@stgiga@youronlyone@youronlyone & talking about #Fedi history by the way, since the doc itself says it is a living doc, there are a few notable instances not yet mentioned there that were recently developed by high-profile (or at least notable enough for us) Fedi users & might have verifiable links or posts that can give them a place within the doc’s timeline:
• #Fedibird (#Mastodon fork) by @noellabo
• #Sharkey (a very popular #Misskey fork) by @Amelia (& others from the @Sharkey project) since 2023
• maybe #IceShrimp (#Firefish fork?), unsure if it’s notable enough for inclusion or if supported by verifiable links (even I don’t know who created it).
I leave it up to @youronlyone whether certain popular extensions (if not forks per se) like #GlitchSoc (extending Mastodon) & #Soapbox (extending or modifying #Pleroma) can be added to the timeline as well.
Also, I will definitely not suggest for inclusion (or even a footnote mention) a certain #Akkoma fork that was given an obscene name by a fringe group of people (let’s just pretend it never existed, OK?) :ablobcatknitsweats:
If your profile and posts are set to "public" and you can read this very post, you should have no sense of "privacy" here on Fedi. That means ANYONE can reply.
There's 20,000+ instances and new ones every day, there's NO WAY to tell who is accessing your posts or what they're doing with them.
Fediverse is not some kinda "bastion for privacy" nor is there any sort of "consent" required to see your posts if they are public.
The only way you can be 100% sure that your followers are the only ones that directly see your posts is to make your profile and posts private. Even then, screenshots exist.
Remember, you're on the internet. Once you post it, it's probably not going away. This is true everywhere.
If there were ever a single post that truly shows how running a Fedi instance is, that I could boost to the moon, it's this one.
People still somehow think that Fedi is "opt-in" or "privacy focused" or even "community focused". None of these things are true and I wish more people understood.
It's not a BAD thing, per se. I like it, personally. I choose who I want to interact with by blocking those instances I DON'T want to interact with, but it's OPEN BY DEFAULT is something some people can't grasp.😬
I promised I'd be giving updates on #Iceshrimp's #dotnet C# rewrite -a brand new fedi platform really- so here's where we're at at the moment! The backend's basic functionality is more or less finished, although there will undoubtedly be stuff to fix and improve during beta. So theoretically you could use it, but we don't have a frontend yet so you could use it only with masto apps atm. However, the frontend is where the focus is going now, and we plan to have a basic/working frontend soon so that we can release our first beta in a couple of weeks or so!
We expect performance and server requirements to be comparable to #Akkoma. Things are about to get exciting!
I said it elsewhere, but I say it here too, I HATE how corporate social media sites have taken SOCIAL out of social media.
Thankfully the Fediverse is mostly taking that back. But if we don't expand to get those that are still on corporate social media to move here, then we'll just become the echo chambers we hate. That's why the Threads integration is a good thing. We need to expand.
Alright, I know I haven't given many updates on #Catodon, because frankly there's not a lot to say. We're reorganizing, reprioritizing etc. Things are going slow. I haven't given up on the project, I think we have an interesting approach which is worth exploring, but we're short on human resources atm. Hopefully this will change and things will get exciting again, but we're not there yet. I'll let you know.
However, I wanna talk about another project I'm also sort of involved in lately - #Iceshrimp! So Iceshrimp also started as a #Firefish fork but they are currently rewriting the whole thing on .net/C#! Both the backend and frontend are being rewritten in C# - the frontend on Blazor. AFAIK this is the only fedi project written on .net and I'm really curious for the result!
This has been announced many months before, and Iceshrimp-js is in feature freeze, to allow all efforts to concentrate in the rewrite. Many people were skeptical because it's a huge project - which is true. So let me tell you that finally #Iceshrimp's rewrite will be entering beta soon - meaning, probably before the month is through!
This will practically be a brand new fedi platform, with a UX similar to Firefish (at least initially), with great Mastodon API support for compatibility with existing apps, hopefully with much better performance and a cleaner codebase. I'll keep you posted on how things progress!
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'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!
Hello again #Fediverse, I may need your #fedihelp. So, here's a list of the Fediverse software I'm about to make temporary accounts for to test all the features and differences:
So, did I miss anything noteworthy? Does anyone have any tips or recommendations before I choose a server for any one of these? I'll probably be going for the most popular server on each for improved federation and maintenance.
Note: I'm using #Sharkey right now and Misskey forks are already overrepresented, so that's why it's not included.
Those wanting to try out an alternative to Mastodon, you're welcome to create an account on https://sharkey.world. #Sharkey has a very different layout, but most of the same features as Mastodon, and many features Mastodon hasn't. Just see for yourself, and it's fine to either use it as a second account, or you can decide to migrate your current account to it, if you really like it.
Alright, I think we now have a better idea of what's happening with #Firefish, so I might as well give a small update. Kainoa quit, and left the project to naskya, who is a person I appreciate very much, as they've always been kind and polite and willing to help. I also think they're very devoted to Firefish, and basically were the last person actively caring about the project. As far as I know, they intend to keep maintaining and developing Firefish, and a new stable version will finally soon be released. This is great news, as you don't need to worry that your server is running unmaintained and vulnerable software. So, alarm off everybody, no need to abandon ship.
As for us, we're standing by our decision to rebase #Catodon to #Iceshrimp. The changes we want to do are long term plans, but we've started redesigning some things and, whenever we are ready, I hope we'll show you something worth your attention. So yeah, firefish, iceshrimp and catodon are all alive and valid options (the first two to be precise, for the time being). All projects share code fixes and I think we're on very good terms, here in our corner of the fediverse. Enjoy the ride.
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 👪
Kinda big day tomorrow as catodon.social's getting updated to our latest dev version, since our announced rebase to #Iceshrimp is finished, which means that, if everything goes well, after tomorrow catodon.social will have all of the performance improvements of Iceshrimp, including full Mastodon API support. It took us back a few weeks but we think it was worth it, and now we can resume development towards our first release. #Catodon
Just learned about the demise of #Firefish (head is M.I.A.). It's unfortunate for the thousands of instances running it, but with that comes #IceShrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon. All of them (I think) are being developed by former Firefish devs. Options.
Hopefully, current FF users are all, if they want to, able to move to another actively-developed community easily.
It doesn't matter if you are new to the #fediverse or if you have been here forever, it's always good to keep in mind that (a) what server you pick, and (b) what software that server runs, matter.
I should admit am fairly new at this. I created my first fediverse account only a year ago. It was a #mastodon server with about 8,000 users. And while it "worked" there was something missing from the experience.
While researching the idea of hosting my own server, I discovered #FireFish which in turn led to discovering #IceShrimp. It's hard to describe how much better the experience is with IceShrimp.
The #UI is just so much better, and the feature set way more robust. The way it handles replies, the ability to quote, to use multiple emojis, etc.
If you have friends or family thinking about joining the Fediverse or are feeling unimpressed with your mastodon experience, I highly recommend getting an account running IceShrimp or other similar software.
Probably also worth mentioning that I also looked at using a #Wordpress integration and #Hubzilla#GoToSocial#Pleroma#Humhub and #Streams. I found them to be clunky; reminding me of how email was in the early 90s.
If the fediverse is going to thrive, then it needs to make a good first impression. Moving beyond mastodon is a good step in the right direction.
An interesting feature of the Misskey forks (#Forkeys) is Pages, long form posts with a CMS editor. I wrote about it, and the changes you can expect over the next year! Check it out.
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!
We're one week into 2024, do you know what that means? Time to clean up your #SNS “following” especially here in the #Fediverse.
Check the “dormant” accounts if you can unfollow them.
Check which accounts “moved”. Follow their new account, then unfollow their old account.
And maybe there are other accounts that you haven't interacted with in the past few months; and their content is no longer something that you are interested, you can unfollow them too.
If you still want to see their content, you can encourage them to use #hashtags and you follow those hashtags. Or, join a federated “group” like those powered by #Mbin#Kbin#Friendica#Chirp and #Lemmy.
Of course, depending on the fediverse platform your instance is using, there are probably better features to the content of users without seeing their content that is not of interest to you. A good example, #Firefish / #Catodon / #IceShrimp can do that through the “Antenna” feature.
Take some time to do this, and start your 2024 fediverse better than 2023.