what is calckey
calckey is a fork of misskey with modifications to the UI and functionality.
some of the biggest improvements on misskey are listed here and include such things as:
and many many more neat features.
why choose calckey
why do i like calckey over and above mastodon or plermoa/akkoma? => that is a wholly personal preference and since making the choice, i've discovered some pretty disturbing stuff about pleroma and have actually encountered a few unsavoury folk from pleroma instances. cognitive bias at work, i guess. but i digress ...
i ended up driving using calckey exclusively and i'd like to document my experiences for the wider fediverse so here i am.
my install process
there are a few different ways to run calckey as documented in the repo README, and as far as I can remember, the suggestion is that the docker route is the easiest way. there are, of course, some limitations to that - namely resource usage. if you're going to be using it for a multi person instance, you might want to dedicate a whole server (vps anyone?) to it. i haven't tried installing on the host OS myself, so i won't speak to that.
since discovering containerisation, i've reinstalled my home server, removing proxmox in favour of a bare bones debian install running docker. i know there is tons wrong with docker as a company, and i'm looking into moving to podman, but i'm running into some growing pains so it'll be a while before the migration is complete; in the meantime ...
why? well, i don't host anything that demands a lot of resources and proxmox was just heavier than i was comfortable with. the last straw was losing a vm completely to data corruption. worst bit is that was months before i realised it because proxmox was busily snapshotting the corrupted vm for weeks so all my backups were bad too. pissed me off. mostly because i hadn't bothered to check my backups to make sure they were good. but i digress ...
at the time, i was still on misskey. then when i learned about calckey, i made the switch. the migration went fairly smoothly - most of my issues were just learning which settings were important. once i got that straightened out, my instance was running calckey and i have not looked back.
what's next?
next i'll talk about bots and how i went about learning the misskey api -and later the calckey api- and establishing my first bot
