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
It seems like it is a rewrite/alternative server to the mastodon server. Looks to be written in Rust. It is a fork of #misskey, which seems to be written in typsescript
But since it uses ActvityPub, it's interoperable with Mastodon
Seems like you can't migrate your Mastodon account over.
So basically an alternative microblogging interface to the fediverse with different server software.
I will try to reintroduce them to the #Fediverse, but this time promote #Misskey & #Calckey as viable options.
I believe the window of opportunity for this will be short, as I assume (I have not evidence for this, so be skeptical) Threads will launch managed hosting options within months of entering the Fediverse.
#Threads user with dotted username (an impossibility in vanilla #Mastodon) spotted in the wild federating with a #Misskey instance (namely, Voskey)! So, does this mean Misskey can handle dotted usernames & thus can further do what #Mastodont?
C'est l'heure du goûter ! Mais ne serait-ce pas aussi le bon moment pour regarder le replay (remonté et amélioré) du stream sur Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky et tout ce qui gravite autour ?
J'explique et surtout... je montre les trucs et astuces 👀
:iceshrimp: #Iceshrimp a sorti sa première version stable !
C’est un hardfork de #Firefish :firefish: (lui-même hardfork de #Misskey :misskey:) avec pour objectif de mieux répondre aux besoins de sa communauté, d’apporter plus accessibilité et de se débarrasser de toutes fonctions pouvant créer de l’addiction.
Nouveautés principales :
Nouveau logo
Prise en charge des domaines divisés locaux et distant
Ajout d’une configuration de suppression automatique des médias distants
Choix entre 3 styles d’affichage des ContentWarning
Changement d’UI/UX
Suppression de la possibilité d’activer des publicités
L’indicateur de notification clignotant est maintenant statique
Les réponses aux messages inaccessibles ont maintenant un indicateur qui l’explique.
Les messages protégés ont maintenant une icône de cadenas au lieu d’un bouton boost inactif
La disposition de la barre de navigation a été modifiée
Récupération de l’éditeur de bar de navigation de Misskey
Amélioration de la lisibilité des indicateurs d’instance d’origine des posts
La recherche en vue invitée est maintenant un bouton au lieu d’une fausse barre de recherche
Les effets de flou sont désactivés par défaut
Lorsque le flou est désactivé, les éléments de l’interface utilisateur sont désormais correctement opaques
La chronologie de l’antenne comporte désormais un texte d’aide expliquant pourquoi les messages peuvent être dans le désordre
Les images d’état ont été remplacées par des émojis d’état configurables
Diverses incohérences ainsi que des problèmes d’alignement et d’animation ont été corrigés.
When we measure for activity – not accounts – Mastodon isn’t even in first place. Misskey is.
Mastodon is in 2nd place.
And other server types, like Pixelfed, aren’t doing so shabby either.
But what’s more interesting is what this all means when you also take into consideration account sign-ups.
It’s true that according to total accounts, mastodon.social is the biggest server on the Fediverse with 1,159,110 accounts. In comparison, misskey.io only has 183,549 accounts.
As someone who actively monitors both misskey.io and mastodon.social, it actually looks like mastodon.social produces more spam. I have yet to encounter spam on misskey.io, nor have I received spam from there. I can’t say the same about mastodon.social – seeing how I received crypto spam to my inbox from there twice last month.
What’s going on?
First, I must acknowledge a fact. The Fediverse is simply more popular in Japan. When I look at the 10 most active servers on the Fediverse, 6 of them are Japanese. Yes, even the Mastodon servers.
And in Japan, it looks like Misskey is overtaking Mastodon. This is not yet true in terms of sheer account numbers, but the fastest growing servers are clearly Misskey. In terms of raw post production, though, Misskey has already overtaken Mastodon.
Something I often hear is, “So what if something’s big in Japan? Lots of bands are big in Japan too, and we don’t hear a whisper from them here in the West.”
While comparing software to music is silly, it is a mistake for Westerners to ignore the cultural impact of Japan and other Asian nations.
We live in an era where many Western kids grow up with Japanese video games, anime, and J-Pop. Many of them don’t even look at Japanese media as “foreign”. It’s simply part of their cultural rubric.
Why do I bring this up? Because while the majority of Fediverse accounts are from the West, the majority of Fediverse content is from Japan. And while there is a language barrier, it’s only a matter of time before that content finds its way out West.
But if you’re a content producer making stuff for the Fediverse, I also think it’s important to ask yourself, “What are Japanese content producers doing right?”
As it turns out, a lot. The Japanese Fediverse is less focused on technology and politics, more focused on art. And there’s a ready community willing to interact with that art.
This is not so true for the West’s version of the Fediverse. Over here, the culture is to deem art “unimportant”. There have been times when I’ve shared thoughts on video games and music, and someone came out of the woodwork to tell me I was wrong for doing this since some political thing in the USA was happening, and I was insensitive for sharing my interests.
For the Fediverse to take root in the West, it must be as much about art as it is about politics and tech.
All this said, there is a further fact that likewise underlies my contention: the 3rd most active server on the Fediverse is pixelfed.social, Pixelfed’s flagship server.
Why is this? Because #Pixelfed is based on images, not text. Which also means that, as a result of content filtering, it is more focused on art than politics and technology.
Interestingly, pixelfed.social is focused on English speakers. As it turns out, the desire to share art is universal – not exclusive to people who speak Japanese. Most people like art.
Don’t get me wrong, politics and technology have an important effect on our daily lives. But it’s art that makes life worth living.
My takeaway: if we want the Fediverse to be as big in the West as it is in Japan, we need to share art.
Sora, a futuristic Fediverse client, now features 🎬 Fediverse Watch tab 🎬
🌐 Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey, Pleroma all in one
🔭 Watch interesting videos on the Fediverse
🌟 Explore more contents from Discovery view and hashtag timelines
👀 When you open a post, see similar posts of the same topic
👾 Local algorithm to rank posts and add additional interesting posts into your home timeline
So, looking at three #Misskey clients on the Mac so far, those being #Kimis#missririca (also on Android) and #Misscat, all of them if running on a Mac using #Voiceover (where Kimis is a Mac exclusive), all three of them have some issue or another at the moment.
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.
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.