We finally have a statement from the former Firefish owner/lead Developer. It seems that the Firefish site and Gitlab is given to one of the maintainers. Still, I kind of consider it EOL as the new person in charge isn't a programmer. It's pretty much doesn't change anything unless a new lead developer decides to take on the project. I do wish Kainoa the best in his future endeavors.
There are other options, such as Sharkey, IceShrimp and Catodon. However, IceShrimp is doing a rewrite in C#, so it's basically going to be it's own thing, which might be interesting to try, but not something I would use outside of personal use. Same with Catodon, which might use IceShrimp's C# rewrite.
I have a lot of trust in Sharkey's team in making sure something like this doesn't happen while making it community driven. Taking the Glitch-soc approach like with Mastodon will make Sharkey a more viable option since it’s just Misskey with extra features, some making it to mainline Misskey like with some things from Glitch-Soc making it to vanilla Mastodon.
@chikorita157 I have very mixed feelings about the tons of forks floating around in the first place. Sure, diversity is good, and people might have different goals, but it's bad for a community if it has to depend on a small project that has zero resilience. Running a large software project is hard, but it's always better in the long run to have a solid foundation.
@smochi It seems that Misskey attracts a lot of forks because people want to customize it or do their own thing. Considering that Misskey is closer to the :deadbird: site in design and a bit better UX than Mastodon (yes, Mastodon doesn't have a great UX).
The only way I see this being sustainable if it's community driven, a soft fork, and not managed by one developer that can disappear and the project falls apart. It's more like this (imagine the blocks being the servers that one the server and the small leg, the person who is maintaining the project of the said software):
@chikorita157 Having a single person run public things isn’t a great idea. I hope they can get in a better life situation and move on. People hating on them is utter BS. Have some dignity I’d say.
Sharkey seems to be doing well. Lazy following things and I’m hearing things I like. I do hope they collectively think about what it means to grow as a public persona though. You basically have to hide away your true self at one point (which sucks btw). Wish them luck!
C# seems like such an odd choice. I also wonder what motivates the people making these forks. Not saying they are bad reasons, heck even dumb fun reasons are fine, but I still wonder. I think I would have very different ideas if I tried it myself.
@yon That is why I shared the xkcd dependency comic. A lot of servers depended on Firefish and when the lead developer disappeared after fixing a serious vulnerability a few days later, that is why we decided to jump ship as I know that Firefish might become a dead project, and it did a few months later. Sad to see a project die and now servers are basically running unsupported software.
I’m pretty satisfied with the future of Sharkey, and I know the lead leader and she has been helpful. Also, they fixed a discovered vulnerability with the post importer for Twitter rather quickly after it was discovered with help of the community.
I'm surprised why IceShimp decided to use C#. Yes, I written a web app using C#, which I had to update the code since it was so out of date to .NET 8. It was still using 2.1 and haven't been updated since 2019 since in late fall, I got a new job offer and been busy. :meowfearful: There have been 2 years since coming back to the office I did hardly any development on my open source apps, but now I'm starting to work on them.
I do wonder how IceShrimp C# will turn out, but it looks like it will just be a new UI not using anything from Misskey/Firefish with only Mastodon API support. Who knows if it will work with Ivory, like Pixelfed and GotoSocial does that is not Mastodon.
@chikorita157 My interests lie more in building something that would be ultra efficient and massively scalable.
(Not that I want big servers, it’s just what I would find interesting. Also no UI, just servers. Let someone else build and innovate UIs I say. I got very tired of UIs after being in that field for too long.)
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