@ve3qbz I was using Firefish but the project kind of died. I migrated over the weekend to Sharkey.
Both Firefish and Sharkey are forks of Misskey.
Misskey and all its forks (there are a lot. Seriously a lot.) all use Activity Pub under the hood and I believe implement a lot of their APIs in a Mastodon-compatible way as well.
The initial config was super easy. The hardest thing about it was getting Let's Encrypt cert generating working. If you know any Docker, it's a breeze.
Even the migration from Firefish to Sharkey was pretty easy. The hardest part there was doing some database migrations, but the Sharkey team have great documentation and are super helpful in their Discord channel.
In the past I've tried to set up both Mastodon and Hubzilla and both were absolute torture compared to getting Sharkey online. I really recommend it!
If you're thinking about hosting your own instance, I can't recommend it enough. It doesn't take much hardware- I'm running on an old small form factor desktop from 10+ years ago.
It won't be too hard if you have any experience hosting your own web apps and either know a little Docker or are willing to try it.
I'm super happy I finally got my instance migrated over to software that's actually still maintained. I enjoyed using Firefish but the project imploding kinda made it hard to keep using it.
I'm grateful that the Sharkey project is continuing despite some dev team changes.
I recently remembered I had an old Misskey (Foundkey) account on a different Instance with a bunch of lame jokes just posted to it. So, since I don't use it I'm deleting it.
However, I am transferring the lame jokes over to this or my Sharkey account, @mdmrn - so if you see either of us just being the worst, know that I already did it before and I haven't changed.
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!
Is there a way to disable the reversi game for the new #sharkey update?
I really don't want to muck around in my database for something that nobody will use
Turns out there isn't...
I don't particularly love this move, #sharkey devs. :(
Sharkey is already probably the most bloated AP software, and this is not a feature I ever heard anyone asking for...
Now I gotta do extra work for no good reason?
Go into settings > General, scroll down to Appearance and turn on Seasonal Screen Effects.
I turned it on a couple of weeks ago and nothing happened but today I'm watching cherry blossom falling as I type this which is very lovely, reminding me of the garden full of flowering cherry trees I once had. 🥰
February is a short month, and unfortunately, much of the Fediverse was attacked this month, leaving many server admins with a costly bill now that the crisis is over.
If you're enjoying your Mastodon, Misskey, Sharkey, Pixelfed, or other platform, perhaps consider making a donation this month.
This past month, as many of you know, the Fediverse was attacked by those who would see harm to come to the Fediverse. These people wanted to disrupt the social media experience, you have come to enjoy
Now that the crisis is over, your local admin of your local Mastodon, Misskey, Sharkey, Pixelfed, and other platforms on the Fediverse are now stuck with the extra bandwidth and data cost
So... Does the ListenBrainz integration in #sharkeydo anything? I've got my username in the field for it but I haven't noticed anything related to ListenBrainz pop up on my profile even after adding listens and stuff
Why is the default way for word mutes to display on #Sharkey and how do I get it to show me which filter triggered the hiding? On ice shrimp, it would say (for example) "someone said /NSFW/" if it matched my /NSFW/ word mute
This only applies in #Mastodon. #Misskey and its forks like #Sharkey have #fulltextsearch too and they will ignore your "#privacy setting" for every post it has ever seen from you. And IIRC Misskey did implement full-text search way earlier than Mastodon has started debating about it. :sagume_think:
Why did this debate of full-text search arose again? :seija_coffee: