10 ms·

Misskey: An Interplanetary Microblogging Platform

82 points by nbrempel 4y ago

xupybd 4y ago
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.
- heyoni 4y ago
  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.
  - darcien 4y ago
    The image links to https://藍.moe/ 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%E3%82%93%E3%82%80%E3%81%99%E3%82%81#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8B%E3%82%93%E3%81%B0%E...
- neotrope 4y ago
  It appears to be created/maintained by Japanese developers, which tends to be full of anime culture.
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    A.A. Gill had interesting things to say about that… (his essay on Japan in his travel column compendium “A A Gill is Away”)
    - pjc50 4y ago
      Don't suppose you have a link for that, and maybe a date?
      - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
        It appears to be a book.
- leke 4y ago
  Hehe, that's exactly what I thought. Is it because I'm 48 or is this weird? No, it is this that is weird.
- ephaeton 4y ago
  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.
  - detaro 4y ago
    "hard to sell to corporate overlords" is something many communities consider a feature.
  - animuchan 4y ago
    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.
    - ephaeton 4y ago
      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.
  - MuteXR 4y ago
    This is a feature. This is an open source project, nobody cares about the sales pitch to some old executives.
- wcerfgba 4y ago
  I don't read it as sexual at all, I just read it as moe.
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  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.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    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?
    - claudiawerner 4y ago
      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.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        > 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.
        throwaway290 4y ago
        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.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Yes as a father of 2 daughters I dismissed it just because of it when I was looking for a fediverse compatible platform.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  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.
- redleader55 4y ago
  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).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - truecomm 4y ago
    [flagged]
- branon 4y ago
  Do you know many underage girls with fox ears?
- smcleod 4y ago
  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.
- dgellow 4y ago
  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/ https://xn--931a.moe/
- truecomm 4y ago
  It is creepy. One aspect of the fediverse that isn't discussed enough is that it's full of pedophiles hiding in plain sight.
  - omniglottal 4y ago
    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.
inawarminister 4y ago
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.
- lf-non 4y ago
  https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ tracks various fediverse related projects.
- lhl 4y ago
  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/ https://akkoma.social/, a Pleroma fork over the Misskey variants): https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FSoftware%2FFediverse%2FMigrating%20to%20Your%20Own%20Fediverse%20Instance#What_other_options_are_there 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/ https://gotosocial.org/ (written in Go of course), and Takahē https://jointakahe.org/ 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.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    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 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/21/0900
- grishka 4y ago
hedgehog 4y ago
The docs explain what this is more clearly than the readme: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html Apparently the name is somehow derived from this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efrlqw8ytg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efrlqw8ytg4 Pretty strange, but also pretty much the sales pitch for ActivityPub interop.
aliqot 4y ago
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?
- senectus1 4y ago
  yeah that mascot is going to drive away the eyes of a lot of westerners.
  - coffeefirst 4y ago
    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.
  - MuteXR 4y ago
    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.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Why does everything in 2020-> contain a monkey's paw?
  - frozencell 4y ago
    HN is so 19th century British ^^ :s
Twisol 4y ago
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 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!)
tsuujin 4y ago
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.
- dqv 4y ago
  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/ https://ninenines.eu/
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  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.
  - inawarminister 4y ago
    "do things that don't scale" :)
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  It's strange to assume that anime is for people who aren't middle agged men :)
- pmontra 4y ago
  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.
Alifatisk 4y ago
Makes me happy to see platforms like FB & Twitter crashing while decentralised and open-platforms is slowly becoming mainstream. What a dream!

82 points by nbrempel 4y ago

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.

heyoni 4y ago
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.
- darcien 4y ago
  The image links to https://藍.moe/ 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%E3%82%93%E3%82%80%E3%81%99%E3%82%81#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8B%E3%82%93%E3%81%B0%E...
neotrope 4y ago
It appears to be created/maintained by Japanese developers, which tends to be full of anime culture.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  A.A. Gill had interesting things to say about that… (his essay on Japan in his travel column compendium “A A Gill is Away”)
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Don't suppose you have a link for that, and maybe a date?
    - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
      It appears to be a book.
leke 4y ago
Hehe, that's exactly what I thought. Is it because I'm 48 or is this weird? No, it is this that is weird.
ephaeton 4y ago
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.
- detaro 4y ago
  "hard to sell to corporate overlords" is something many communities consider a feature.
- animuchan 4y ago
  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.
  - ephaeton 4y ago
    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.
- MuteXR 4y ago
  This is a feature. This is an open source project, nobody cares about the sales pitch to some old executives.
wcerfgba 4y ago
I don't read it as sexual at all, I just read it as moe.
claudiawerner 4y ago
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.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  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?
  - claudiawerner 4y ago
    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.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      > 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.
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        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.
prmoustache 4y ago
Yes as a father of 2 daughters I dismissed it just because of it when I was looking for a fediverse compatible platform.
the_third_wave 4y ago
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.
redleader55 4y ago
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).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- truecomm 4y ago
  [flagged]
branon 4y ago
Do you know many underage girls with fox ears?
smcleod 4y ago
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.
dgellow 4y ago
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/ https://xn--931a.moe/
truecomm 4y ago
It is creepy. One aspect of the fediverse that isn't discussed enough is that it's full of pedophiles hiding in plain sight.
- omniglottal 4y ago
  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.

inawarminister 4y ago

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.

lf-non 4y ago
https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/ tracks various fediverse related projects.
lhl 4y ago
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/ https://akkoma.social/, a Pleroma fork over the Misskey variants): https://mostlyobvious.org/?link=/Reference%2FSoftware%2FFediverse%2FMigrating%20to%20Your%20Own%20Fediverse%20Instance#What_other_options_are_there 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/ https://gotosocial.org/ (written in Go of course), and Takahē https://jointakahe.org/ 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.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  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 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/21/0900
grishka 4y ago

hedgehog 4y ago

The docs explain what this is more clearly than the readme: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html Apparently the name is somehow derived from this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efrlqw8ytg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efrlqw8ytg4 Pretty strange, but also pretty much the sales pitch for ActivityPub interop.

aliqot 4y ago

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?

senectus1 4y ago
yeah that mascot is going to drive away the eyes of a lot of westerners.
- coffeefirst 4y ago
  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.
- MuteXR 4y ago
  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.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Why does everything in 2020-> contain a monkey's paw?
- frozencell 4y ago
  HN is so 19th century British ^^ :s

Twisol 4y ago

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 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!)

tsuujin 4y ago

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.

dqv 4y ago
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/ https://ninenines.eu/
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
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.
- inawarminister 4y ago
  "do things that don't scale" :)
claudiawerner 4y ago
It's strange to assume that anime is for people who aren't middle agged men :)
pmontra 4y ago
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.

Alifatisk 4y ago

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