Meet Elk, the new Mastodon Front End for Sakurajima

A few weeks back, I have discovered Elk, which is a new Mastodon Client that resembles the Twitter interface. One of the reasons why people are reluctant to join Mastodon because it looks too hard. Elk solves this by giving an interface that looks like Twitter, so users can be at home when they move to our Mastodon instance, Sakurajima.

Since the Elk team recently open source their repository, it’s now possible for us to set up our own Elk front end. It’s located at:

https://elk.sakurajima.moe

By default, it will show our instance local timeline. Our Elk instance client will get built every two weeks with out customizations (Myriad Pro font and in the future, a Sakura theme).

You can also access this by clicking the Elk FE link in the left sidebar or the Elk Frontend button on the logged out view on our instance. This will replace our Halcyon client set up at https://easymode.sakurajima.moe. We intend to take down Halcyon at the end of March since it hasn’t received updates since 2020. This can become a security risk. We set it up and kept it up as a transitionary tool as better clients are being made for Mastodon like Ivory from Tapbots. With Elk being a better alternative, we see no need to keep both Elk and Halcyon, so the latter will be retired. I think most people who used Twitter will like Elk more than Halcyon.

If you have any issues with our Elk front end, report them in the Mastodon Support Forums at our Xenforo forums or contact @chikorita157.