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:
Testing #Bluesky out, but it’s obvious that #Sharkey is just more fleshed out - neither are close to perfect but Sharkey (and likely other Fedi apps) are definitely closer (imo). Very jealous of them having an official mobile client though. I remember hopping on #Firefish from #Mastodon, and there was hype from the FF team that they are looking to commission for an official FF mobile client or at least for support in a general client - that official client never came in the end even after FF’s death today. Dk if it’s Sharkey’s plan to be like Mastodon and have an official mobile client eventually.
Translated from FR: @skaly
The de jure existence of the state of Israel is recognized.
But why doesn't it recognize the right of a Palestinian state to exist alongside it?
Why does it persist in denying international law?
Why does it mistreat its Muslim citizens?
Why should humanity put up with having a part of itself amputated without protest?
Why I picked Sakurajima dot Social is because when looking for a Sharkey instance I found many of the other instances (servers) were not in English, were out of date (software), were extensively moderated, were slow loading, and de-federated so many other instances (servers) that it seemed like they had no interest in being part of the Fediverse.
Meanwhile, here on Sakurajima dot Social, the admin seems relaxed (not heavy-handed), so long as you follow the rules (easy enough, since I can easily sum up the rules as simply, don't be a jerk, which is fair), the software is kept up to date, the site is fast, and the instance (server) is well federated as part of the Fediverse. -- This is a good instance to join. 😄
The new 4.2.8 release is out today. It's a small update that introduces a mechanic that will automatically switch sign-ups to manual review if no moderators have been active for a while. This should reduce vectors for spam and abuse in the future.