Curious. Why did someone think it necessary to do sharkey and iceshrimp. What is wrong with Misskey? (feddit.online)

submitted 1 day ago by Jerry@feddit.online to c/fediverse@piefed.social

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I'm curious about people's thoughts around Misskey and its forked projects.

Why is Misskey so popular in Asia, but not used much in the west? Why do you think the preferences are so different between the regions?
What is wrong with Misskey that some people are willing to invest their time and money on separate forks (IceShrimp, Sharkey). What's the difference between the forks and the originals?
Does anyone have experience running any of these? Do they have any downsides like, for example, a database that grows unreasonably fast or that requires too many resources?

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[-] Snoopy@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I don't know about Misskey and haven't the opportunity to test it.

I looked for a french speaking instance that doesn't use mastodon because i disliked mastodon's UI. That french speaking instance was using Firefish.

Then Firefish development stopped and the instance moved to iceshrimp. And then, they started rewritting it into #C because it is the dev main language. (Iceshrimp.net)

If i'm not wrong, as one of its dev know jlai.lu that run lemmy, they will add support of Lemmy and PieFed (because i share lot information about PieFed on jlai.lu and its matrix room)

It is for you @AntoineD@kwak.cab :)

[-] AntoineD@kwak.cab 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

@Snoopy

Hello @Jerry.

Misskey is a Japanese software, whose lead developer does not speak English and does not make an effort to do so, even with translation tools.

It is therefore very complicated to contribute to the software if one does not speak Japanese.

At the time of Misskey 12, a soft fork was created, named Calckey, which added functionalities not present in Misskey, such as:

• API Mastodon
• Edit post
• Improved UI/UX (especially on mobile)
• Improved notifications
• Fediverse account migration
• Improved instance security
• Improved accessibility
• Recommended Instances timeline
• OCR image captioning
• New and improved Groups
• Better intro tutorial and many more user and admin settings.

With the update to Misskey 13, which brought significant changes, Calckey became a hard fork and eventually rebranded as Firefish. Various reasons led to the creation of the IceShrimp fork (focusing on bug fixes and performance optimization), while Firefish wanted to continue innovating but ultimately faded away.

Following this, two new projects emerged:

Sharkey, a soft fork of Misskey that reimplements the functionalities of Calckey into the updated Misskey (it's the equivalent of Mastodon + Glitch-Social).

IceShrimp.net, a from-scratch rewrite of IceShrimp in C#, which, once completed, will allow the migration of instances from IceShrimp.js. It will no longer be a fork of Misskey, with the goal of having software that is much easier to maintain, with cleaner and more optimized code, and to implement maximum compatibility with the major platforms of the fediverse.

[-] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 5 points 1 day ago

Misskey is basically fine, but it's very oriented to it's creator's home country.

If you can use it cool, but if you can't they're not going to fix it for you.

Perfectly sane response, IMO.

The other forks you mention are because Firefish's devleoper decided to destroy his project, and vanish. And, of course, since that's not enough, he then dumped maintenance on someone who didn't really want maintenance responsibilities, and they completely killed the project.

So, those two are the "western" forks of Misskey, basically.

this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025

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