Multiple people have asked me to respond to this post by @panos. We have never worked together since I was never a part of the dev team, but I appreciate all they’ve done for Firefish.
I, myself, had a big hand in the growth of Firefish. I was one of the project’s biggest donators, having provided ~$2,000 in funding over the course of a year. I also helped administer firefish.social, and advised on several community and marketing initiatives. I further spoke to several instance admins in back channels hoping to build strong relationships.
But as you see, I’m not sending this message from firefish.social, and that’s because of severe performance issues with it. To Kainoa’s credit, they did try to work and fix these issues to the best of their ability.
However, I have not spoken to Kainoa since October, and I don’t know the status of the project. Suffice it to say, I have not been working on Firefish for quite awhile.
Despite many people thinking I was a core member of the Firefish team, I never have been—and I always made that very clear. Instead, I saw my role primarily as empowering the project both financially and with other resources when needed.
As demonstrated by the fact I committed large amounts of time and money to the project, I genuinely have wanted Firefish to succeed. I still do, even if it’s with a successor project.
Working on any open source project is hard, and I commend anyone who attempts to do it.
@atomicpoet Hello Chris! I can confirm you were never a member of the Firefish team, Kainoa also made that clear to me that you were only trying to help and weren't involved further, and we both appreciated your support. Things didn't go great with Firefish, but hopefully we have a new chance to build an amazing fedi platform!
But as you see, I’m not sending this message from firefish.social, and that’s because of severe performance issues with it. To Kainoa’s credit, they did try to work and fix these issues to the best of their ability.
in the past, you claimed that firefish.social were so successful that it does not need your help anymore, hence your move to another instance > you have been instrumental not only in hyping up the project, but you also infused some dishonest marketing lingo, effectively turning significant parts of the non-japanese *keys community into a sectarian tribe: critical thinking is more often than not unwelcome, leader cults have emerged, hypocrisy and toxic patterns occur time and again
moreover, i believe that your push for calckey/firefish's fast growth has contributed to creating an unhealthy environment for devs - this must not have been the case! in the end, it is this unhealthy environment which got firefish into trouble
slow growth is not necessarily something bad: you don't grow a project by throwing some money at it, by blurting out exaggerated claims, and by acting in denial of existing problems!
@testing@panos Sorry, I never claimed Firefish was “so successful” it didn’t need my help. Nor did I push for fast growth. On the contrary, I turned off registrations to firefish.social many times when I perceived the service was problematic.
I also don’t know what you mean by “dishonest marketing lingo” since I stated many times that my broad purpose was to build the Fediverse, not one particular flavour of it.
And again, I tried very hard to build relationships with developers of other projects, and helped provide server access to them as well. I personally run Pleroma and Pixelfed servers.
@atomicpoet
if you seriously forgot how you pushed for rebranding calckey to firefish, and your hyping up of a flagship instance which was in trouble before the rebranding already, then this is one more act of denial > everything used to be the bestest extraordinarily super amazing, until it wasn't @panos#firefish
@atomicpoet
re: your first claim: your statement on reasons for leaving ffsocial stressed the instance's success rather than its deplorable state @panos#firefish
@testing@panos I said I left firefish.social because it had outgrown me and I preferred small servers. Part of that was my belief that my presence on firefish.social was hurting its performance. I was in a positive frame of mind because I believed the outcome would be positive.
@testing@panos The reason I pushed the rebranding of Calckey to Firefish, wasn’t for “growth”, it was because I discovered a social media app on the App Store that was also called Calckey and I didn’t want there to be any conflicts with that other app.
I never pushed for a flagship instance. Instead, calckey.social was originally supposed to be a “general chat” server for anyone who just wanted to try the project. It was meant to solve a problem I was having with vancity.social, namely that people NOT from Vancouver kept joining it to play around with Calckey. After a month of me owning the domain, the Calckey project asked to buy the domain, which I was happy to sell them. They also asked me to admin the server—on a voluntary basis—which I was also happy to do.
Also, I don’t know why you perceive me as some unquestioning Firefish cheerleader when I spent months using atomicpoet.org as a back-up server, having to update people when firefish.social often went down.
the rebranding was laughable, too > surely, it was no community decision
Since I was there when that happened and I don't like speculation, I can testify that the new name was discussed at length in the Firefish devs chat, Kainoa asked for ideas, made polls among devs etc. Still, the final decision was Kainoa's, as with everything. I don't think anyone really loved "Calckey" anyway, I had also suggested changing the name before Chris did.
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