#blahajzone — Public Fediverse posts

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!

​:blahaj_is_fine:​ ​:BlahajSpin:​ ​:Blobhaj_Ani_Hophop:​ ​:Blobhaj_Heart_Trans:​ ​:Blobhaj_Thanks_Wow:​

#blahajzone #sharkey #hajkey #firefish #calckey #iceshrimp

Some of my changes:
- Added my ListenBrainz username to the integration located in Profile.
- Reduced the reaction size to small.
- Changed reaction acceptance to All.
- Disabled animations.
- Moved notifications to bottom left and stacking vertically.
- Toggle to use the system's default font. It looks similar to Iceshrimp / Firefish font we had previously, instead of Misskey.
- Enabled the Loading Media Data Saver option.
- Disabled notification sounds.
- Added Lookup, Antennas, Lists, and Pages; removed Achievements from Navigation bar. Reordered the menu.

#blahajzone #hajkey #Sharkey

My first post since blahajzone migrated to Sharkey, yay! 🦈 🦈
#blahajzone #hajkey #Sharkey

So there's actually a big problem with local-only posts federating out to other *key instances atm. I can confirm that folks on #Firefish social have been able to view and reply to local-only channel posts here on #blahajzone where we use #Hajkey still on #Calckey v14. Can also confirm that I can see local only posts on FF social made 6 days ago. I'm able to see a local only post of @[email protected] posted on #Iceshrimp when in guest mode, but won't get it in when I place url in search. Also local-only posts on #Misskey can be seen by Iceshrimp and Hajkey users, so assume that FF too. Please don't post anything local-only atm that you don't want to be discoverable. What a mess.

I've just started playing around with #Channels which look like they are instance-locked #forums on the #Calckey platform. Cool thing about them is you can #follow them and posts will appear in your home #timeline just like when following another user's account.

Here's some initial screenshots so you can see what I'm talking about. #fediverse #feditips #microfedi

1. Channels are found in the #Calckey sidebar.
2. Here's a list of channels on #blahajzone.
3. Inside "Jo Channel" on #blahajzone. Anyone from the instance can post, posts are #localonly.
4. If you #follow the channel, posts appear in your home & local timelines like so.

How to migrate from mastodon.lol to blahaj.zone

1) Create your new account at blahaj.zone
2) Go to the migration settings on blahaj.zone They can be found at Settings >> Other Settings >> Migration.

3) In the "move to this account from an older account" field, enter in your mastodon.lol account (example @[email protected]) and save

4) Go to mastodon.lol migration settings. I think the URL for mastodon.lol is https://mastodon.lol/settings/migration

5) Fill in the handle of your blahaj.zone account (example: @[email protected]) and then your mastodon.lol password).

6) Press "Move Followers" and the magic will happen

#mastodon #calckey #migration #microfedi #blahajzone #mastodonlol #feditips

blahaj.zone is a #trans -run #calckey instance with strong #fediblock rules against Nazis, TERFs, sexual exploitation, etc., but permissive in terms of (CWed) NSFW content [my 🔞 alt is @[email protected] 😅]. #nsfw #lewdposting #adultcontent #mastodonlol #migration #microfedi #blahajzone

Finally seeing what's behind mastodon.lol blowing up. Holy shit Nathan. 🤦‍♀️

If you're looking for a new home blahaj.zone is a small trans-friendly #calckey instance run by #trans women @ada and @supakaity #mastodonlol #Mastodon #migration #microfedi #blahajzone

Hey mastodon.lol folks, blahaj.zone is a small instance that is open for signups. We run on #calckey which is has a different UI than #Mastodon and some other differences. We also have seamless migration from Mastodon instances built in, just like you're used to. Hope some of you might join us. Jo xx (formerly @[email protected])
#mastodonlol #migration #microfedi #trans #blahaj #blahajzone