Welp the bomb has been dropped, former #firefish team members basically telling us what we suspected is true firefish is basicly dead, since this is out now i might as well talk about some firefish things even tho i hate this happening i don't feel like i should continue to stay quite on some of the issues, as part of my promise to the firefish devs i've talked to i will not mention some things that i know of but will tell my personal experiences with the project and why i think the project is unlikely to recover.
well lets start of with the apparent issue, firefish is kainoa's project and as such he is fully in charge of the project, the issue is that firefish has been seemingly developed in a way that's basically right out of the Portal Quotes book
"I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the wall here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do. Probably nothing"
this Quote perfectly describes what firefish has been doing over the last releases, stuff like rust was added never to be touched again, scylladb was hyped and worked on (apparently because discord uses it?) just to be basically scrapped, and rewrite in bun was planned?
the attitude was basically adding stuff and making changes without fixing the underlying issues, firefish suffers from alot and by alot i mean a fuck ton of technical issues these won't magically be solved by rewriting it, or changing db sure rewrittes and switching to a better db can help (scylladb is not better for a thing like firefish btw) but that's just putting duck tape on the issue, instead a focus should have been to work on the underlying issues fixing whats causing the issues, like the monster db querys not to mention the fact that some things like scylladb were apparently done even tho multiple firefish devs adviced against it (not a firefish dev can't confirm this but ive been told such)
but also as we have seen firefish is extremely dependent on Kainoa being there, without him being there not much can be done on the firefish side of the team which is also very bad a project should not collapse as hard as firefish because the main dev is missing for multiple weeks, thats why in the ideal case u have multiple project leads
but even if kainoa comes back and everything returns to normal for a bit if firefish does not majorly change their attitude towards development and organization the project will just continue to crash straight into a wall
that said don't start harassing any of the firefish devs or even kainoa
firefish is a foss hobby project and projects come and go
as of writing this post both main firefish instances firefish.social and stop.voring.me are still down or up but don't federate and|or otherwise unusable
EDIT: if you are currently running firefish its highly recommended u consider migrating to either Sharkey, Iceshrimp or Catodon, ofc im going to recommend #sharkey but please do your own research
