I’m happy that I made the move to @Sharkey in late November as I was not really confident in the direction Firefish is heading. It was evident with the slow performance and local timeline would fail to load. Activity was decreasing on Sakurajima Social before the move because of how bad of an experience it was.
After the move, activity started to pick up again thanks to the improved performance. Misskey 13 resolved all the issues Misskey 12 forks are facing that caused Foundkey to go EOL with Firefish in the mess it’s currently in (Iceshrimp has the same scaling issues, but at least from what I heard, that team is at least responsive.
With Firefish Social in a worse mess as there are reports no new posts are being fetched, making the timeline 5 days old and the admins completely unresponsive. At this point, I don’t know if it’s even possible to migrate the account off Firefish Social if federation is not working on that server. This is why we dumped Firefish for Sharkey.
With that, besides our server, a handful of established Firefish servers are starting to jump ship to IceShimp or Sharkey. Infosec Exchange’s Firefish server transitioned to IceShimp. It should be even easier to migrate to Sharkey as there are documentation on how to do it.
I do recommend Sharkey over IceShrimp since it has a public timeline view (for visitors), more moderation tools and performance. The Sharkey Team is very responsive and helpful. Of course, they are adding back features that are in Firefish.
But I have a feeling that at the rate things are going for Firefish, it may have a bleak future ahead unless it can turn things around.
It’s unfortunate to see Firefish turn out like this, but it’s not surprising.
@chikorita157@Sharkey Making software in the public without proper funding and a PR team shielding you is tough stuff. It’s even tougher saying “this grew beyond what I can handle”.
I think moving was 100% the right thing, and shouldn’t be interpreted in any other way than trying to provide a nice service to us users. But we should probably just leave the firefish people alone. I think the best thing they could do at this point is to officially leave and ask if someone wants to pick it up. There is no shame in dealing with your life first and everything else second. I wish everyone involved the best of luck.
I’m slowly moved towards trying to use .social more again. I just wish I could get all features in a mobile app. But I do like the idea of having the Mastodon API (MAPI?:)) implemented so I can use Ivory at all:)
@yon I only posted this as a a warning given the state of Firefish is in seeing all the reports I'm hearing and trying to give a notice to other Firefish admins to probably think about switching software and also not to recommend the software. I don’t want users get stuck with using software that will get hardly any support or having a hard time to get support. When the flagship instance continues to worsen, it gives one worry about the over getting support.
I think this is a case of taking on too much, and straying too far away from upstream Misskey, with the inability to implement the improvements. If one is going to make a lot of changes, one has to prepare to do the backend work as well to make it run better, and that can be difficult.
The red flag that Firefish is in trouble is it taking days to fix a critical security flaw. This was the reason we immediately switched.
@chikorita157 One of the reason I don’t just stick around here is that things are measured and calm and friendly and well ran. It was 100% the right thing to do, I’d done the same.
No ill will, and power to everyone writing free software. But when there’s security issues and endless downtime I don’t think it’s in a managable state.
In the upside Sharkey seems to do well and it seems like they have small sensible incremental goals. Which is good for production stuff.
I mean I get it, I dream big. And I think everyone should. But production and dream projects don’t mix well imho.
Edit: That first sentence is so awkward, it seriously changed direction in the middle. Love it here, but there’s more <stuff> would have been more clear.
Remember, if someone says something out of character, they are just probably expressing themselves poorly for some reason.
@testing@chikorita157 we are actually very close to feature parity with firefish especially with the new note design that is currently sitting in the dev branch (https://dev.joinsharkey.org) so overall even if u prefere firefish/calckey experience sharkey is not a bad choice
@Sharkey@testing@chikorita157 Best of luck with Sharkey and make sure that everyone involved page yourself and never overwork yourself. From what I can tell you are doing a great job thus far!
Add comment