Misskey: An Interplanetary Microblogging Platform | Hacker News Reader

Misskey: An Interplanetary Microblogging Platform

github.com

82 pointsnbrempel56 comments

Misskey as a project looks pretty cool, but they seem to lean really hard into the anime culture thing. I couldn’t find, on a cursory glance, an instance that seemed like it would feel appropriate for a middle aged man.

No shame to anime culture, you do you, but it seems like they’re missing a segment for adoption.

Cowboy from Nine Nines has been going strong for years. With an anime mascot.

An app you’re using right now could be using a project with an inappropriate anime mascot!

I mean I get it’s not exactly the same, but I can’t think of a time anyone chose not to use Cowboy because of the mascot.

https://ninenines.eu/

It is very HN to assume universal adoption/scale should be every project's goal. There are dozens of ActivityPub server platforms out there, none of them are explicitly trying to win all the users.

"do things that don't scale" :)

It's strange to assume that anime is for people who aren't middle agged men :)

50 yo are part of anime culture. 60 yo maybe not for lack of exposure when they were kids. Of course many 50 yo people are not current with the latest animes but remember very well the ones from the '70s and '80s.

The docs explain what this is more clearly than the readme: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html

Apparently the name is somehow derived from this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efrlqw8ytg4

Pretty strange, but also pretty much the sales pitch for ActivityPub interop.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the name was the opening theme for a 2011 anime called "Phi Brain", which uses the word "misskey" in its lyrics. (I don't think it has any meaning?)

Lo and behold, that's where the name comes from: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html

> The name "Misskey" comes from a song called "Brain Diver" by a band that syuilo used to listen to at the time called May'n.

Also, for the benefit of the other discussion happening here:

> Who's that cute cat-eared girl that you see sometimes?

> It's Misskey's guardian deity, Ai.(They called Ai cute, yay!)

Makes me happy to see platforms like FB & Twitter crashing while decentralised and open-platforms is slowly becoming mainstream.

What a dream!

Does someone have a list of various ActivityPub/Mastodon-alike projects and their differences?

I know there's Mastodon proper, then Pleroma which is much less demanding on the hosting server, and then this Misskey which have full support for emoji reactions?

Would be interesting to see which project have the most velocity and their various tradeoffs, IMO.

https://fediverse.party/ tracks various fediverse related projects.

I did an informal review for myself when deciding on what to run a couple months ago (I ended up going w/ https://akkoma.social/, a Pleroma fork over the Misskey variants): https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FSoftware%2FFedi...?

There are two other (to me) interesting newer projects (that probably aren't quite ready for primetime) - https://gotosocial.org/ (written in Go of course), and Takahē https://jointakahe.org/ , a Python project - both aim for Mastodon API client support, which feels like a must since it allows you to use all the various 3rd party Mastodon clients.

I’m running (and debugging) Takahe and it is _really_ solid (although obviously still missing a lot of features). I have two domains on it and am asking friends to join and test, and it works great on very limited CPU resources thanks to its back-end processing strategy. Since it’s Django-based, contributing and debugging is accessible to an enormous amount of people (unlike the Pleroma variants, which I also tested but found quite demanding resource-wise).

Here are my notes: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/21/0900

I'm building an ActivityPub thing of my own: https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen

It's not quite ready for mainstream use just yet, but I'm getting there. The next update will improve moderation tools by a lot. One after that will, at last, add private messages.

Hey Grishka, are there any instances of smithereen out there outside your test one?

There's a personal one run by one of my ex-VK colleagues. I don't know about any other ones.

cloudflare just launched one too, wildebeest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34350897

It does require you to buy into their ecosystem wholesale, but it has sparks of brilliance in the approach. I was thinking about doing something similar with lambdas/Azure Functions and a KV store, but they just happen to have the right building blocks all lined up.

Quoting my comment from yesterday, these ones extend beyond microblogging:

> From top of my head, there are more extensive lists out there: Pixelfed (Instagram alternative), Peertube (YouTube alternative), Pleroma (another Twitter-like microblog), Bookwyrm (Goodreads alternative), Funkwhale (like a mashup between Soundcloud and a podcast host), Owncast (Twitch alternative), Mobilizon (event organizing), lemmy (reddit alternative)...

> They're all rather tiny and unpolished, having even less resources to work with than Mastodon, but you should be able to follow a user on any of them from Mastodon. At least in theory, haven't tried with all of them.

The mascot caught me off guard, but the substance of the app itself is really cool. I look forward to giving this a shot. Any contributors in the crowd here?

yeah that mascot is going to drive away the eyes of a lot of westerners.

And maybe that's okay? A heavily fragmented web means no one actor can accrue all that much power.

The challenge for all the ActivityPub services, in order to go anything resembling mainstream, is to get better at routing a wider swath of people to the right services and communities.

You can also take a look at Calckey, which is a Misskey fork and instead of Ai-Chan has a bird with a weed problem as mascot.

Why does everything in 2020-> contain a monkey's paw?

HN is so 19th century British ^^ :s

I don't know if it's because I'm getting old, but is anyone else a little put off by the cartoon girl in the short skirt? To me it seems like it is fetishizing under age girls.

I don't know it just feels creepy to me.

What the…yea, I’m not sure what she’s doing there. Is it supposed to be the projects mascot? Shit, I must be old too.

The image links to https://xn--931a.moe/ which has more details on the girl. Looks like you're correct, she is Ai-chan and the project's kanbanmusume.

- kanbanmusume: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8B%E3%82%93%E3%81%B0%E...

It appears to be created/maintained by Japanese developers, which tends to be full of anime culture.

A.A. Gill had interesting things to say about that… (his essay on Japan in his travel column compendium “A A Gill is Away”)

Don't suppose you have a link for that, and maybe a date?

It appears to be a book.

Hehe, that's exactly what I thought.

Is it because I'm 48 or is this weird?

No, it is this that is weird.

I had the same thought. Just tried picturing "selling" use of this to some corporate overlords and I could hear the deafening noise of raised eyebrows in my mind. This looks like something no "modern" project with a "modern" COC could ever use. It seems quite oblivious at the very least, ignorant at the likely.

"hard to sell to corporate overlords" is something many communities consider a feature.

Remember when we were allowed to have fun on the Internet?

To me, the fact that corpos and their unbearable, sanctimonious servants are put off by this is the best possible feature, bar none.

There's definitely a certain element of nostalgia when consuming "old" (say, pre-millenium) art, e.g. tv shows, posters, poems, ... yet once you become aware of dark patterns it's hard to unsee them in said art.

This is a feature. This is an open source project, nobody cares about the sales pitch to some old executives.

I don't read it as sexual at all, I just read it as moe.

I don't see it as sexualized or fetishized at all. It's rather charming to see anime mascots these days rather than some soulless logo.

A very young woman posing with a school uniform disguise modified to have a tiny skirt doesn't sounds like sexualizing/fetishizing children to you?

Not really, no. People can wear short skirts without being sexualized; it's a fashion preference like any other.

Even so, I dispute the idea that sexuality or moe doesn't belong in the products of our labor. And moreso, I dispute the idea that school uniform fetishes sexualize children in the case of an adult wearing one.

> Not really, no. People can wear short skirts without being sexualized; it's a fashion preference like any other.

The problem here is not the short skirt. It is the short skirt associated with what his a school uniform that doesn't normally have a short one associated with a very young looking girl.

> I dispute the idea that school uniform fetishes sexualize children in the case of an adult wearing one.

It triggers people with pedophile fantasy and only them imho.

For the record, school uniform is typically worn for at least 4 years after crossing into age of consent. Where do you draw your arbitrary line?

Now that it is clear "underage" is not implied, I gotta say I see a lot the obsession with age and hostility at the sign of younger people having healthy sexual lives, might be a sign of repressed psychological issues I guess.

Younger people having healthy sexual lives is all good as long as it stays within the same age group. I don't think anyone implied the countrary.

Now if you are trying to pretend that japanese society doesn't have a problem with fetishing womans that act like little girls under age of content you are just blind.

> as long as it stays within the same age group

...because?

> japanese society doesn't have a problem with fetishing womans that act like little girls under age of content

No one condones sexualizing underage girls. Just school uniform alone and so the logo of this project have provably nothing to do with that

> associated with what his a school uniform that doesn't normally have a short one associated

That's a highly cultural and location/climate bias. Do an image search for "Japan school photos" and you'll see a range of uniforms with short skirts without any fetishising. Those kids could've chosen longer ones.

There's on picture in the repo readme and one on the hub page. The repo picture is much more acceptable, so make sure you're both talking about the same picture

Yes as a father of 2 daughters I dismissed it just because of it when I was looking for a fediverse compatible platform.

This type of imagery seems to be endemic in the world of text- and image-based ActivityPub, a similar set of "mascot" images greeted me when I first installed Pleroma and was greeted by a female fox-hybrid (which I quickly removed from the server). I have not noticed any higher incidence of furries in the world of Peertube (which I've been running for years now) or Pixelfed (an Instagram clone which I've been experimenting with for a year or so) so it seems to be mostly limited to the "Twitter-alternatives" side of things. The distributed nature of these systems makes it possible for many subcultures to create their own "islands" of ActivityPub-linked nodes where furries roam the land and/or anime-avatars abound but I do feel that the prevalence of these subcultures has turned off many others from the likes of Pleroma and Mastodon because they deem them to be tainted in some way.

I noticed that a significant number of contributors to the Fediverse are trans-women who seem to prefer using anime toons instead of their real pictures. I'm not sure it's about sexualizing young girls, but instead it might be about using an idealized self body image (there might be a preferred or scientific term for this, I'm not sure).

Do you know many underage girls with fox ears?

As well as finding it outright tacky - I find it incredibly creepy. It's one thing to enjoy a style of animation / artwork - it's another to have sleazy cartoon avatars of sexualised young girls.

Yes, that feels uncomfortable. The list of main contributors is also a weird list of anime girls, in combination with the README that makes it a bit creepy.

Edit: yeah, no, if you follow the image link it’s pretty clear. It is definitely sexualized and really creepy: https://xn--931a.moe/

It is creepy. One aspect of the fediverse that isn't discussed enough is that it's full of pedophiles hiding in plain sight.

One aspect of claiming content without any nudity to be sexualized is that you, yourself, may be the only one actually attaching sexuality to it. If the characters are also underage in your imagination, it's really worth considering where this "underage sexuality" actually exists. I see a cartoon of a dressed woman above the age of consent - what do you see? What are you looking for?

One aspect of a common moral culture is that it has laws made by the centralized authority and their promoted influencers - laws like covering women's faces and hair to prevent the victims (i.e., hapless, tempted men </s> ) from succumbing to sexual urges. The more this authority controls a narrative, the more the control is reinforced with rationale arbitrarily and increasingly deviating from reality, and so on, until there exists a central authority who forces more self-censorship than would be permissible in a viable democracy. So here we end up with people seeing a culture's skirt length and project our own sexualization on stuff like moe, and thus their maligned culture becomes a subculture - one which fools in the mainstream cannot apparently differentiate from baby-rapists, although no foul deeds are actually done, not even in the ripe imagination of that subculture. Would you rather subcultures be permitted to exist, or that imams with your sensibilities excise all the clitorises from the internet? Wouldn't you be glad to know that pedophiles are profoundly less common than you imagine, or is this yet another case where, no matter the real and present danger, a voice like yours comes out singularly, loudest, to override every other thoughtful recourse with "think of the children!"? Maybe it would be better not to strawman, and to project your fears less upon others, and to learn that things are not just what you deem them to mean. One aspect of the Fediverse is it allows one to be treated with honest innocence where it's due, including where judgment like yours treats those most needing protection as guilty-by-association.

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