Conversation

A few people have asked us now about the future of Hajkey, given the recent changes with Calckey becoming Firefish and the Iceshrimp fork of that. So I thought I'd make a post, now that I can type again and let you know where we're at.

I have been taking a small break from adding new features to Hajkey recently because my left arm has basically been useless for the last month after breaking it, but I'm now able to partially touch type again, and my arm is incrementally better each day.

However my reticence with writing new code has been going on for a bit longer than that.

I was in a dev chat room with a few devs, trying to pursuade that the safety of a minority group is paramount whilst trying to justify the addition of a new safety feature. I was tyring to make the point that a feature which may initially confuse some people is worth it if we protect just one minority person. I also tried (without luck) to address the (valid) concerns about how to implement the feature with minimal potential for confusion.

However, I feel like while the majority of minority people present in the room agreed, my point was ultimately worn down and overruled by a single person who I feel didn't understand what such a feature would mean for the safety of those needing protection.

I am ashamed to say that I felt a lot of disempowerment and lost a lot of forward momentum when that happened, questioning my own compass which said that I should push ahead, but pushing ahead without an implementation in other instances would make my new feature a non-starter.

I don't see a lot of diverse fediverse projects around which focus on security features to protect the vulnerable or that have dev leads that have experience with existing in a society with a greatly diminished privileged status. This means that they are not as concious of the features that are important to us and other underprivileged or minority groups.

I am proud to run one myself, and as a female and transgender person (and whilst acknowedging my own significant privilege), I think that gives me somewhat of a unique and valuable perspective, so it excites me to see that there's a new project (Iceshrimp) starting, focussing more on security and safety and less on flashy new sparkles and bling. I feel like this will ultimately be a good thing for the fediverse.

In the FOSS world, diversity is, like in the real world, a fantastic thing. It drives innovation, allows greater choice, avoids stagnation, vendor siloing, narrow minded thinking and generally inproves the overall health of the entire ecosystem.

So I congratulate @april@donotsta.re on their new project. I'm looking forward to great things from Firefish and Iceshrimp, both of which are rich with diverse developers. While Firefish can focus on the flashy usability and experience tack, Iceshrimp can help fill the sorely needed safety aspects. The good features from both will help improve the quality of experience and ultimately our end users will benefit.

As far as Hajkey is concerned, we'll still be our own fork, still doing our own little thing, but we will be directly downstream of Iceshrimp and will be pushing our changes back upstream to the 'shrimp.

We made this choice as we feel that this project more closely aligns with our overall goals and has less focus on the commercial/sponsorship side of things which we are uncomfortable with. Also this way the trademark issue (while not a blocker for us) is something we don't have to worry about biting us in the future.

We're also not planning a name change at this point. We like Hajkey as a name and don't currently see a compelling reason to change that.