2023 Year in Review for Sakurajima

Now that we are heading to the end of the year, it’s time to give a brief recap. We were two months with around 40-50 users at the end of last year. Our server has grown several times, with about 348 active monthly users.

Of course, there were some challenges in the beginning. Sure, when the server only had a handful of users, I could handle the moderation myself. However, in March, our server was attacked by bad actors, and I became so stressed over moderating the server that I needed some moderators to help me out. It was a big help in handling any reports we received that broke our rules. The first half of 2023 is getting things together to determine what will come next.

In May 2023, we started Sakurajima Social, which used a Misskey fork called Calckey, which eventually became Firefish. However, Firefish has begun to have some controversies over its rebranding and lead developer. Finally, in November, we left Firefish for Sharkey (a soft fork of Misskey) due to performance issues and primarily a lack of response from the Firefish developers. This “upgrade” has renewed interest in our “Misskey” server.

In other words, Sakurajima Social won’t be much of an afterthought we treated before the move. After all, most of the activity is on our Mastodon server. Still, we hope our Misskey/Sharkey server will be an alternative. After all, I believe that Misskey (and Sharkey, by extension) is a better UX and quite a bit easier compared to Mastodon. It strongly resembles Twitter (now known as X). However, it lacks clients and integration support. We hope that the Sharkey team’s work on the Mastodon API can help bring it closer to the number of apps available on Mastodon, especially for those who blog.

Lastly, I would like to thank our donors, mods (NaraMoore, cymaiden, and kbnet), and, of course, the admin of Urusai Social, Neatchee, for the entire first year of our existence. We aren’t going anywhere as the inevitable end of X (nee Twitter) will come with the rise of more services embracing ActivityPub. Yes, we even started a free blogging service called Yoshino Garden.

With this, we hope to see the return of fandom communities and, hopefully, the revival of blogging. After all, the experience on corporate platforms isn’t getting any better, with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube facing the cycle of enshittification.

If you are on Mastodon Social, I do recommend checking us out. You know where you can join us and migrate your account. A video on how to migrate your account will come soon.

Some short-term goals for Sakurajima for the future are:

• Move to a built server hosted in a Colocation site for more stability at a lower cost in the long term. The monthly cost spent on Linode is already approaching the cost of building and hosting a server on a colocation site. The plan is to get a bare-bones 1U rack with an Intel Xeon or AMD Ryzen processor with at least 64 GB of RAM or more with 2 TB enterprise drives in RAID 1 with a life span of at least 7 years.
• Commission artwork for the Mascot of Sakurajima (Hoshino Aiko), new instance image
• We are porting the Anime Subreddit’s Anime discussion bot for our Xenforo forums to increase engagement and the ability to log in with a Sharkey account.

With that, I hope everyone at Sakurajima will have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.