I plan to close down my #calckey / #firefish / #misskey fork instance and then replace it with new software on the same domain name.
I suspect however that this will break everything and fail to federate properly with the new instance unless the Misskey instance sends what may be known as a "tombstone" message to it's existing contacts so that they know it's disappearing.
Think the problem will be that the private-key associated with the server will change, and so messages signed from the new server will be rejected.
Anyone successfully closed down an instance then bought it back with new software on the same domain name?
Anyone know if it's possible to get Firefish to emit these tombstone messages?
Or maybe backup the private key to be used by the new instance I guess?
Seems like these things will be impossible once the old server is deleted.
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!
I started out, like many, on #Mastodon, during the great Twitter migration. Not that I migrated from Twitter. No... I never had a Twitter account. Rather, I hoped that Mastodon could obtain the Network Effect, and help fundamentally alter the shape of social media for the foreseeable future.
So I made my own solo Masto instance and ran it for a good six months. It was cool. But then there was a glittery thing -- #Calckey -- that caught my eye. So I joined that. Pretty soon the maintainer of Calckey (young BTW) dropped out, but forks forked. I waited. Then #Firefish was the shit. But no...
Then, today, the admin of my former instance calckey.world made a new sharkey.world instance public, and I joined. #Sharkey is the new shit.
Because that's how I roll. On the Cutting Edge, baby.
I still have my Firefish/Calckey account over at @youronlyone, but the instance, sadly, is not functioning as it should be, so I'm just logging into it but not using it anymore.
For now, I think those two new accounts will primarily be used as a “let me keep watch what's going on with this fork”. Though, I do want to upgrade it from that since it's actually easier to find content through the Antenna feature. (For me is the winning feature of Firefish and its forks.)
Anyway, just getting this out there, so people won't be surprised.
That reminded me, I haven't added it in my “verified” methods and lists. #ToDo!
Dear Admins of Fediverse
As #Firefish / #Calckey still doesnt have "unsub" button like Mastodon: https://git.joinfirefish.org/firefish/firefish/-/issues/9727 e.g. - im talking about defederation.
What would be the best way to remove instance?
after i moved my account i should remove relays, then remove all tracking from existing account (to and from), wait few days to make everyone knows that "there is no connection" and then remove?
We had quite a bit of this here at blahaj.zone back on #Calckey 14 when our MAU rose considerably. A move to #Iceshrimp didn't help. Trying to cut down costs by moving hosting introduced more unforeseen issues. We've lost a fair few people but we're more stable now. We're looking at moving to the #Sharkey fork of #Misskey v13 (which itself is a major revision & rewrite and not compatible with FF/IS) which seems to scale well by the looks of the massive instances that run it. But all this has been a big downer, and a lot of downtime. The reality is English-language forks of Misskey have never been tested at scale and when things go wrong trying to any documentation is difficult and most likely in Japanese. They've usually just commenced with a small single instance with some non-stock features added. I hope our eventual move to Sharkey doesn't come with a similar surprise, but seeing it sticks closely to upstream Misskey I think it might be ok.
I must be somewhere around my 1 year anniversary on the #Fediverse with #Mastodon, which included a short stint testing out #Calckey, hosting my own instance as a #serveradmin, and migrating my account multipl times because being able to do that - even while leaving old posts behind - is cool.
It’s steadily gotten better and better here, while the interactions overall have always been better than the hellsite. That might change but since douchebags congregate like flies to shit, being able to block entire instances (or defederate if needed) is great.
Now if people would stop clinging to the hellsite with whatever excuses they’re using to delude themselves (excluding the POC who’ve experienced the shitty side of a mostly white Fediverse), we could continue trying to fulfill the promise the web had before aggregators & algorithms ruined practically everything.
I need any resources, guides, HOWTOs, man pages, codices, papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, and anything else you might have, by yourself or others, on the topic of running a Fediverse instance.
It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
Are there any #fediverse platforms that don't compress or others ruin image uploads? #mastodon reduces many images to under 2000 pixels in either direction, usually in the 1600-1800 range from what I've seen.
they have shown a tremendous amount of disrespect and falsehood, eventually even daring to publicly attack me with false accusations, only to limit my acc on stop.voring.me to the home timeline without further note > when this happened some months ago, i was laughing because it felt like kindergarten edition of fedi drama
what is worse: back then, t1c threw overboard the principle not to federate with government-run instances, and t1c declared zero interest in the rise of fascism in germany, thereby giving leeway to apologetic posts on their instance calckey.social (now firefish.social)
when i started donating, i felt both happy and proud to support a small fediverse project which had managed to attract contributors and creators from all over the world > when i learned that t1c would occasionally face problems receiving donations in currencies other than usd, i ensured to donate in usd btw
i have felt for quite some time that the calckey/firefish community is not the right place for me, and i am saddened by the direction which the calckey/firefish project has taken #fediverse#calckey#firefish
The Feditext iOS client for Mastodon, GotoSocial, Firefish, etc. now has its own account on fedi.software! Please follow us here for official Feditext updates and announcements.
The first two accounts to be forwarded from calckey.social to firefish.social here for me are
Someone who blanked their profile.
Someone who already moved their account to masto.ai
So now there's two places that their old calckey.social account points to.
Seems to be working though, even in weird edge-cases like an account that's already been forwarded elsewhere. The new firefish account also forwards to the same destination.
My follow request section has a blinking dot like there's something in there, but there isn't... How do i make it stop? #calckey#firefish#iceshrimp#hajkey