community when folks are forced to migrate, and then those folks struggle to get their data exported.
So much front end work and not enough backend is the present legacy of the pre-Misskey v 13 forks.
From a #sharkey Dev to People On Fedi (pls boost):
While i understand that there's lots of drama around firefish, please do actual research. Sharkey is not and has NEVER been a firefish/#calckey fork, it didn't spring of from firefish. it started off as just an indipendent Misskey soft-fork(updates with misskey), there is no relation at all to firefish, it is incredibly damaging to call it a firefish fork, as the sharkey team actually spends lots of time just implementing features that people wish for (this include some features firefish has), while also spending time on making sure they work decently unlike (firefish some times)
also it's just as damaging to call Iceshrimp an offspring of the whole firefish drama now, Iceshrimp while an actual fork of firefish existed way before the entire recent firefish drama the only recent ofspring of firefish is #catodon and then again catodon is not trying to be firefish, catodon is its own thing it wants to sit inbetween mastodon and *key as a more userfriendly thing with alot of the "fun" misskey stuff removed, and #iceshrimp is doing a full rewrite of firefish in c#, none of these projects are even remotly similar to the firefish way of doing things, some of them aren't even in any relation to #firefish
tldr: stop calling things firefish sucessor, esspecialy don't call sharkey a firefish ofspring it was never in any way related to firefish
I promised I'd be giving updates on #Iceshrimp's #dotnet C# rewrite -a brand new fedi platform really- so here's where we're at at the moment! The backend's basic functionality is more or less finished, although there will undoubtedly be stuff to fix and improve during beta. So theoretically you could use it, but we don't have a frontend yet so you could use it only with masto apps atm. However, the frontend is where the focus is going now, and we plan to have a basic/working frontend soon so that we can release our first beta in a couple of weeks or so!
We expect performance and server requirements to be comparable to #Akkoma. Things are about to get exciting!
Im honestly kinda disappointed in all the people jumping on catodon now and calling it firefish successor its kinda very bad as the devs don't intend it to be a firefish successor nor is it trying to be anything like firefish or misskey in general, talking about migrating to catodon while also calling it firefish sucessor is like punching the catodon devs in the face
as they try to create something simple for newer users, not something for existing key users that enjoy fun shit like MFM
please everyone do you research before spreading shit this is also very harmful to the project at least from my POV. if everyone starts hyping the project for something that it is not.
please just give @panos and @catodon some time, and don't put them under pressure for something its not.
If you want a Misskey fork that is unlikely to die as its a softfork (updates with misskey) anytime soon and is community focused and includes #firefish inspired changes go with #sharkey
if you really really want to stick with the firefish sort of thing of doing things try the firefish fork #iceshrimp
and if u want something new more geared towards new users / casual users try looking into #catodon
but don't just jump the gun on things u don't even know fully about
Just learned about the demise of #Firefish (head is M.I.A.). It's unfortunate for the thousands of instances running it, but with that comes #IceShrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon. All of them (I think) are being developed by former Firefish devs. Options.
Hopefully, current FF users are all, if they want to, able to move to another actively-developed community easily.
Currently the interface is very similar to Misskey and Firefish, but through time, as this promising fork grows, we will update the Wiki with Iceshrimp specific articles.
Kinda big day tomorrow as catodon.social's getting updated to our latest dev version, since our announced rebase to #Iceshrimp is finished, which means that, if everything goes well, after tomorrow catodon.social will have all of the performance improvements of Iceshrimp, including full Mastodon API support. It took us back a few weeks but we think it was worth it, and now we can resume development towards our first release. #Catodon
#IceShrimp, a fork of #Firefish will switch it's API authentication from MiAuth (a custom authorization scheme) to OAUTH. This will increase compatibility with various Mastodon apps. Currently out in a pre-release version.
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!
Hello there! If you are on #Iceshrimp, #Firefish or #Sharkey, there's a new security patch out so your server admin should update the software immediately. #Catodon has also merged the patch from upstream #Iceshrimp and catodon.social has been updated :catodon: