While we are named after a volcano, we are better than the Birdsite and BlueSky.
Well, it’s finally September. After a month of chaos in July due to a certain Birdsite, things are settling down, but of course, there are a few instance updates.
Mastodon developers officially announce that full-text search for public toots is finally coming in the 4.2.0 release of Mastodon. There is a big difference as compared to Firefish and Akkoma implementations, it will only apply to public toots and you have to opt into it. Once this feature becomes available in 4.2.0 Beta 3 and Sakurajima …
Believe it or not, we created a 2 minute promo/skit promoting our server. I thought it will be fun way to try to promote our server and well, point out the issues Twitter/X is having lately. Feel free to share this video with your friends. As always, we do have videos helping users learn the …
We have decided that the old guides we made on the whim when the first wave of X users (nee Twitter) came in November of last year. Now the information is outdated since Mastodon went through many changes over the previous 10 months. Also, we aren’t running vanilla Mastodon anymore, meaning there will be differences in features. …
As July ends, Sakurajima has grown considerably ever since Elon made a lot of damaging moves on Twitter, now known as 𝕏. Believe it or not, as of today, our Mastodon server has 421 monthly active users, and our Firefish (formerly Calckey) server has 88. This brings the total to 509 monthly active users across …
It’s finally July, and it’s time to share a monthly update on the state of our instance. As expected, Sakurajima has grown quite a bit, thanks to its inclusion in JoinMastodon, coinciding with the fiasco at Reddit and Twitter being a bad place in general. You have noticed that our local timelines are getting busier, …
It seems that centralized platforms are facing an enshittification problem lately. It’s because of funds drying up or the platform’s management baking anti-consumer decision such as overpricing their API or allowing hate speech on their platform. While I wrote a long writeup on trying to convince Twitter users to switch to Mastodon, especially our instances at …
After much thinking, I think it was best to create another instance to make it easier for people on the fence about moving from Twitter to Mastodon to have an alternative. Some of the reasons why some might not move over from the birdsite to Mastodon is because they find it intimidating. We have a …
It’s been a while since I provided an instance update since a lot has happened. After our instance and our friends at Urusai social got attacked by alt-right trolls, I have to beef of moderation. We have some volunteers come up and help me with the moderation. The moderation team can be seen on the …
With that, I want to briefly summarize what happened in the past week. Yes, mistakes were made, and I unintentionally put a target on my back. However, moderation is new as it wasn’t put up to the test now. I never moderated a community before, so there are going to be some mistakes made. I …
Welcome to March, here are some updates. Server Cost Increases Just recently, I received an email stating that the server cost will increase by 20% because of inflation, but it’s more of we just Akamai wants to make more money. With that, we calculated that our monthly costs will be $37 a month. Here is …
Basically, this is the moment everyone is waiting for. Besides Mastodon 4.1.0 coming out, which brings a bunch of new features, but also we are now using neatchee’s fork of Mastodon Glitch, which he uses for urusai.social and most of the original work done by fef1312 in this pull request. Note that since we are finally …
It’s been a while since we made an update. I have posted on my main blog about the impacts of the Third Party API shutting down for free users unless you pay up. If you know anyone that creates Japanese-media-centric content or is an Anime Blogger, point them to our instance. We cater to Anime Bloggers and …
A few weeks back, I have discovered Elk, which is a new Mastodon Client that resembles the Twitter interface. One of the reasons why people are reluctant to join Mastodon because it looks too hard. Elk solves this by giving an interface that looks like Twitter, so users can be at home when they move …
With Mastodon and the Fediverse growing, we decided to expand our offerings in our ecosystems of apps. With that, we have set up a Pixelfed instance focusing on Anime, Manga, video games, and Japanese culture. This instance is named Usuzakuraya (薄桜屋）. 薄桜 means cherry blossom in a faint color, and 屋 means shop. What is …
With Twitter being a sinking ship, you have heard about Mastodon and the Fediverse as alternatives. I knew that it won’t go well when Elon Musk bought Twitter. That is why I created Sakurajima. Why Sakurajima if you are an Anime Blogger or Creator who Reviews Japanese Media? Back in the late 2000s and 2010s, …
I hope everyone is having a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I have been hard at work resolving the email issues Outlook and Office 365 users are having. Apparently, I did not configure Postfix correctly, thus some users weren’t getting verification emails. Setting OpenDKIM manually was a pain, so I nuked the current Postfix install …
With the Twitter Migration underway, we have finally decided to resize the server to support a new influx of users who might join our instance. While Twitter has reversed it’s policy, people are coming to a realization that the erratic behavior from Elon Musk who control the platform and looking for alternatives like Mastodon. Remember, …
We have been working a bit overtime since a new spurt of people joined Mastodon. So with that, we rolled out some more features. Besides bringing tutorials to set up AutoShare of blog posts and making our quick start guide available in blog form, is some UI enhancements. We have finally implemented the Modern Mastodon …
With Space Karen literally dumping petrol on Twitter and literally set the place on fire, you have moved to Mastodon, a new social network you are hearing about. However, you don’t know how to use it, although it looks familiar. This post will tech you the basics of using Mastodon.
So, you just moved to Mastodon, but have no idea how to auto-share your new blog posts to Mastodon. There are currently two methods to do this. If you are hosting WordPress on your own server, Mastodon Auto Post is the best option. A toot with a link to your blog posts is done instantly …
It’s been a while since I made an update regarding the changes over the past two weeks. First, we added a new theme called Gekka. More themes are coming down in the pipeline in the future, but this is an alternative to the Sakura theme. You can change the theme on Mastodon in the user’s …
First off, we finally deployed our new theme, which is Sakura themed. As expected, you can revert back to the regular Mastodon themes by going into Flavours and selecting a new theme. If you want the regular Mastodon experience, click Flavours, Vanilla Mastodon and select any theme and click “Use This.” It’s almost a month …
Sakurajima is now running Mastodon Glitch, which is a more experimental version fork of Mastodon, which allows for more features. Note that you can revert back to vanilla Mastodon in the user preferences. For most users, Glitch-Soc should look the same as vanilla Mastodon.I plan to have an updated guide covering the Glitch SOC interface …
