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
Sharkey, a Misskey fork, is pushing forward with post imports. Unlike other platforms that have tried this, Sharkey will not federate the imported notes at all, just import them to the account. Assuming all comments, likes, boosts, etc are lost, but I’ll take it.
In addition, it seems to have Instagram and Twitter imports. I’m intrigued! Excited to see some progress on this front.
Apparently, Tumblr's CEO stepped on his crank and outed himself as a TERF. We does not abide the TERF. No we doesn't.
If you're fleeing #Tumblr and checking out the #fediverse, welcome! I hope you find a home here. You have quite a few options with #Mastodon, #Miskey, #Firefish#Sharkey (I'm posting this from sharkey.world), and the practically thousands of instances within those. Each have their own flavor and features, so don't feel you have to settle on one off the bat. It's not unusual to see new users sign up on one instance, then eventually move to another, then another before they find the community that fits them best.
Looking for something more "bloggy"? Bear Blog and Pika are two services offering simple blogging tools with an emphasis on "small blogging". They are unassociated with the major blogging platforms and offer a fresh alternative to them.
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:
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 👪
Fyra Labs, the makers of Ultramarine Linux, were the ones who were tracking down who the Fediverse spammers were and making it known so the authorities could deal with them.
bringing you random shark facts since 2023 [looks at script: oops wrong script...]
bringing you a Misskey fork that follows upstream when ever possible with added features such as federated post editing, mastodon api, federated profile backgrounds, federated music status via listenbrainz and more since 2023.
this account is used for updates regarding #Sharkey aswell as support but also may occasionally post some random facts about Sharks Sharkey, this account will also be used for Information regarding https://shonk.social
The https://sharkey.world server is almost done. We now need branding (new theme and images). @vsp will be creating images like he did for :mw: (and others).
While it grows we will also do some tuning and tweaking.
I like the #sharkey interface, so much even that I installed it on my personal server too (ruud.social)
If you want to try it, just create an account and play around with it.
And if you really like it, you can migrate so you keep your followers.
1/2
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
You know what makes more sense than Unlisted or Quiet Public? Home. My brain follows this so much more. Public, shows up everywhere. Home, shows up in home timeline only. Followers, only shows up to your followers. Direct, just tagged people. So clear.
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!
"Omg... Joe Biden is the 1st President posting in the Fediverse"
No, Joe Biden is using mainstream social media, owned by Meta (Facebook), which most of the Fediverse blocked a while back. If POTUS (President of the United States) wants to join the Fediverse correctly and hold that claim, they need to join a true Fediverse instance such as Misskey, Sharkey, Mastodon, or something else not government a large corporation which avoid paying taxes.
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:
I started out on the fediverse arooooound...I wanna say 2017/18 mebbe? My big start in social media was MySpace. Before that, I had a LiveJournal (which I miss mightily with all my heart). My very first computer was a Gateway PC, back when they shipped them to you in those awesome cow spot pattern boxes. I am trying to de-google my life.
I'm #ADHD and suffer from #dysthymia. I'm currently unmedicated. I can be damned moody at times, so there's your warning.
Religiously/spiritually speaking, I'm complicated. That will be a long post, when I get around to writing it. My general rule is: I have my thing. It's not everybody's thing, and that's cool. Not everybody's thing is my thing, and that's cool. Just don't be a wanker towards those whose thing ain't your thing. OM 🕉
I'm 57 years old and have come to the conclusion that we never truly appreciate the decades we grew up in until we hit middle age.
I'm single and childless, hence my user tag: TheLastOfHisName.
Special shoutout to our administrator @chikorita157 who has been doing a good job keeping our Sharkey instance (server) running smoothly.
Being a system admin is can seem like a thankless job sometimes, and sometimes it means tracking down minor issues, going over logs, and occasionally dealing with user drama too (I do that for a living, it's not fun).
A friendly reminder that the Fediverse instance (server) is run by a volunteer who does not get paid, does not host ads, and is often paying things out of their own pocket. - All so complete strangers can share their random thoughts, views, beliefs, rants, or sometimes just sh*tpost.