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
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
Hm. I wonder if I can get any fediverse admins onboard to disable all images on their instance on the World Sight Day in October, so that only alt text shows up.
Shoutout to the new #Firefish dev team, who've done a lot of work updating docs (as well as the app itself); that was the easiest and main painless update I think I've done yet.
single line replies in timelines for iceshrimp, firefish and potentially other derivatives. see quoted post for how it looks. extremely hacky and might mess up. will not work in sharkey or other "modern" misskey instances
requires a browser with nyative nested css and :has (so, literally anything from the last year or so)
Some news from the #Firefish front! Kainoa (former lead dev who has been absent for several months now) finally passed control of the donations platform to naskya, the new owner of the project. I'm happy to report that Firefish is becoming a healthy project again, and that members of the community have stepped up to get the development going. For those who didn't migrate to other platforms during the project's crisis: You're safe and in good hands.
ogni tanto tanto vi ricordo che esistono due bellissime istanze nel #fediverso una è #foxyhole istanza #firefish e l'altra è #neptube istanza #peertube entrabi gestisti da ragazzi (si fa per dire eh!!) bellissimi e intelligentissimi
Alright, I know I haven't given many updates on #Catodon, because frankly there's not a lot to say. We're reorganizing, reprioritizing etc. Things are going slow. I haven't given up on the project, I think we have an interesting approach which is worth exploring, but we're short on human resources atm. Hopefully this will change and things will get exciting again, but we're not there yet. I'll let you know.
However, I wanna talk about another project I'm also sort of involved in lately - #Iceshrimp! So Iceshrimp also started as a #Firefish fork but they are currently rewriting the whole thing on .net/C#! Both the backend and frontend are being rewritten in C# - the frontend on Blazor. AFAIK this is the only fedi project written on .net and I'm really curious for the result!
This has been announced many months before, and Iceshrimp-js is in feature freeze, to allow all efforts to concentrate in the rewrite. Many people were skeptical because it's a huge project - which is true. So let me tell you that finally #Iceshrimp's rewrite will be entering beta soon - meaning, probably before the month is through!
This will practically be a brand new fedi platform, with a UX similar to Firefish (at least initially), with great Mastodon API support for compatibility with existing apps, hopefully with much better performance and a cleaner codebase. I'll keep you posted on how things progress!
Antennas.
Antennas are effectively custom timelines. They work approximately like watching hashtags, but they can look for normal text as well. You can add as many phrases as you like and the results can be filtered with an ignore list.
You can make an antenna that just shows posts from specific users and notifies you when they post something new, you can make an antenna that collects posts containing or excluding certain key words, or you can make an antenna that collects only posts with files attached. You can even make an antenna consisting of “Posts from specific users” with “Show replies” checked.
Setting up
You can set up antenna by going to the More! section on your sidebar, and selecting Antennas. Press Add + to create your first. This is where you can also manage & edit previously created antennas.
Images:
Where to find More! on the sidebar (highlighted)
Where to find Antennas in the More! menu (highlighted)
My antennas page showing Add + button and my previously created antennas.
4 & 5) When you click Add + you get this page to set up your antenna. I've set one up as my Calckey antenna and another to alert me when PastaThief posts. There's a lot to go through here. Expect a separate post sometime soon.
6 & 7) What those antenna feeds look like.
On our progressive web app you can access your antennas by selecting the UFO in the top right corner.
Clicking on the UFO button brings up all my antennas and the link to manage/edit them
Just curious, with the recent demise of #Firefish -- are the forks like #Catodon#Iceshrimp etc viable / sustainable alternatives? Do they share a common base, so one could expect updates into the future if they to cease to exist?
Does #iceshrimp have a way to delete posts older than some age? It's been a feature I've been hoping for in #firefish for a while but it never happened. Would love if it's available. Even if it is a manual DB update or whatever that'll work.
It's so crazy to me to think that I was on Xhitter for like 4 years and had a total of about 120 followers, most of which were spammers messaging me about "stream graphics".
I've been on Fedi for less than a year and have 5x that amount of followers and probably only enough spammers to count on one hand. I love this place.
Frage an die #firefish Fraktion 🙂 .. wollte gerade mal wieder meinen brachliegenden Account reaktivieren .. leider hat da auf dem Handy was mit der 2FA nicht hin gehauen und nun kann ich mich gar nicht mehr einloggen 🫤
.. Auf dem Laptop hab ich noch Zugriff auf den Account, aber keine Option gefunden, das Problem zu lösen.
Hat jemand eine Idee was zu tun ist? 🙏