mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

379K
active users

Today is the day I talk about what is and what it does. 🧵

In this thread, I will explore what I believe to be the most important features of Calckey.

SPOILER ALERT: While Calckey focuses on microblogging, that's where its similarities with (and ) end.

@fediversenews

Let's first take a look at what looks like in desktop mode.

As you can see, it's got a very media-rich presentation of a feed.

But there's also more!

On the right pane are some widgets. You can customize which widgets you see there. I opted to see trending hashtags and recent notifications.

On the left pane is the navbar. I'll get into that in a bit.

At the top are different feeds including home, local, social, recommended, global, lists, and antennaes.

Here's a look at in mobile mode.

The top displays different feeds.

The bottom has a navbar with a hamburger menu, home, notifications, chat, and widgets.

This can be installed as a progressive web app to your phone by "adding to Home screeen" when you visit a Calckey site.

So far, so good. You see 's timeline for microblogging.

Let's now look at notifications.

Notifications can be displayed for

* All
* Unread
* Mentions
* Direct mentions

You can also filter your notifications by:

* New followers
* Boosts
* Quotes
* Reactions
* And many more!

Here's a screenshot what the notification nav bar looks like in mobile mode.

The next prominent feature of is chat.

Now I can't show you this exactly because that's private 😉

However, what's important to know is that this is distinct from Mastodon DMs, it's isolated from the main feed, and there's no mistaking chats for status updates.

This looks like a chat app.

Yet another killer aspect of is the Explore section. This is for content discovery -- finding people ("Users") to follow and posts that are gaining traction ("Featured").

Let's focused on the Users aspect of Explore. It helps you find users according to:

* Pinned (a.k.a., recommended)
* Popular
* Recently Active
* Newly Joined Users

There's all sorts of people to follow through the Explore section of Calckey

The "Featured" portion of Explore shows the most popular posts divided into two options:

* Local: what's popular on your local server
* Remote: what's popular across the Fediverse

This is excellent for finding stuff that already has lots of conversation so you can join in.

In this post, you may have noticed lots of emoji reactions. Interestingly, some of these emojis are animated too.

To many people, this is the most compelling reason to use Calckey as this is a feature that's unsupported by Mastodon or Twitter.

Like Twitter and Mastodon, supports bookmarks. These are a private means to save posts to review at a later date.

Bookmarks are easily accessible through the navbar.

If you like Facebook Groups, has something similar. They are called "Channels".

Currently, they are localized to each Calckey server, but there are plans to federate them across the Fediverse.

Posts to channels (but not channels themselves) can be broadcast across the Fediverse.

This is one big difference between Calckey and Mastodon.

Here's a "Music Recommendations" channel on calckey.social.

Let's now talk about search on .

To be bluntly honest, Fediverse search needs a lot of work. I don't think one server software nails it yet.

However, unlike Mastodon, Calckey allows you to search across the Fediverse without need of hashtags (or for you to have interacted with the post previously).

This makes search a lot more extensible than on Mastodon.

Click this link to see it in action:

calckey.social/search?q=notifi

Also see screenshot.

This is another massive difference between and Mastodon.

Calckey has a Drive!

That's right, a cloud storage feature! You can store whatever you want there: photos, music, documents, Zip files, etc.

Who needs Dropbox or Onedrive when you have Calckey?

As you can see in this screenshot, I'm storing diverse media.

Pages! That's another big difference between and Mastodon.

That's right, anyone can make a webpage using Calckey. This page does formats text, embeds images, and allows you to express yourself as you choose.

Here's an example of a Calckey page made by @youronlyone:

calckey.social/@youronlyone/pa

Also see screenshot.

Galleries is another key feature.

Calckey allows you to add, curate, and write a description of user-made collection of images.

Here's an example of one person's gallery:

calckey.social/gallery/9e32jx7

See screenshot of this gallery.

There's lots of other features that has:

* Antennas
* Clips
* Comment trees
* Misskey Flavoured Markdown (MFM)
* Local-only posting
* Deck layout

Really, there's too much to list -- and if I tried, I'd be here all day.

But really, the only way to understand is to give it a shot.

If Calckey intrigues you, go ahead and try it yourself.

@atomicpoet I would love to hear what Antennas and Clips are. I made a calckey.social account a week or so ago and was surprised to see stuff that didn't tell you what it does. Felt a bit like logging into the AWS dashboard and seeing stuff like "Route 53" instead of "DNS."

@nyquildotorg No question, there's a lot of documentation that still needs to happen with Calckey.

@Chris Trottier @Jer Warren #CalcKey is getting more and more similar to #Hubzilla, down to the documentation that leaves a lot to be desired. Seriously, Hubzilla has stuff mentioned in the user manual that has been removed years ago.

Only that Hubzilla has even more features, a much worse GUI (improvement is being worked on) and no working mobile app whatsoever because Nomad has been dead for so long that it doesn't even work with today's Hubzilla anymore.
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla