It's more than two years I have been here, maybe almost three.

This is the actual beginning of me in the fediverse though I did not realize it then. Someone invited me to hitorino, a then-functioning Mastodon server. And they suggested an app to me, maybe it's Pawoo or something, but I cannot remember. No one told me anything about the fediverse, not even Mastodon. They just gave me a link, and that's it. So I just registered, and that's it.

It was the end of 2020 I remember. I was browsing through some old archives on #archlinux-cn. There were many interesting people, including those I've been known for a decade or so. Some got a blog, and they put their link to their Mastodon account on it. I followed that link, and got (re-)introduced to that little simple interface. "Oh, it's a microblog." I was like. I was already using Matrix for a long time, and my feeling was, "So I can self-host this as well?" So I did, and that was https://t.tusooa.xyz . I began posting poems, posting some daily life, and it turns out that I have already been interacting with those who later became my lovers.

Good life was short. I got burned out by my internship. Covid was there. I wasn't able to see my girlfriend. I tried to participate in discussions peacefully, there were always people who spread hatred, discrimination, and especially transphobia. Since the beginning, I tried to give constructive feedback, but those just won't listen and will just violently push you back against a rock. And the more I use Mastodon, the more I feel it was really uncustomizable. The text limit can't be changed without changing the code. The requirement for email upon registration is constantly bothering me because it is inherently unnecessary information collected against users' privacy, and Eugen refused to make it optional. I never actually opened up registration on the server.

It was no surprise I began searching for alternative microblogging software. And somehow I found out about Pleroma. It looks so nice, so customizable, and is so friendly towards those who do not register (Mastodon requires you to register to perform most read-only actions). Immediately I was amazed about that. Only one thing though: Mastodon allows you to take all ("conditions apply"!) your followers with you when you jump ships. Pleroma had no such feature. The good side was, I found out about one merge request on their GitLab, which allows you to move from Mastodon to Pleroma, by adding an alias referring the old account to the new account. I was never thinking of going back, so that was enough for me. I looked at it and that gave me hope of using some other software than Mastodon. But after a month or so, there was literally no progress on that MR, so I decided to shout out in the dev channel and ask what was going on. One of them, maybe rinpatch, told me that if no one cared about it then it was probably going to be ignored, and suggested that I comment on the MR. I ended up testing it and reported my results -- initially it did not work. It went the wrong way as the original method added it to the WebFinger profile, but Mastodon expects the alias in the Actor object. After the problem was fixed, I was able to open up a Pleroma server for my own use.

And that was the beginning of kazv.moe, somewhere April in 2021. It started out as a tiny little server. I invited my girlfriend and some friends there. Some people who I have known when I was on Mastodon registered alt accounts on it. Even though registration was completely open without any verification, there was not a lot of people.

As time goes, I feel that I want more features for Pleroma. First of all, I want account migration to fully work. A lot of people are posting really long images and I could not zoom in conveniently. I really liked Misskey's tree-style thread display and nice mention links. The emoji picker was a disaster to use because it was really slow to load, and everything was mixed together, there being only two groups: "custom" and "unicode," effectively making emoji packs useless.

So I started to write code, for the features I want, and deployed them to kazv.moe . At the beginning, I just touched the frontend. It was relatively easy. It's JavaScript, and I knew JavaScript since 2017, when I joined Rikumi's project and started writing server-side JavaScript. It took me some time to figure out how Vue works, but since I knew React, it wasn't that much of a problem. Then, suica asked me why search on Pleroma was broken. And debula found out the cause of it. To fix that took me a couple of hours -- that was the first time I touched Pleroma's backend code. I was never exposed to any Elixir or Erlang before, and all I read was Elixir's official tutorial. I did not get to read the OTP part -- it could have saved a huge part of my time if I did, because I did not know how to run individual test cases and wasted a lot of time on running the whole coveralls process.

And so I continued adding new features: grouped emoji picker, remote interaction, misskeyish mention links, confirmation dialogs, account migration, translations for backend-rendered pages, server announcements, editing. Those are all things wanted by people, and they really love to see it. However, Pleroma at that time was on the verge of collapsing: AG was using his power to push all his changes into Pleroma in any way he could, while caring little if nothing about other people's work and especially Pleroma-FE, as Soapbox was the frontend of his legacy. There were not a lot of people who can review my code, so it got stuck in the process for a very long time. My very first MR took half a year to get merged.

In the meantime, hj organized a meeting for Pleroma developers and users to reunionize the community and rethink about the next steps. AG was stripped off the maintainer title, and later got kicked out. He then became really abusive on the fediverse, calling names towards me and Hélène, the other girl at that time on our team. I wonder whether it is due to this that she ended up quitting developing Pleroma. I ended up banned both of his instance from kazv.moe . Reflecting on that, I would say, "A self-claimed feminist, and all he does is... harassing women? What a shame?" By the end of the year of 2022, I was named a new maintainer through the consensus of the current devs on the IRC channel. And we released 2.5.0, the one with many of the long-longed features I wrote. The Akkoma folks forked away from us and advertised their software with the features I wrote, claiming credits just because they released earlier than us. I really can't say I like how this works.

From here on there might be depiction of sex. You have been warned.

That's not as much dramatic as the Pleroma drama, no? I still posted my poems (2021 was the year when I wrote the most poems till then). I occasionally posted the food I cooked, and I posted my political viewpoints. Definitely a lot of people hate me for my views, but I do not care any more. I created an alt account for more intimate relationships, and I started to flirt with Reiki. We used paired avatars, expressed our feelings to each other, and maybe after half a year, I asked them to be my girlfriend. They agreed. Since that time I realized I was not a "pure lesbian" but rather can be attracted to non-binary people as well, which is a type of Bi+. I use the term yuri to represent my sexual orientation now. And later I got to be girlfriends with two other cute people.

After covid I have been able to see Saya more often, but only during my school breaks. She masturbated me and I think that counts as sex. I hate it that I have to cross the border. At school it's still busy, and I have encountered a couple of small problems, but luckily they were resolved promptly.

Revealing my political views isn't necessarily a bad thing right? Someone came to kazv.moe because she love my views, and I ended up having a crush on her. Unfortunately she doesn't love me back so we are just being friends and sisters. I guess that's the bitterness of life, huh. (Oh have I told you that she now has a Pleroma instance with the exact same setup as mine?) I finally actually used my Funkwhale, and please, look forward to our new song, ok?