Just a headsup for any server admins running Firefish, apparently it is no longer being maintained. One of the core developers of Firefish has written about the situation in the link provided.
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Not to downplay all the blood, sweat, and tears that have been shed while making the fediverse work, but if I may offer some unsolicited advice to the author of the linked post: Publicly airing out a team’s dirty laundry tends to be… counter-productive. Usually it’s best to “keep it in the family.”
In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now. The author of this post could have just said “hey all, we apologize for the inconvenience, but the original project appears to be abandoned, so we’ve forked the project with the intention of patching some of the known issues and adding some new features.” (insert GH link here)
Although the original project dies, this new project is born, and who knows—the original project’s owner might even show up again someday and start making meaningful contributions to the new project (or not).
I say all this without knowing the full history of this project, and I don’t mean to downplay the author’s frustration, just my two cents.
All of that said, in my mind this situation makes for an interesting case study on the pros and cons of different ownership structures for public/open projects.
In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now.
I had a quick look at the repository and the last commit was three weeks ago: https://git.joinfirefish.org/firefish/firefish/-/commit/db604b8f466e826fd8c93d3519898c8ab236a2ed
Freaking out over three weeks of silence during Christmas season is so weird.
I’m fairly certain they’re a college student also.
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Usually I would agree but in this case it’s important to provide context for people using the platform. According to the post Firefish’s admin practically abandoned it for months now and was radio silent and now hasn’t replied to the core team in over a week, someone had to say what’s going on.
Everyone knows how hard managing these things are, and it’s often a thankless job, but this sadly seems like another example of someone taking on a leadership role then bailing for whatever reason. The owner should’ve let someone else handle firefish.social if they didn’t have the time.
I’d like to add from a user’s point of view. Firefish.social was advertised as the flagship instance and in the beginning everything was fine and nice on there but then they started to implement new stuff and this broke something leading to the flagship instance being down or unusable for most of the time. Days turned into weeks with the server not running or at least not without problems (only talking about timelines, not to mention other features like antennae or lists which wouldn’t work at all) without any communication from the admins and no replies to direct inquiries. I eventually moved to another instance running a stable firefish version. But our admin also complains about being ignored by the dev team, so they decided we will be moving to Sharkey. And we all know that Kainoa is young, started uni last year and a new job - that’s all fine and understandable but maybe not compatible with running such a big project. Which again is fine but also means that -for now- the project is not being worked on while in a broken state. I think this is valuable information for users and admins and it was good to hear this from someone in the core team.
Open source devs being in a parasocial relationship with their projects uwu
this seems to be a trend playing out.
i hope instances can come up with a more standardized methods of control that dont leave all the keys in a single humans hands. we know how unstable humans are.
i hope instances can come up with a more standardized methods of control that dont leave all the keys in a single humans hands
Yeah like we could have a shared legal entity, say a corporation, controlling the servers 🤔 And they could instead of a single decisionmaker have a board. 🤔
Jokes aside, wouldn’t this go against the federated idea? anyone can go and roll their own instance. Or take it down. Control is in the user’s (of the software, that is, the instance owners) hands!
i did seem to conflate the software with the instance… but then, so do a lot of developers it seems.
its not that hard to have a small group of people instead of a single human manage a project. mbin is a community fork of kbin for these reasons.
Another example of this is what happened with KeePass, then KeePassX, which gave us KeePassXC. Went from single Dev to single Dev to group of devs that were serious about the ecosystem.
Yeah like we could have a shared legal entity, say a corporation,
You mispelt coöperative.
Even at its smallest form, a federated instance hosting a community likely needs more than one person acting as admin and mod. It may not be a for profit corporation, but there needs to be some kind of collective organization.
blahaj.zone moved to ice-shrimp too but honestly calckey/firefish (HATE the name) always left a bad taste in my mouth.
i’ve always loved misskey above all else.
We partly moved to ice shrimp, but it was quite divergent from Hajkey, and after being burnt by our Calckey experience, we lost a lot of momentum and energy, so it’s sort of sat there in a mostly working state, not ice shrimp and not Hajkey for a while now.
Once we’re both back from South America though, we’ll do a migration to Sharkey (a direct soft fork of Misskey). After that, Kaity will look at gradually adding our Hajkey specific features directly in to Sharkey where possibly.
ice shrimp, Hajkey, Calckey, Sharkey
Wait, what? How is anybody supposed to keep up with so many forks? Why does everyone and their mom rather make their own fork than to work together? What’s even the problem with Misskey to begin with?
How is anybody supposed to keep up with so many forks?
It’s like eating at a fancy restaurant up in here.
Just wait until you hear about the number of Linux distros 😛
Most are just repackagings of Debian and Ubuntu, not actual forks.
You’re not. The only people who need to know are instance admins choosing what platform to run. If you’re not an admin you can deep dive as much or as little as you like in to the differences between the forks!
Why does everyone and their mom rather make their own fork than to work together?
It’s both of those things. This stuff is all open source. For our fork, Hajkey for example, we added the stuff that we wanted that wasn’t anywhere else. We’d also submit our changes to Calckey (which would later rename to Firefish due to a name clash) if the Calckey team wanted them. Some they did (like translation, post editing etc) and some they didn’t (such as our timeline filters).
So we were doing our own thing and working together.
Sharkey does the same thing, but they feed back in to Misskey.
And as a user, if that’s too much to bother with, well, most of the differences are minor and you can just ignore it all, and pick your preferred instance for other reasons
The only people who need to know are instance admins choosing what platform to run.
And how are admins supposed to know which the week’s hottest fork is? If I google for Sharkey, the results I get are people with that Irish surname, most notably Feargal Sharkey. When I google for Hajkey, https://git.hajkey.org/hajkey comes up which doesn’t even open in a web browser (perhaps the web server is down and now only a git client can access it, no idea and how would I get an idea about that…). Googling for Ice Shrimp mostly results in recipes and photos on shrimp on crushed ice.
I start to understand why everyone rather makes a new fork: Because nobody knows of other projects to contribute to.
Admins know which forks are which and what benefit they bring because they’re active in spaces talking about this stuff, and often talking to other admins.
A first time admin with no real Fediverse experience won’t end up running any of those forks.
Admins know which forks are which
Sure…
My apologies. I incorrectly assumed you were involved in this conversation in good faith, rather than looking for an axe to grind.
ooh yess thank you i didn’t mean to imply i was in charge or anything i was just reading from the announcement :3
Hah, no stress. That’s not how I read your comment. I was just taking the chance to expand on it :)
Damn, that repository and its forks really know how to crash and burn. I’m glad to see it’s being given more life with another fork. That said, with a name like Catodon, I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be a resounding success 🥺
with a name like Catodon, I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be a resounding success
Pfft, are you kidding me?? I’ll take the other side of that bet any day!
Just incase, we should probably start workshopping some similar names for the next forks.
Batodon, Ratodon, um Gatordon
Long live IceShrimp!
Was on it for a few months but jumped ship after bugs went unfixed. Can’t fault the owner personally. It’s a stressful, thankless job. Hope he finds happiness in 2024
The power of opensource.
…is that it can be picked up and continued by anyone rather than lost forever, right?
I’d rather go back to the 90s! The good old times, when devs can lose all that commercial software source code they are developing when the hard drive crashes! And there were no backups! Sorry people who bought licenses! 😂
Narrator: this happened more than once.
Is there a list I wanna know
MajorMUD is the only one off the top of my head.
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Oh wow. And I was suggesting Firefish to my wife to get her off twitter because it looked “fancier” than Mastodon. Glad she hasn’t switched over yet, and I’ll probably just get her on Mastodon instead. I wish catodon success though, and I hope it’s a better replacement for Firefish.
Mastodon is like the boring solid mainstay that will always be there and keep the fediverse alive. There are tons of other fedi projects that are more exciting, but they burst into flames way too often for my taste lol
There’s Sharkey, which is also a fork of Misskey like Firefish
@postwatchbot@lemy.lol
