I absolutely love Firefish as a platform. They’ve made something really special. The name Firefish is awful though. I hope they take everyone’s feedback and rebrand again (though I’m sure that’s a massive undertaking)
Someone checked and there’s already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.
I don’t like it. I did sign up for an instance though just to poke around. Seems nice! Not sure if I’ll use it over Lemmy / Mastodon combo though. My attention can only go so many directions.
Imo more people would use them if they were called something clearer. Saved search. Custom timeline or feed. Something like that. But yeah they are awesome
Firefish née Calckey is a microblogging platform like Mastodon, but that’s about all it has in common. Firefish has extra features like emoji reactions (like Facebook’s, but you can use any emoji, including custom emoji), quote posts, and better support for deep threads (it displays replies in a tree view like Lemmy or Kbin, unlike Mastodon which tries to linearize them and makes them a confusing mess). it also supports text formatting like bold, italics, headings, custom link text, and even animations (don’t worry, they don’t autoplay). it’s even themable, and supports migrating posts from other accounts so you don’t have to start over!
The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.
(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)
What’s the reasonable extent of their trade mark? Anything involving “Fire” + “animal” … or “animals” starting with “f”? Actually, now that I think that through, “fish” alliterating with “fox”, and the non-trivial amount of “fox”/“furry” love on the platform does make this seem like a less trivial issue.
But still … it seems to be in the space of similar but not trade mark infringement no?
Good question! Whether it’s actually infringement is a legal judgment I’m certainly not qualified to make. 🙂 But my understanding is that it hinges on whether a court thinks a “reasonable person” could be confused. For example, a clothing brand called “Firefoxy” would probably be in the clear since Mozilla isn’t in the clothing business. And maybe even a clothing brand named “Firefox” might be okay! For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records (founded by The Beatles) coexisted nicely for a long time until Apple Computer started getting into the music-selling business. I forget how it got resolved (maybe a licensing agreement?) but The Beatles’ music wasn’t available on the iTunes Music Store for a looooong time while that dispute was going on.
Firefish is an online service and software package, the very space Mozilla operates in, so there’s at least a case to be made that reasonable people might incorrectly assume it’s from Mozilla. It’s come up many times in this discussion already, and we as active Fediverse users are already pretty well informed about this!
Yea it might fall into the “similar, but not really infringement, but similar enough to cause some headaches especially for a very small volunteer run social media platform” territory.
En tout cas, le nom ne fait pas du tout consensus parmi les utilisateurs de Calckey/Firefish x)
Je n’ai pas tellement d’avis sur la question, je ne pense pas que le nom soit si important que ça. J’admets que l’ancien nom m’était plus évocateur, car j’avais directement fait l’association avec misskey que je connaissais déjà. Mais ça, ça n’avait d’importance que si on connaissait déjà l’écosystème complet du Fediverse !
Oui, j’ai vu quelques avis assez mitigés passer. Je suis sur l’instance calckey.world, ils sont censés passer à Firefish demain, on verra ce que donne cette nouvelle platform
Replacement yes, but also its own thing that doesn’t really care about replacing Twitter. I like to think of it as kinda a fusion of MySpace and Twitter.
Not a tumblr user, but AFAIU, the post length or lack of character limit kinda tracks, but on the fediverse character limits like twitter and mastodon are much more forgiving basically everywhere else, so I’m not sure that’s a major factor. Plus, the colorful graphics and theme customisation and UI options are a big part of firefish/calckey, and I’m not sure that’s a thing on tumblr.
I’m on calckey.social … now probably firefish.social (as in they’re making the change today).
It’s the main flagship-style instance. But they’ve been having performance issues for a month or so that aren’t fatal but not ideal. There’s a good chance the move to the new server (ie firefish.social) will fix all that but I wouldn’t guarantee that.
Other than that I’m not really sure. blahaz.zone seems to be run well. the admins of infosecexchange and mastodon.world also run instances, but I’m not sure how they’re going. So, firefish.social is probably the best recommendation … though there are actually a number of instances out there!
calckey.social
Newest