Firefish (@firefish)
info.firefish.dev
**Announcement: Firefish will enter maintenance mode** For those who have been supporting Firefish and me, I can’t thank you enough. But today, I have to make an announcement of my very difficult decision: As of today’s release, Firefish will enter maintenance mode and reach end-of-support at the end of the year. The main reasons for this are as follows. In February, Kainoa suddenly transferred the ownership of Firefish to me. This transition came without prior notice, which took me aback. I still wish Kainoa had consulted with me in advance. At that time, some people were already saying that “Firefish is coming back”, making it challenging to address the situation. Also, since there were several hundred active Firefish servers at that point, I could not suddenly discontinue the project, so I took over the project unwillingly. Over the past seven months, I have been maintaining Firefish alone. All other former maintainers have left, leaving me solely responsible for managing issues, reviewing merge requests, testing, and releasing new versions. This situation has had a significant impact on my personal life. Frankly speaking, there are numerous bugs and questionable logic in the current Firefish codebase. While I attempted to fix them, balancing this work with my personal life made it clear that it would take ages, and I’ve started thinking that I can’t manage this project in the long run. Additionally, vulnerabilities have been reported approximately once a month. Addressing vulnerabilities, communicating privately with reporters, and testing fixes have proven overwhelming and unsustainable. Moreover, a certain percentage of users have made insulting comments, which have severely affected my mental well-being and made me fearful of opening social media apps. I will do my best to refund the donations made to Firefish via OpenCollective, but that’s not guaranteed. `firefish.dev` and `info.firefish.dev` will remain operational until the end of February 2025, after which they will return a 410 Gone status. Server admins may downgrade Firefish to version `20240206`/`1.0.5-rc` and migrate to another *key variant, or may fork Firefish to maintain. Downgrade instructions: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish/-/blob/downgrade/docs/downgrade.md Thanks, naskya

Edit: Removed the photos due to lemmy crawler displaying the toot.

  • HarryEnglish
    22•3 months ago

    Damn shame, tbh. Out of all of them I really like the visuals and vibe of Firefish.

    • EighthLayerEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      Yeah it looked promising. Also a shame I never got to try it properly because it didn’t work for me from the start. Home timeline never loaded and errored out and I never got any kind of support response so gave up on it. Oh well.

      (Also, hi Harry in the wilds of Lemmy. 👋😂)

      • HarryEnglish
        3•3 months ago

        Yeah it had a pretty rough ride at the start but when it worked, it was really nice tbh.

        Also:

  • @RookiAEnglish
    18•3 months ago

    That was quick

    • zewmEnglish
      22•3 months ago

      Sounds like my ex.

      • @wreckedcarzzEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Gotta make the most of it, go back for seconds, thirds…

  • edricEnglish
    12•3 months ago

    Glad I held back from suggesting Firefish for my wife. I’ve been slowly trying to convince her to jump to the fediverse for microblogging and figured to have her try Firefish simply because it’s prettier than Mastodon. Guess it’s back to ol’ Mastodon.

        • @[email protected]English
          6•3 months ago

          Closer to Firefish would be Iceshrimp, a fork of Firefish started when the writing started to appear on the wall.

    • Aatube
      1•3 months ago

      Does anyone know if Mastodon have that “multiple frontends” thing Lemmy has?

      • @[email protected]English
        3•3 months ago

        There are some. Mastodon has a lot of garbagey nonsense, but they do at least have a proper API which will let you make a non-shit front end if you wanted.

          • @[email protected]English
            8•3 months ago

            Well, Lemmy’s front end talks to it’s back end via an API, which is pretty much how every web app of any scale works these days.

            There’s really not any particular difference between a monolithic app vs a seperate front end in terms of “all those API calls” since everything is basically calling APIs at this point, if they’re not made by complete incompetents. (In the case of Mastodon, though, I suppose complete incompetent is possible.)

          • XylightEnglish
            2•3 months ago

            photon doesn’t directly communicate with the backend, it’s not intended for that. but even then, lemmy-ui is almost entirely client side (for some reason) and it makes its calls to the API

        • Aatube
          0•3 months ago

          See what I said above. I don’t mean clients, I mean frontends.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•3 months ago

      Did the Misskey network not advise against e.g. EU people signing up because of legal reasons like GPDR? Anyway, Iceshrimp works very much as intended and has active development so that could be an alternative for some people (have no experience with Sharkey).

      • astro_ray
        5•3 months ago

        I think that was specifically for misskey.io because some western users were breaking some sort of law. I never quite figured out the details. Misskey.io still doesn’t let any IP from outside the China-Japan-Korea circle sign up. But there are some instances, that do, and some English language instances there as well.

        Also, misskey and the Japanese side of fedi, tend to tolerate “loli” content to a degree that other side doesn’t. My main account is on a misskey server and I love it.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•3 months ago

          I see. BTW, I never figured out the details either, but wanted to bring matters up anyway in case it still would be considered useful.

          • astro_ray
            4•3 months ago

            wanted to bring matters up anyway in case it still would be considered useful.

            Honestly, I think the issue is still relevant because many users coming to fedi, don’t get exposed to this kind of discussion. I wasn’t. I was bored with mastodon so looked around and found firefish. But my instance was shutting down. So I decided to just use the source of all the *key software, misskey and went to sign up for misskey.io but couldn’t. I had to search a lot to finally figure out the situation. Later, I joined a smaller instance, instead of the flagship instance. My server admin is amazing. They run an instance that also follows US specific laws as well despite being primarily Japanese server because there are a few english users.

            What I learned all of these is that, mastodon is not fedi, there are a lot of software, look around before you settle down. And instances with small number of users form a better community. So, you don’t have to choose the largest instance out there.

            • I am not using misskey because I like loli stuff. I should’ve worded it better. I love my instance because our admin runs a great server.
  • @macattackEnglish
    7•3 months ago

    RIP. Was on firefish a few months but saw the writing on the wall back then and jumped ship. In retrospect, probably the 3rd or 4th federated product I’ve been a user of that flamed out. WATTBA

    • foxymulderEnglish
      5•3 months ago

      weird, ive never seen that acronym before to my knowledge, and yet still knew what it stood for. WATTBA!

  • Encrypt-KeeperEnglish
    4•3 months ago

    I tried Firefish but at no point in time did it ever actually work well. 85% of the content just wouldn’t load.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•3 months ago

      It did when it was still called Calckey, but around the time of the rebranding their main server got into issues (Kainoa, the previous maintainer, was messing around with it to improve performance but that just broke things).

  • astro_rayEnglish
    2•3 months ago

    I am especially sad because firefish was the first fedi project that I donated to. A lot of people had problems with firefish, but the server I was on was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, they server maintainers foresaw the demise of the software and decided to shut down early this year, on March.