Trying to follow everything is, as always, tricky without the ability to really search for stuff on Mastodon.

1. Calckey, which was a fork of Misskey, rebranded as “Firefish” (for which name choice they have been widely mocked; also there’s already a software company under that name in the UK with a trademark, which could be…interesting)
2. This also I think was meant to be the start of a push for more popular adoption of the platform, which has just generally led to a lot of buzz and attention
3. Apparently for some days the code was hosted on a far-right git host, which the main developer says they didn’t know at the time; they eventually moved it somewhere else but didn’t openly address the issue until later
4. Folks also noticed that the dev was boosting posts by someone with a reputation for being problematic/racist
5. .art admin removed the dev from a discord channel where instance admins share safety info, and says that subsequently the dev started circulating a fabricated screenshot regarding this.

Also, that is all coming a couple of days after someone who had previously contributed to calckey forked firefish as iceshrimp (lol) citing being erased from the list of contributors I think and also saying that other folks were leaving that community because of toxicity/safety issues that weren’t really elaborated on in what I saw. I don’t have a link for this because it didn’t happen today and you can’t search for things on Mastodon. My sense at the time was that I had basically no way to evaluate the claims made on either side.