Misskey () is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, federated,

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, ac ...

created in 2014 by Japanese software engineer Eiji "syuilo" Shinoda. Misskey uses the

ActivityPub ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for d ...

protocol for federation, allowing users to interact between independent Misskey instances, and other ActivityPub compatible platforms. Misskey is generally considered to be part of the

Fediverse The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, whi ...

. Despite being a decentralized service, Misskey is not philosophically opposed to centralization. The name Misskey comes from the lyrics of Brain Diver, a song by the Japanese singer

May'n , better known by her stage name , is a Japanese singer from Nagoya. Aspiring to become a musician since childhood, she began her music activities in 2003 upon passing an audition held by talent agency Horipro International. She made her major d ...

History

Misskey was initially developed as a BBS-style

internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...

by high school student Eiji Shinoda in 2014. After introducing a timeline feature, Misskey gained popularity as the microblogging platform it is today. In 2018, Misskey added support for

, becoming a federated social media platform. The flagship Misskey server, Misskey.io, was started on April 15, 2019. Misskey, alongside

Mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of th ...

and

Bluesky Blue Sky, BlueSky or Bluesky may refer to: Places *Blue Sky, Colorado, U.S. *Bluesky, Alberta, Canada Science *Blue skies research (also called blue sky science), scientific research in domains where "real-world" applications are not immediatel ...

, has received attention as a potential replacement for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

following Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. On April 8, 2023, Misskey.io incorporated as MisskeyHQ K.K. As of February 2024, over 450,000 users were registered, making it the largest instance of Misskey. Misskey.io is

crowdfunded Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

. The administrator of Misskey.io is Japanese system administrator Yoshiki Eto, who operates under the alias Murakami-san. Eiji Shinoda serves as director. In July 2023, Twitter introduced extreme restrictions on their

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

in order to combat scraping from bots. Some users were critical of the changes, and as a result migrated to other social networks. The number of users registering on Misskey.io, Misskey's official instance and the largest one, increased rapidly, with other Misskey instances also receiving a spike in signups. In response to this trend, Skeb, a platform for sharing art, announced on July 14, 2023 that it would sponsor the Misskey development team. In early 2024, Misskey was targeted by a spam attack from Japan. The cause of the attack is believed to be a dispute between rival groups on a Japanese hacker forum and a

DDoS attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connec ...

on a

Discord Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers".The developer documenta ...

bot. Mastodon instances with open registration were used in the attack.

Development

Misskey is open source software and is licensed under the

AGPLv3 The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU General Public License, version 3 and the Affero General Public License. The Free Sof ...

. The Misskey API is publicly available and is documented using the

OpenAPI Specification The OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for a machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing RESTful web services. Previously part of the Sw ...

, which allows users to build automated accounts and use it on any Misskey instance. The service is translated using

Crowdin Crowdin is a proprietary, cloud-based localization technology and services company. It provides software as a service for commercial products, and it provides software free of charge for non-commercial open source projects, and educational project ...

. Misskey is developed using

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

TypeScript TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. It is designed for the development of large appl ...

is used on both the frontend and backend.

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

is used as its database.

Vue.js Vue.js (commonly referred to as Vue; pronounced "view") is an open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications. It was created by Evan You, and is maintained by him a ...

is used for the frontend.

Functionality

Posts on Misskey are called "notes". Notes are limited to a maximum of 3,000 characters (a limit which can be customized by instances), and can be accompanied by any file, including polls, images, videos, and audio. Notes can be reposted, either by themselves or with another "quote" note. Misskey comes with multiple timelines to sort through the notes that an instance has available, and are displayed in reverse chronological order. The Home timeline shows notes from users that you follow, the Local timeline shows all notes from the instance in use, the Social timeline shows both the Home and Local timeline, and the Global timeline shows every public note that the instance knows about. Notes have customizable privacy settings to control what users can see a note, similar to

's post visibility ranges. Public notes show up on all timelines, while Home notes only show on a user's Home timeline. Notes can also be set to be available only for followers. Direct messages using notes can be sent to users.

References and notes

External links

* {{Microblogging 2014 software Software that federates via ActivityPub Free and open-source software Free software programmed in TypeScript Free software websites Microblogging software Social media Social networking services Web applications

History

Development

Functionality

See also

References and notes

External links