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!
uninstalling my previous instance which was #Calckey. Thank you for being my home on the #Fediverse for a while. I will miss the cat ears and the silly reactions.
but, with the spam stuff recently, it is time to come down. (after a backup of course...)
If Firefish is going to come back, Kainoa won't have a hand in it. They quietly handed over the keys to the repo to a maintainer... who has publicly stated they aren't a programmer and are just looking after commits. Not exactly a signal things are starting back up.
Unless there is an announcement soon about someone taking up development again, I think it's safe to say Firefish is over as a Fedi platform.
Optimism wants to say that someone will, but at this point even if someone does it'll be playing catch-up to the current state of affairs. It isn't possible for someone to come off of the street and say "I'll do it" and go back to the pace that was happening last summer immediately. (But it's not impossible for me to be wrong and six months from now someone does. I'm just not banking on it happening. Even the Firefish name itself might be too damaged in reputation to even take back up.)
#Iceshrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon are #Misskey derivatives who are continuing onward with things. All three of them have disassociated with FF completely so it seems Misskey still has a future with non-Japanese users. (Iceshrimp even spent time on a new non triangular logo to further separate from Firefish.) Server admins who wanted to consider a Firefish instance but shied away from the drama last fall may want to follow those projects instead.
If your fedi server is still on Firefish, don't be surprised if an announcement "were taking signups on our new Plombus server, in X months Fleeb will be decommissioned" comes down sometime soon. Internet services without recent updates are asking for trouble from exploits and vulnerabilities. Also, without an active FF developer to fix standing issues (or a skilled DB admin on your instance's behalf to whittle the database and schema to fit the new system as well as possible) a cut-over migration where users don't lift a finger isn't in the cards like the Calckey to Firefish migration last September. It likely will be up to you to decide to either move your account Mastodon style (no post migration, just your follower lists and a link back to the prior server) or to just start fresh.
Hat hier schon mal die Kommunikation zwischen #Gotosocial und #Friendica getestet?
Ich habe hier von Gotosocial Nutzern die Info erhalten, das er/sie mein Profil bzw. mein Profilbild nicht angezeigt bekommt.
Wenn er dann aber mit #Mastodon oder #Calckey einen Kontakt hat - dann wäre das gar kein Problem.
Da ich das jetzt nicht nachvollziehen kann in Ermangelung einer Gotosocial Instanz
I started out, like many, on #Mastodon, during the great Twitter migration. Not that I migrated from Twitter. No... I never had a Twitter account. Rather, I hoped that Mastodon could obtain the Network Effect, and help fundamentally alter the shape of social media for the foreseeable future.
So I made my own solo Masto instance and ran it for a good six months. It was cool. But then there was a glittery thing -- #Calckey -- that caught my eye. So I joined that. Pretty soon the maintainer of Calckey (young BTW) dropped out, but forks forked. I waited. Then #Firefish was the shit. But no...
Then, today, the admin of my former instance calckey.world made a new sharkey.world instance public, and I joined. #Sharkey is the new shit.
Because that's how I roll. On the Cutting Edge, baby.
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
"This document is dedicated to all citizens of planet Earth. You deserve freedom of communication; we hope we have contributed in some part, however small, towards that goal and right."
well, after 18 hours of not having this site open, I am still getting the "Rate Exceeded" error when I try to move. #Calckey is effectively holding my account hostage with whatever broken thing on the backend. I know I can just import my follows and start over, but this is supposed to be one of the things that makes the Fedi better. #sigh
Dear Admins of Fediverse
As #Firefish / #Calckey still doesnt have "unsub" button like Mastodon: https://git.joinfirefish.org/firefish/firefish/-/issues/9727 e.g. - im talking about defederation.
What would be the best way to remove instance?
after i moved my account i should remove relays, then remove all tracking from existing account (to and from), wait few days to make everyone knows that "there is no connection" and then remove?
While it doesn’t have all the same features, the #Plemora installation I’m testing seems to work better overall, between the speed and the ability to use the Mastodon app on my phone. Still hoping I can figure out how to update from #Calckey to #IceShrimp as that would be best of both worlds…
We had quite a bit of this here at blahaj.zone back on #Calckey 14 when our MAU rose considerably. A move to #Iceshrimp didn't help. Trying to cut down costs by moving hosting introduced more unforeseen issues. We've lost a fair few people but we're more stable now. We're looking at moving to the #Sharkey fork of #Misskey v13 (which itself is a major revision & rewrite and not compatible with FF/IS) which seems to scale well by the looks of the massive instances that run it. But all this has been a big downer, and a lot of downtime. The reality is English-language forks of Misskey have never been tested at scale and when things go wrong trying to any documentation is difficult and most likely in Japanese. They've usually just commenced with a small single instance with some non-stock features added. I hope our eventual move to Sharkey doesn't come with a similar surprise, but seeing it sticks closely to upstream Misskey I think it might be ok.
I must be somewhere around my 1 year anniversary on the #Fediverse with #Mastodon, which included a short stint testing out #Calckey, hosting my own instance as a #serveradmin, and migrating my account multipl times because being able to do that - even while leaving old posts behind - is cool.
It’s steadily gotten better and better here, while the interactions overall have always been better than the hellsite. That might change but since douchebags congregate like flies to shit, being able to block entire instances (or defederate if needed) is great.
Now if people would stop clinging to the hellsite with whatever excuses they’re using to delude themselves (excluding the POC who’ve experienced the shitty side of a mostly white Fediverse), we could continue trying to fulfill the promise the web had before aggregators & algorithms ruined practically everything.
Danke, das das Fediverse so bunt an Software ist und jeder seine Software finden kann. 👍
Falls ihr eine Funktion vermisst, liegt es vielleicht auch nur daran, das ihr die falsche Software für das Fediverse nutzt.
Mastodon scheint für viele zu reichen, nur ist Mastodon nicht alles
well, my #calckey instance was cacheing everything it iseemed, and filled the server until it stopped working. Calckey seems to have to settings, turn this on, or off. And that's it.
so it is currently off, and no images work anymore. i mention the Calckey/#Firefish documentation is not great? it is not great.
I think we should slightly rethink how login works on most Fediverse apps (Mastodon, Lemmy, but not only)
A while ago I posted a thread back on the...