I’m on a Firefish instance and have been really enjoying the features but the constant *key forks and failures means I am not exactly committing myself to it (I also have a Mastodon account). However, I am also not the biggest micro-blogger as that needs brevity. Perhaps when/if I find the right home that’ll change.
Copying the linked thread here (cuz I stuffed it up):
So the basic story would be that mastodon’s dominance is pretty entrenched and the “migration” event is mostly “over” (whatever other “events” are on their way)
But I wonder about the details of the firefish moment
I think it revealed that there are/were plenty interested in novel & different platforms. We’re novelty seekers after all right. Generally, I’d wager any new platform needs some degree of novelty to “make it”.
Further, its collapse showed how hard creating a new platform is.
2/
Firefish did well at presenting itself as “professional”, capable and rich. But these were over-promises, and despite a number of people being involved or contributing, a good deal of user enthusiasm, the whole thing fell into a heap.
And that’s the bit that concerns me. How many people/teams are there both capable and willing to put up a good, successful and sustainable platform?
The #firefish lesson may be that the fediverse just hasn’t attracted a healthy building culture/personnel. 3/3
The problem is that Misskey code is bad. This is the main reason the forks exist at all. Iceshrimp is rewriting from scratch in C# and it’s my main hope for the *keys.
And yeah - a lot of fedi is built on spur of the moment inspiration without much planning on the long term. Sometimes it works out (like pixelfeed and the other related projects) and sometimes the passion of one (or small group) of devs just isn’t enough.
Lemmy is pretty good example (from the other side of the scale) as well - we’re at version 0.18.4 - and the devs are pretty hostile.
Yeah, as a beehaw user, I’m pretty familiar with the situation. I’m not going to re-hash the whole thing here (and I don’t represent the instance), but let’s just say PR’s for features were offered, but not accepted. Discussion was attempted but it resulted in Lemmy devs asking beehaw to fuck off - so that’s the end of that.
There’s an alternative being tested. I believe we’re going to Sublinks, but there’s still active development going and sizeable migration. So we’re still here. For the time being.
I’m only vaguely aware of the history here. Any chance you’ve got some links to these PRs? Not sea lioning (or at least that’s not the point) … genuinely curious to see what happened.
Thanks, but I couldn’t find any links to PRs in there (which is what I was mainly interested in). The rest of the dynamic explained in there I’m roughly familiar with.
I guess I’d have to check mastodon to find the rest of this thread and the context of what it actually references. Posting into Lemmy/Kbin groups from long mastodon threads is quite janky experience, I find.
So the basic story would be that mastodon's dominance is pretty entrenched and the "migration" event is mostly "over" (whatever other "events" are on their way)
But I wonder about the details of the firefish moment
I think it revealed that there are/were plenty interested in novel & different platforms. We're novelty seekers after all right. Generally, I'd wager any new platform needs some degree of novelty to "make it".
Further, its collapse showed how hard creating a new platform is.
Firefish did well at presenting itself as "professional", capable and rich. But these were over-promises, and despite a number of people being involved or contributing, a good deal of user enthusiasm, the whole thing fell into a heap.
And that's the bit that concerns me. How many people/teams are there both capable and willing to put up a good, successful and sustainable platform?
The #firefish lesson may be that the fediverse just hasn't attracted a healthy building culture/personnel.
3/3
@maegul There were a lot of different factors that went into what happened with Firefish. Some of it was bad optics (the whole “he said” vs “she said” ordeal that may have involved forged screenshots), some of it was community disagreements that went south, some of it was the project lead dealing with school. The database problems didn’t help, nor did switching DB technologies mid-stream.
It’s easy to chalk the situation of Firefish to one or two causes, but there was a lot going on. It’s an amazing project, and showing signs of new life. It just went through hell for a while.
@maegul I’m not saying that you were blaming anyone. It’s just a shitty situation, one that I lament often.
I loved Firefish. I really thought the project had a moment where it was going to go big, but there were too many problems. It’s upsetting.
But yeah, I think we’re all hoping to see something get big like Mastodon, maybe even eclipse it. Why that hasn’t happened remains something of a mystery, with potentially depressing tells: most projects and developers in the space are barely making any income, are spread way too thin, and effectively doing hard work for years and years.
I want Fediverse projects to succeed. I think a few are in really good places. But, I worry that many are running themselves into the ground.
Which implies, AFAICT, a winner-take-all dynamic regarding platform dominance.
Which then means, if true, that all of those aiming for getting another platform up there with mastodon may not realise the hill they’re trying to climb (thus my take that if you care about competing with masto you should be working together with everyone else that also cares).
For microblogging, I think it’s now too late. Mastodon is the fediverse (for microblogging at least).
@maegul I think the only way around this problem is to not play that game.
The biggest, most promising thing that I’m seeing is the collaboration between SocialHub (FEPs), FediDevs (Testing Suite), and SocialCG (documenting behaviors of common approaches, like Webfinger usage).
This kind of collaboration is already bearing lots of fruit, and may take us to a place where projects aren’t so centered around Mastodon as a platform.
@maegul at the end of the day Firefish burned brightly but quickly. It might be worth doing a post-mortem of it purely as a technical exercise because building a fediverse application has some unique constraints... though I imagine when you get down to it the failures may end up being the same social and/or technical failings you see anywhere else.
Sometimes I wonder how much their name choice (Calckey, specifically) set them back on their fedi speedrun.
After all, NodeBB isn't exactly a "hip" and marketable brand name 😬
AFAICT (where some rumours likely to have truth to them are behind this) the essential failure was a flawed lead dev and an excessive tolerance of their BDFL approach by fellow contributors and "backers".
When those flaws become critical there was no governance/org to compensate. That dev was making weird decisions on the fly that were ruining the platform. Then they walked and nothing was left. And so all the promise of being big/serious was facade/hype.
The only meaningful lesson, I think, is if you're aiming to substantially grow and attract users and admins, you need to organise a team and users and contributors and backers need to have and expect norms around team work for buying in.
Otherwise, my "fedi-antenna" thinks the same energy wouldn't happen now, that a moment has passed.
But that's on the microblogging side. We're you're at with the thrediverse/forums and maybe better blog interop is new and exciting ground IMO!!
And so all the promise of being big/serious was facade/hype.
But being honest here, who hasn't thrown out a few "company we's" in order to sound bigger or more established?
I did not see firsthand what happened (I guess I didn't follow the right people!), so I'm probably off. How much of it was bluster and when does it become problematic? Bluster is rewarded in the capitalist Americas, blech...
Here's the homepage of the platform, which strikes me as relatively "serious/big" for something run by a dev who didn't really know how to manage a database: https://joinfirefish.org/
I'm pretty sure there were "backers" trying to make it a thing and the "vibe" was very much "invite everyone, LFG!!". They even had a total rebrand (name and logo) in the middle of the "moment" with multiple posts hyping it up ahead of time.
@maegul The cost to migrate to calckey was minimal b/c it federated. I moved my follower list & arrived with enthusiasm! No walls! Refreshing!
I liked the "calckey" approach to aggregating content w/ emojis. But there were times when I couldn't post or get new messages for days, which stretched to weeks at a time!
Just wait, devs were working on it. DB issues, etc. By the time it rebranded to firefish it was down so frequently I gave up and ended up happily on a stable Mastodon server.
@GeekinKorea
> By the time it rebranded to firefish it was down so frequently I gave up and ended up happily on a stable Mastodon server.
Yea that's the story in a nut shell. The lead dev wasn't fit for the role and ruined the whole thing.
What interests me though is that others were involved and that an unhealthy "team" or lack of a team may be indicative of the fediverse's ability to bring people together to build sustainable and stable projects.
Yea that's the story in a nut shell. The lead dev wasn't fit for the role and ruined the whole thing.
That's a harsh and ungenerous interpretation of events.
While the lead dev was only, what, 18 when they started the project, and you can definitely make an argument for a social media platform being a bigger bite than someone that age and experience could chew, what they achieved with Calckey/Firefish is something they can be very proud of. For a time it did look like a modern, credible and rising alternative to Mastodon itself. That's a hugely laudable achievement given the infinitely smaller timescale and far smaller resource they were working with.
There are a few reasons the Firefish project unravelled that weren't directly their fault, one big one inherited from the codebase they'd chosen to adopt (Misskey v12). The slow-downs and performance issues were due to that server codebase simply not being engineered well enough to scale well with increased population sizes. If you were running a Firefish instance of more than a couple of hundred users, performance tanked. I'd suggest that this issue was bigger than one dev or even the small team gathered around Firefish could address. They tried workarounds and tried swapping back-ends etc but I don't know if it was ever understood that the codebase itself was fatally compromised until it was way too late. Notably, Sharkey, basically Firefish but forked directly from the re-factored Misskey v13 codebase, has proven far better at handling scale and way more performative. Meanwhile, Iceshrimp and others still on v12 have failed to gain significant traction of their own and I believe they're basically inhabiting technical cul-de-sacs unless they address the codebase issue.
Additionally, the lead dev attracting the ire of a notoriously toxic/bullying personage/instance in the Fediverse is I think what took the wind out of their sails, killing the project as far as they were concerned. That personage levelled accusations of screenshot tampering at the dev (among many others) in a grotesque display of Trial By Public Forum but has actually been found out to have been doing exactly that themselves. I very nearly left the Fediverse over that person's behaviour and the scale of the support they enjoyed apparently legitimising it: there's a spider in this web and the power they wield via weaponised victimhood has been used to silence and harm far too many in this network.
In short, I don't think it's fair to lay the collapse of the Firefish project entirely at the feet of the lead dev.
You're probably very right about all of that. (Would you mind letting me know who that "spider" was, as I mostly didn't pay attentioon to that episode)
In the end though, AFAIU, as a lead dev they were very happy to hold onto their role as BDFL. Which, if you're up for it, great, sometimes that's necessary to make things happen. But if you're not and then become the vulnerability, then that's a bad call and the buck has to stop with you for it.
In the end though, AFAIU, as a lead dev they were very happy to hold onto their role as BDFL. Which, if you're up for it, great, sometimes that's necessary to make things happen. But if you're not and then become the vulnerability, then that's a bad call and the buck has to stop with you for it.
I can agree with this because I think that harks back to their lack of experience I alluded to running a major technical project like Firefish. Possibly it can be argued they fell into a bit of a pride/ego trap as well; they were receiving a LOT of praise and attention.
Disclaimer: we're not Friends by any means but the lead dev and I were friendly and interacted semi-regularly on Firefish.social. My partner and I met on that server and we both feel they were very unjustly assaulted by the wider Fediverse community acting in a very vindictive schoolyard fashion.
Nonetheless, I'm more interested in the general dynamics of the whole thing, not blaming or even thinking about any one individual. The "spider" and the episode they created, for example.
On a personal level, I wish all the best for the lead dev and hope that they are proud of what they did because they deserve it.
I do not think though that the fediverse can be proud and happy about what happened and should probably question itself (incl us users TBH). That's my point.
Another platform that some people got excited for about 1yr ago. It was obviously not a direct clone of twitter in the same way mastodon is, but based on a japanese platform (misskey) and so just came from a different place with a whole bunch of features quite separate from the "mere microblogging" of mastodon.
It had flaws, sure, but there was genuine hope it'd become "the other platform".
But it was run like crap and fell apart and its flagship server is dead.
All those of emojis are native, as is the animation you'll see if you press "play" (some of which glitch because this is a different instance/version).
You could add as much visual sugar to your posts as you wanted and it was so much more fun.
Yep ... but interests me is that there were people around them, including us users. What culture did we all bring to the table that enabled it to grow and die like that with such a lead dev?
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