Sakurajima Social and the Future Transition to Sharkey

Soon, Sakurajima Social, but with more shark plushies.

In the past few months, our Firefish server has been pretty slow lately and not as active. As announced earlier, we planned to switch to Sharkey, a soft fork of Misskey with additional features. It can be akin to what Glitch-Soc is on Mastodon. There are some obvious reasons, especially with Firefish and Firefish.social being a dumpster fire. It’s gotten pretty bad that Blahaj Zone is planning to switch away from their IceShrimp fork to Sharkey.

With that, Sakurajima Social plans to switch to Sharkey sometime in December or early January. The dev team is very responsive and friendly to work with. The Sharkey Dev is progressing in implementing features in Firefish, such as the MFM Play button and, recently, the ability to import posts from Mastodon and other social networks without spamming the notifications. The problem with post importing in Firefish is that it floods the notifications. The Sharkey devs figured out a way around this by not federating imported posts, which is a workable solution.

The plus side of switching to Sharkey is the backend improvements that Misskey has in scaling up and additional moderation tools. Sharkey has improved Mastodon API support, so more clients should (in theory) work with it.

At the end of the day, we want to provide the best experience for our users and actually use our services. I feel that a Misskey fork that follows upstream more closely is better than one that tries to be it’s own thing.

Suppose you want to learn more about the differences between FireFish, Misskey, and Sharkey. In that case, you can see this spreadsheet I am working on comparing all the features. The UX should be similar between Firefish and Sharkey.

We will make an announcement when she plan to do some downtime to migrate over to Sharkey. Don’t worry, everything will be backed up before we transition.



The post Sakurajima Social and the Future Transition to Sharkey appeared first on Sakurajima.

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[merulox]

I'm excited for this! <3

 

[Hika]

Really looking forward to the improvement

 

[chikorita157]

Yep, it`s finally done, while it took some work to set things up again. But it's faster now. I decided to push things up because of a crticial Firefish vulnerability

(the Recommend Timeline is gone for a bit, but it will come back in the future.)

 

[Kimby]

Yep, it`s finally done, while it took some work to set things up again. But it's faster now. I decided to push things up because of a crticial Firefish vulnerability

(the Recommend Timeline is gone for a bit, but it will come back in the future.)

Thank you so much for the hard work

 

[dorkboycomics]

Yes, thank you!!!
I can't believe how much better Sharkey is in terms of speed, as well as fun new features!!
Thanks so much!!!

 

[Hika]

I follow the same people across Sharkkey and Mastodon and I'm perplexed how posts can look so different, or I feel like there's more posts recommended to me via Sharkkey. Am I tripping? I think you mentioned before we get antennae/circles kind of thing that make it easier to discover post across instances.

On that note, is there a way to make "Gallery" as one of the main tabs when I check my profile? I see I can change my Navigation bar for myself, but can I change it for my profile/how people view my profile?

 

[dorkboycomics]

I follow the same people across Sharkkey and Mastodon and I'm perplexed how posts can look so different, or I feel like there's more posts recommended to me via Sharkkey. Am I tripping? I think you mentioned before we get antennae/circles kind of thing that make it easier to discover post across instances.

On that note, is there a way to make "Gallery" as one of the main tabs when I check my profile? I see I can change my Navigation bar for myself, but can I change it for my profile/how people view my profile?

Hi there! Posts on sharkey might look different if not using the same app - images and posts look way different between the Sharkey web app and mastodon clients for example - I’ve definitely noticed that also.

I’m not sure about recommendations - antennae are handy for checking out posts across people you don’t even follow, and on Firefish you could see posts from entire instances. Sharkey doesn’t seem to have that ability currently, but something we could request - I do miss that! There are some third party apps that support viewing other instances - ice cubes app has local timelines that lets you do that.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to make Gallery the default view on your profile…you could probably link it in the profile, but not sure if there are others ways to make it happen…

 

[chikorita157]

Hi there! Posts on sharkey might look different if not using the same app - images and posts look way different between the Sharkey web app and mastodon clients for example - I’ve definitely noticed that also.

I’m not sure about recommendations - antennae are handy for checking out posts across people you don’t even follow, and on Firefish you could see posts from entire instances. Sharkey doesn’t seem to have that ability currently, but something we could request - I do miss that! There are some third party apps that support viewing other instances - ice cubes app has local timelines that lets you do that.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to make Gallery the default view on your profile…you could probably link it in the profile, but not sure if there are others ways to make it happen…

The Sharkey devs added the bubble/recommended tab, and it’s already restored as the Bubble tab. But following whole instances will eventually become a thing once they implement wildcard support for users so you only need to add *@sakurajima.moe to see an antenna feed of all users from that instanve. Of course, that wouldn’t be useful since the bubble/recommend tab is back, but useful for other servers.

 

[chikorita157]

A note, this is the only time we are using Dev as this feature is something our users want, but of course we are informed that using dev is not recommended given unresolved issues. (also we shouldn’t be testing dev branch in production, but this will be the only exception)

I’m only doing it this one time, but a stable version should come out in a few weeks.

 

[dorkboycomics]

Thank you! Bubble and threaded views are looking interesting!
Coming from a server that was only ever in Dev, this sounds fine.

 

[emily]

The switch to sharky seems promising for sakurajimasocial as it follows the original project closer to source, so less likely of being behind on updates and potentially broken from trying it's own things. Knowing that we're working with a dev team that seems to know what they are doing is also a bonus.