Sakurajima Social and the Future Transition to Sharkey

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.