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!
This time tomorrow a friend and I will be checking into our accommodation for the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade.
We're marching with Trans Pride Australia. We're float number 5 this year, so shouldn't be a chore to spot us!
Among the things that TPA runs is Friday Night Social, a weekly video chat with participants from across Australia. It's overseen & hosted by blahaj zone's admins @ada & @supakaity . I'm also a regular host, and some of our BZ🦈 community are regular participants.
The parade is being televised in Australia on ABCTV and ABC iview (you can watch from overseas through a IPTV service or use a VPN to access iview). The coverage starts at 7:30pm AEDT [Saturday 8:30am London, 12:30am San Fran, 3:30am NYC].
Go to https://iview.abc.net.au/ to watch the Sydney Gay And Lesbian Mardi Gras 2024 in iview (you'll need to register).
I just moved here. I was originally on mastodon.social, being bored, not posting often and waiting for an e-mail from Mozilla to finally give me an invite to Mozilla.social, which I've been waiting on forever. But with the new CEO and the restructuring, it seems like that's dead in the water so... I decided to move here.
Gonna miss local-only posts. They were perfect for moments like this when an instance-wide change had happened and local users want to share settings or other tips.
Anyway #blahajzone folks, reverting to system font gets you something that looks like the IS / FF font rather than the Sharkey / Misskey default.
Sakurajima Social is moving to Sharkey from Firefish. They similarly cite increasing slowness as they scaled, with mention of blahaj.zone planning to move away from Iceshrimp. to Sharkey The future is Misskey v13 if you run a *key server that wants to affordably scale.
I've been on #blahajzone so long that I remember when most of us didn't have anime profile pics. :blobcat_lol: User no. 9 :Blobhaj_Ani_Hophop: for life, baby!
Makes my heart full to know that my admins think pretty much the same way I do about this. Doing subscription tier BS against people who have multiple intersections as minority folks is some peak online capitalist ick IMO. Rewarding and/or preferencing folks who can pay is just reinforcing more of the structural crap we face on the daily in user-pays driven meatspace.
@ayilathebailey Yeah and calling #blahajzone out for not defederating from social BBC quickly enough within 10 hours of them coming online [because everyone is meant to be extremely online all the time and some of our users here allegedly voiced a wait and see approach]. Instead, our admins were asleep in bed on the other side of the world after busting themselves behinds the scenes all day yesterday.
Still, within minutes of waking and seeing that scolding subtoot, Ada learned about the wider action to block the BBC & promptly defedded them as I confidently knew she would.
Meanwhile over on Blåhaj Lemmy we had folks recently describing Ada's proactive moderation of transphobia & "just askin questions" replies as being emotional and getting all the kind of reply guy stuff WelshPixie regularly gets. It's if they can't not go for the most misogynistic stereotype when encountering femme-presenting folk. And I've seen much the same thing being said atm about April wrt Iceshrimp and WelshPixie/ Curator at .Art
@supakaity I'm pleased that this post has been up for 30 minutes and no one has jumped in with "Acktually..." and proceeded to tell you how you're doing it wrong. jk /jk
Thankfully I have no clue about this stuff, but appreciate the detailed update nonetheless. #Hajkey#blahajzone
Kaity has been working hard all day preparing everything for our migration away from AWS, however blahaj.zone has been struggling under the load during that time. We have temporarily upgraded the AWS hardware we're running on, which will keep us sailing smoothly until we migrate.
You can follow the #blahajzone and #Hajkey hashtags from your secondary accounts should performance further degrade here while @supakaity does the backend migrations etc
I'm also posting to these hashtags from my @jo#Iceshrimp account.
You can follow the #blahajzone and #Hajkey hashtags from your secondary accounts should performance further degrade here while @supakaity does the backend migrations etc
I'm posting to these hashtags from my @jo#Iceshrimp account.
Funding the Fediverse - use an awards feature to fund instances
Saw this proposal originally posted on Github and thought it was worth posting here and expanding on...
State of the shork!
So it’s been a few days, where are we now?...