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.
I server FireFish.Social e joinfirefish.org sono completamente inattivi e non rispondono nemmeno più ai ping: significa che firefish è ufficialmente morto?
I am delighted to announce that here at iBe Social we have migrated to #Sharkey :sharkey:
Sharkey is a fabulous variation of Misskey, with some great little extras. I hope everyone will enjoy using it as much as we have during our testing phase. We had setup a test server to let our users play around with it to decide if it was what they wanted.
#Firefish served us well, but it was time to move on to new and exciting things in Sharkey.
Massive kudos to @Amelia who did all the work on the migration. She took an unbelievably impressive 26 minutes to do the migration; I hardly had time to check my honey stocks!
Proud to be part of Sharkey, and open for visitors.
Recently I've seen posts that #Firefish project is in trouble? Its flagship server being unavailable, and people are impatient about new releases. Sad if true, though I hope its death is slightly exagerrated. Anyhow, I've learnt that people are migrating to other Misskey forks (mainly #IceShrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon) And Iceshrimp devs are rewriting the JS backend on C# 😯
If Firefish is going to come back, Kainoa won't have a hand in it. They quietly handed over the keys to the repo to a maintainer... who has publicly stated they aren't a programmer and are just looking after commits. Not exactly a signal things are starting back up.
Unless there is an announcement soon about someone taking up development again, I think it's safe to say Firefish is over as a Fedi platform.
Optimism wants to say that someone will, but at this point even if someone does it'll be playing catch-up to the current state of affairs. It isn't possible for someone to come off of the street and say "I'll do it" and go back to the pace that was happening last summer immediately. (But it's not impossible for me to be wrong and six months from now someone does. I'm just not banking on it happening. Even the Firefish name itself might be too damaged in reputation to even take back up.)
#Iceshrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon are #Misskey derivatives who are continuing onward with things. All three of them have disassociated with FF completely so it seems Misskey still has a future with non-Japanese users. (Iceshrimp even spent time on a new non triangular logo to further separate from Firefish.) Server admins who wanted to consider a Firefish instance but shied away from the drama last fall may want to follow those projects instead.
If your fedi server is still on Firefish, don't be surprised if an announcement "were taking signups on our new Plombus server, in X months Fleeb will be decommissioned" comes down sometime soon. Internet services without recent updates are asking for trouble from exploits and vulnerabilities. Also, without an active FF developer to fix standing issues (or a skilled DB admin on your instance's behalf to whittle the database and schema to fit the new system as well as possible) a cut-over migration where users don't lift a finger isn't in the cards like the Calckey to Firefish migration last September. It likely will be up to you to decide to either move your account Mastodon style (no post migration, just your follower lists and a link back to the prior server) or to just start fresh.
It's almost time. We're super-excited. #FediGroups is entering public testing now, before a full live launch.
Many of us have used other Boosting Groups, but they only work well if you follow from Mastodon accounts. We know there is a wider fediverse. FediGroups works with all the favourites, including #Mastodon, #Firefish, #Iceshrimp, #Catodon, #Sharkey, and more. One big happy family 👪
I decided I'm keeping the link for my #Firefish account listed on my #Mastodon profile because I'm not ready to let go 😭 Firefish is not dead 😩 it's not
The flagship instance of Fire Fish is now OFFLINE.
The significance of this event is many of the Fire Fish Developers have previously come forward claiming the lead developer vanished. Unfortunately, the lead developer treated their project as a centralized project, meaning that they were the sole person making decisions, giving no access to accounts or code changes or even donations, despite having a team behind them.
Fire Fish is now a dead project with the lead developer missing for more than half a year, the remaining developers disbanding, and today, the flagship instance Fire Fish dot Social going OFFLINE.
It is strongly recommended that you migrate your instance to another platform.
You have options
Sharkey
Misskey
Mastodon
Please consider Fire Fish no longer receives updates, including security.
We are offering direct help to any one migrating from #firefish to #sharkey, as the firefish project is now officially unmaintained, please remember tho that sharkey is a misskey soft-fork
also we won't be tolerating any harassment towards any of the firefish devs
The FireFish.Social and joinfirefish.org servers are completly down and don't even respond to pings anymore, this means #firefish is officially dead, the servers no longer run, the git server still runs but seems to be run by a different person than kainoa
We're sad to see firefish go down like this, and we're especially sad about all the users who's data is now gone due to both major instances going down
while this is a major blow to a lot of people, please don't start harassing any one that was involved in the firefish project harassing people isn't going to help, we should see firefish as something to learn from to see what went wrong and prevent something like that happening in the future
and a note be added, Sharkey is not a firefish fork, and does not intent feature parity with it, Sharkey is a misskey softfork its supposed to update with misskey, unlike other fork we will not do big actions like rewrites
i think what happend to #firefish is really said kainoa basicly had to pick between it or well living his life, and its obvious what is the better choice, but its also sad for all the #firefishadmins that now have to deal with this with out there even being announcement or the all the users on the firefish instances, as everything got taken down without any notice, firefish should have been alot more transparent about what was going on, now all servers are dead including fedi.software the host of the @firefish account and firefish.social host of the @kainoa account, which means there is basically no more way for them to do a public announcement over fedi now that both their main accounts do not exist anymore,
this entire situation is very sad, but please don't start harassing anyone involved
May firefish rest in piece, you served us well, up untill you didn't
We are suspending #firefish.social due to it being unavailable, should the instance return this will be lifted, this is done to prevent a stock pile of queued jobs