@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

ada

@ada@blahaj.zone

I'm an Australian woman, based in Meanjin / Brisbane, but in love with Argentina. In a previous life, I was a Trans activist, runner, and RollerDerby player. Now that we are all "post" covid, I feel like I'm still somehow finding my feet, and working out what I want to keep from my old life, and what I want to add to it! I have the feeling I will never get a final answer :)

I'm co-admin blahaj.zone and lemmy.blahaj.zone.

My photography can be found at @ada https://pixelfed.au/i/portfolio/Ada

I can also be found on matrix at ada:chat.blahaj.zone

Estoy aprendiendo español y a veces mi toots estará en mal español!

​:blahaj_zone:​ ​:Blobhaj_Ani_Hearts:​ ​:Blobhaj_Flag_Transgender:​ ​:Blobhaj_Flag_Transfemme:​

Banner image is a wide angle photo of Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, taken from La Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur

#Meanjin #Brisbane #Trans #transgender #RollerDerby #queer #español #espanol #BuenosAires #Argentina #runner #parkrun

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Well, that didn't take long. Though threads.net is not yet federating with the wider fediverse, they are currently home to several hate groups such as Libs of Tik Tok and their ilk. We will not federate with any instance that knowingly chooses to house hate speech, so a full defederation of threads.net has been made by blahaj.zone

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

For those who are unaware, lemmy and kbin to a lesser extent are in the early stages of a rapid growth in users, similar to the one Mastodon experienced in November last year.

In a move similar to Twitter, Reddit has all but confirmed that 3rd party apps will be locked out with their new API pricing, effectively forcing people to use the official app or nothing.

That has driven a lot of people to look for alternatives. I expect the wave in new users will ebb, but it will surge back again even larger once the 3rd party reddit apps are officially unusable.

We live in interesting times on the fediverse

ada, to kbinMeta
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I've had a few days playing around with kbin now, and I really can't say enough good things about it!

It's still very early beta, but it aggregates groups from friendica, gup.pe and chirp and handles them in a smart interface. It also has dedicated reddit like groups (called magazines) that are cross compatible with lemmy. And best of all, you can set up Calckey like antenna for each magazine. This means that not only can you see content explicitly posted to the magazine, but there is a separate tab for content automatically aggregated from the wider fediverse

I've already created a bunch of magazines simply because there aren't many there yet, but I look forward to handing them over to other people once the userbase grows

@ernest, what an amazing platform you're developing!

@kbinmeta

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

So, I guess I'm done with reddit...

A pity. I met a lot of amazing people via reddit (including @supakaity), and many of those communities have been important to me over the 10 years I've had an account there...

But between deliberately killing off 3rd party apps and their lackluster approach to hate speech, it's time to go.

The fediverse has taught me I don't need to endure hate speech find my communities and my people, so, I'm done.

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/christianselig/statuses/110464420566906146

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I just had a bit of a look at kbin.social and I have to say, kbin looks really impressive!

If you've never heard of kbin, it's a fediverse platform specifically focusing on groups. Broadly speaking, similar to lemmy, the goal is to create a fediverse take on the reddit experience. However, kbin also integrates fediverse groups like gup.pe, chirp and friendica groups, and that is a killer feature as far as I'm concerned!

We've been running a lemmy instance for a few months now, but it might be time to look at spinning up our own kbin instance too!

Saltssaltgirl, to random
@Saltssaltgirl@mas.to avatar

Butterflies are just like regular flies except they have high cholesterol and taste good on toast.

ada,
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

@Saltssaltgirl You moth be joking!

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

If you're a fediverse dev or a fedivangelist, please read this! This is our chance to really get in to the nitty gritty of search opt in permissions at the AP level!

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9ev0kge0aj

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Lemmy growth is crazy!

Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We've had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we're not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.

lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn't even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don't even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.

And that's before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part

I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that...

@lemmy @fediverse

ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Is there such a thing as a shared fediverse account that has a different person behind the account each week, that shows us photos and slice of life stuff in different parts of the world?

My home city has an account that gets a different driver from week to week, showing different slices of life in my city, but it occurs me to that it would work well at a global scale too!

Does such an account already exist?

Edit - Thank you to those suggesting groups, but I'm looking for something more curated than that. Not a group of people posting random photos from all over the world, but rather, one person at a time, showing their part of the world from their perspective.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Every Gaming Company:

We are introducing a magical open world for you to explore, you're gonna fight like 6 monsters, but mostly you're going to do the same chores you should be doing in your house right now, over and over and over and over...

ada,
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

@RickiTarr Look, I told you I'm going to deal with the demonic incursions in the kitchen soon mum!

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

The growth of our lemmy instance, without any advertising or spruiking. It was spun up as a test more than anything else, but it seems that it has become more than that!

Even though the graph shows the growth spike from April to June, in reality it's even more stark than that. We have gone from 20 users to 100 users in a week!

We'll be spinning up a kbin instance soon too, and when we do, we might shut down registration on the lemmy instance. We'll keep them up for now though, given the load on lemmy.ml from reddit migrations

ada, to trans
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I'm part of a group doing a presentation on my workplace's Diversity and Inclusion policies and practices, and it turns out that half of the people in the group with me didn't know that I'm trans, despite me being openly and proudly so.

I used to say that I wanted to be able to "cis pass" so that I could take control of my own narrative, but moments like this remind me that I don't think I will ever truly control it...

ada, (edited ) to trans
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

The finished product!

ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

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!

​:blahaj_is_fine:​ ​:BlahajSpin:​ ​:Blobhaj_Ani_Hophop:​ ​:Blobhaj_Heart_Trans:​ ​:Blobhaj_Thanks_Wow:​

ada, to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

So, it turns out I have quite a few folk called Ada in my timeline. It's almost as if I instantly follow anyone with that name.

So, if you are an Ada, and for some reason I'm not following you yet, please let me know so I can fix that :)

ada, to reddit
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I guess we better get ready for the next surge in lemmy user signups...

https://www.reddit.com/community-points/documentation/introduction

ada, to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I did my 200th parkrun today!

I walked it with @supakaity and @internutter.

Combined with my 111 volunteers, that's a LOT of parkrun in my life. So glad I found it all those years ago :)

ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

My take on firehaj!

What do you think? Have we found our new logo?

(Please, no one take this seriously)

Edit - And credit of course goes to the Firefish project for the original logo that inspired this bit of fun :)

RE: https://blahaj.zone/notes/9hffnz5spr

ada, (edited ) to trans
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Trans fems of the Fediverse, what does femininity mean to you?

Over the years, I've seen many folk talking about their relationship with femininity and how it relates to their transition and to their sense of identity, of who they are.

I've never understood it though. I don't feel like I have a relationship with femininity, or at least, nothing beyond pragmatic necessity. It doesn't relate to my sense of identity or who I am. In many ways, it feels like an obligation, rather than a source of empowerment or self understanding.

So, I’m curious how it works for other folk who find empowerment in it. What does it mean to you? How did it help you find yourself? How do you relate to femininity now vs earlier in your life?

ada, to fediverse
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Misskey/Sharkey/*key admins, what, if any roles have you configured on your instances?

ada, (edited ) to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Important poll time

Is your fediverse handle also a valid email address for you?

ada, to boardgames
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

I played my first game of Final Girl today (a board game). Charlie, who looked like she could be the star of an action movie rather than a horror movie, and Gepetto, the puppet master with his evil puppet minions.

Lets just say, it didn't go well. Charlies little brother was killed in the big tent, and then victim after victim fell. Charlie took out several puppets, but eventually, puppets and puppet master ran out of victims and turned on Charlie. She took two minions out, but eventually, she fell to Gepetto himself.

Next time puppet man, next time!

ada, to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Day 1 of Meta's Threads federating with the fediverse, and so far, it's business as usual here.

But maybe that's because we blocked them 6 months ago, when it became clear they were welcoming hate groups with open arms?

I am genuinely confused why people who would block any other instance with bigots and nazis decide to make an exception for a fucking mega corp?

ada, to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

What's not to love about the sound of horny possums growling at each other in the tree right outside your window?

ada, to random
@ada@blahaj.zone avatar

Fediadmins, are any of you seeing weird issues in your queues from lemmy instances?

lemmy.world was single handedly backing our incoming queue, as AP events would fail, and then be rescheduled to be re-tried again later. But then whilst waiting for them to re-try, more would come in.

We're seeing the behaviour from multiple lemmy instances, but lemmy.world is the biggest culprit, despite not being the most subscribed to instance by our users.

The activities in question are mostly votes, and Sharkey doesn't know what to do with them, so simply keeps retrying them until they fail

Does Mastodon have the same issue, or is it handling votes differently?

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