Let's first take a look at what #Calckey 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 #Calckey 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 #Calckey'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 #Calckey 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 #Calckey 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 #Calckey 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, #Calckey 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, #Calckey 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 https://calckey.social.
Let's now talk about search on #Calckey.
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:
https://calckey.social/search?q=notifications
Also see screenshot.
This is another massive difference between #Calckey 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 #Calckey 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:
https://calckey.social/@youronlyone/pages/calckey-faq
Also see screenshot.
Galleries is another key #Calckey 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:
https://calckey.social/gallery/9e32jx7lu9
See screenshot of this gallery.
There's lots of other features that #Calckey 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 #Calckey 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@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social Antennas are basically filters that only show posts matching certain criteria.
You could for example have an antenna that only contains posts from instance x containing word y.
@privateger @atomicpoet So it's essentially a search whose results dump into your timeline?
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social It's more a seperate timeline entirely, you can select an antenna and it shows up as a seperate feed to scroll through.
Very handy to use.
@privateger @atomicpoet oh, interesting. So it sounds like it's essentially a "saved search" then. Thank you very much for explaining
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social That's a good way to put it. It can also notify you of new posts appearing on that saved search.
@privateger
That sounds like it could work like the pinned searches in #Fedilab, but implemented on the server side instead of the client. I will have to explore that!
@atomicpoet @nyquildotorg
@nyquildotorg No question, there's a lot of documentation that still needs to happen with Calckey.
@atomicpoet @nyquildotorg Any experienced writers who would like to volunteer for the Calckey documentation team, that project is about to get better organized. We could use you. Please DM Chris or me.
@shoq @atomicpoet @nyquildotorg Indeed - I've been playing around on it a bunch more lately, and liking it a lot - the biggest complaint that I have now is that everything I've figured out how to do there has been trial/error
I'd offer to help w/ documentation, but for the facts that I 1) don't know what I'm doing, and 2) don't know how to write good
@shoq@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social @nyquildotorg@mastodon.social
You forgot one important feature, which is that you can also use Calckey in columns similar to Tweetdeck. All columns are freely configurable and so you have a very good overview of important content.
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.
@jupiter_rowland @nyquildotorg You're right about that. When I've come to #Calckey, I realize that there's so much that need explaining.
#Misskey Hub has some documentation, and that helps. But now that #Calckey has diverged, it needs to do the same.
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social
Antennas are keyword alerts, basically. Like subscribing to hashtags in Mastodon, only for any old word you want.
I've been using Calckey for like 5 months now, and I still don't know what a clip is...
@atomicpoet@mastodon.social
@kichae@kitchenparty.online @nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social Clips are for collecting multiple posts! Like if you see 5 posts about a specific topic you want to save for later, you can put them into a clip instead of clogging up your regular bookmarks. Clips can also be shared with other people!
@kainoa @atomicpoet @kichae Oh, cool. Sort of like the old Twitter Moments then. Thank you for explaining!
@kainoa @atomicpoet @kichae oh, except, unlike Twitter moments, you can make a clip full of other people's posts? Thats neat. (Has there been any abuse of this? I could see how that could be abused.)
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social @kichae@kitchenparty.online I don't think it can be abused too much, since it basically has the same capabilities of making a Google doc shared publicly with mulitple links of other people's tweets... just in a far nicer package.
@kainoa @atomicpoet @kichae So "sharing" them doesn't involve pushing it out to all the people that follow you then? (which you could obviously do with a spreadsheet link anyway.)
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social @kichae@kitchenparty.online No, it doesn't notify people. It just makes the link to your clip public.
@kainoa @atomicpoet @kichae do you happen to have one I can see? I'm having trouble grokking the concept
@kainoa @atomicpoet @kichae thank you! I get it now. There *is* potential for abuse if I was like "here's a Clip full of people giving bad opinions, tell them about how bad their opinions are!" and push the link to all my followers, but it would be up to them to actually visit the link and see the opinions I'm claiming are bad. So, much less bad than what the anti-Boost people are worried about.
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social
One of the things about the Fediverse is that most of us here are pretty engaged in multiple communication channels, and there are a of regional or interest based communities all over.
For people who kind of gravitated to a single centralized social media platform as their go-to, things like quotes or something like this probably could be used to make it easier to target or harass someone, because the harassers are really only on Twitter. But here, they're also on Discord. Or Matrix. Or TeamSpeak. Or Telegram. Or...
So, if they want to target someone, they do it as a community, not as a bunch of followers of some person.
Maybe this changes as more people continue to show up. But also, maybe all of those people get pulled into catty little Discords.
The important thing for harassment here, though, is that there's a lot of active moderation. Twitter doesn't have that. Twitter's business model kind of precludes doing it. But here, we have every reason to block bad actors and kick them to the curb.
@kainoa@calckey.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social
@kichae @atomicpoet @kainoa That is a very valid point, but I don't think it negates the need to at least think about how abuse can happen here. Just because people do use other channels to coordinate brigading doesn't mean it should just be free-for-all here.
To use a terrible metaphor, it's like how you still lock your front door even though real crooks are just going to use a bump-key to unlock it. Nobody says "welp, no point in locking the door then..."
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social
Oh, totally. Impact to vulnerable people and the potential for abuse should always be considered. It's just that people have a habit of attributing blame to assault vectors they've experienced, and the experience often looks very different at the time of receipt.
Really, I spent a lot of words holding back my point, though: We have a neighbourhood watch that'll try and protect your house, even as the robbers lurk in the shadows, which is not something most social media users today have actually ever lived with before.
@atomicpoet@mastodon.social @kainoa@calckey.social
@kainoa@calckey.social
Well, I know what I'm using a lot of from now on.
@nyquildotorg@mastodon.social @atomicpoet@mastodon.social