internet choster of mild renown. 20.

tags on self posts, sporadically on reblog.

once lowercase.


(aka: Local Girl Tries To Set Up Pleroma Instance, Harrowing Experience!)

hewwo i want to vent/advise about this because i emphatically could not find any info about this on the internet and feel like that should be changed

tl;dr use akkoma and not soapbox/rebased pls


say you’re me.

twitter expat in the barest of terms, been talking about setting up your own fedi instance for months now but only really know about mastodon and maybe pixelfed, get through it and realize you’re a little disappointed with the ux, try and look for other alternatives, and realize you’ve opened an entire 55-gallon drum of worms. anyways, your research keeps pointing you towards pleroma.

so you all know about the pleroma situation, right?

because i didn’t until super recently. being basically completely new to the wider fediverse (past mastodon and its controversies) all i could find on the internet was:

  • before 2022 pleroma was being maintained
  • an Incident happened 4 months ago as of writing
  • there is now at least one fork
  • also pleroma original is now kind of unmaintained?

and like. this is pretty standard i think. any sufficiently large project (or even small ones, if they’re dictatorial enough) has a Big Conflict in its history where people disagree on the direction that the maintainers should be taking and there’s a fracture. and usually you end up with a couple big forks for a bit until it settles down. so i was kind of ok with it.

it’s looking more and more like pleroma’s your best bet. wikipedia lists pleroma and misskey and misskey is japanese and you don’t speak japanese. so now you have to figure out

what’s with these two forks? (or, a quick akkoma background)

well, actually, you start just knowing about one fork. from the cursory research you do on the internet, it kind of seems like development on pleroma stopped in early 2022 and akkoma picked up the slack. it has better ui (good!), no DMs (sure,), and seems anime-driven (hm.). the akkoma dev has written a blogpost on her website about why she forked, and notes that she “doesn’t want to get into details” but that there was a “maintainer disagreement” and she wants to “move away from ‘free speech’ advocates and towards different values”. this should have been a red flag.

you’re convinced you want to migrate off of mastodon. you start searching “mastodon to pleroma”. “mastodon vs pleroma”? “pleroma vs akkoma”? hey, what’s this name that keeps popping up?

the second fork (or, say hi to rebased!)

there’s this reddit comparison you stumble across after searching for that last one. it talks about pleroma being unmaintained (which you know) and akkoma’s featureset (which you’re trying to find, so, cool) but also about a secret third thing - another fork called “rebased”. it ties in better with “soapbox” and is apparently “more professional” compared to akkoma’s “fun”, notes a well-respected user. the link isn’t clickable despite being posted like a month ago (ah, reddit). yeah, sure, why not check this out?

the website looks slick! seems way more put together than akkoma. they’ve got installation instructions and that masto->pleroma migration tool you found earlier and a link to their gitlab (akkoma self hosts gitea). no comparisons, though! disappointing, given my other experiences of (at least) almalinux v. rocky linux and nextcloud v. owncloud and libreoffice v. openoffice and multimc v. polymc and man the list could keep going. the only internet thread comparing these seems to be the first reddit thread i found, so guess i’ll have to look on my own /shrug

(ed: turns out there’s a copost by @AriaSalvatrice talking about this already. didn’t check fedi or twitter for what feels like obvious reasons but i could’ve saved myself a bit of trouble)

researching rebased

looking around on feature comparisons and i feel kinda lost. these two forks seem to have basically the same features, except rebased maintains dms and akkoma adds bubbles. neither are big enough to get me to pick one over the other. eventually i stumble across a fedi post about rebased being “the software the bigot who caused the schism maintains” and many pieces click into place all at once.

uh oh

yeah so using “based” and calling pleroma “cringe” isn’t. great. especially read in this context. i try to find the main maintainer of rebased and it is three jumps from the gitlab to transphobia. it literally went “oh that’s the name of the guy” -> “oh hey this blog post is about why he forked pleroma” -> “this for real actually just says ‘i forked it because i said fuck you a lot and they called me (transphobic)’ (link to blog article called ‘why i don’t believe in trans people’)”. so that’s not great huh.

but it gets worse!

i look for more migration info and the only other two examples i can see of people migrating mastodon instances to pleroma are both connected to him. one is a blog post talking about how the migrator is “100% based” for working for the blog author and the fork author. i’ve actually seen this article before but with context it just makes me sad. the second one is from a “fourth-wave feminism” blog pa— this is just transphobia again. it’s run by this woman who has the “largest woman-centred fediverse instance” which technically doesn’t have sex verification because it’s “impractical”. good for them! also she’s the partner of the first guy. lovely delightful i hate it here. the ToS of this website i am not linking helpfully notes that “their codebase is shared with gab but like we just took a bit of code from them and vice versa don’t worry about it guys!” i slam down my phone. guess i’m using akkoma with a fresh instance

oh no

it’s at this point that i realize i don’t actually know anything about akkoma because i got distracted. nightmare oh no what if akkoma is somehow also bad? i know people hate pleroma and like i get it now but is akkoma any better? i start scouring their website for any hint that a queer person touched this. the most i get is a statement about akkoma’s values not aligning with “free speech” communities. a good start but not good enough. their git repo isn’t helpful either it doesn’t say anything about their values just that they have them. oh god they talk about sharing resources with foundkey maybe they have something? nope nothing there. foundkey is like calckey? oh thank fuck the calckey dev has pronouns. what immediately follows is one of the largest sighs of relief i’ve had in recent memory.

checking the git commit history for akkoma and yup someone with a homestuck pfp and a trans flag. good. i feel scarred.

thank fuck

yeah. that’s my panic fueled research right there. akkoma seems nice and doesn’t have the weird amount of restriction mastodon has (i.e. it actually seems interested in implementing the activitypub spec in full). maybe i’ll look into calckey too? honestly both seem kinda nice. if you somehow got down this far and have any insight please lmk

epilogue

this is the most words i’ve ever written on cohost by like. such a long shot it’s not even funny. it’s a really nice platform to do it on though!


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in reply to @kqct's post:

Hey, I'm the lead #calckey dev. I just found this while searching, that little section about me gave me a good laugh :)

To quote one of the replies:

@thatonecalculator "thank god you have blue hair and pronouns"

(Also, I'm good friends with the Foundkey devs. They may not but trans, but they are very pro-trans-rights and overall are very awesome people.)

hiya, glad you liked it! mildly honoured to be noticed by someone i mentioned in a positive light 😳i still haven’t had the chance to do any sort of migrations but i’ve been keeping tabs on akkoma/foundkey dev still and it seems like a really neat project!

man i don’t check cohost as often as i should…