Ugh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social.
So, yeah, if you haven't noticed, things aren't looking good for firefish. Its owner, Kainoa, has practically abandoned the project, which had its last stable release out on July. My last message to them was a week ago, and I haven't heard back since. Firefish.social, besides the other severe technical problems it's had due to mismanagement in the last few months, now also has serious federation issues. I hope Kainoa is well irl, but this is irresponsible and unacceptable.
I hear some of you saying "but you're in the core team too, don't try to put the blame elsewhere!". So I have to explain what being a core team member in firefish meant. Kainoa invited me, Namekuji and a few others to be part of the "core team", but kept all decisions and responsibilities. We didn't co-own this. We never shared donations. We were just volunteers, who were honestly trying to make it a great project. This didn't work well due to concentration of power to one person, who didn't keep their promises. I don't mean to be harsh to Kainoa, I mean we knew they were only 19 when they started the project. Still, it's a bummer to anyone who chose to trust and support Firefish. This includes myself.
I don't know if it's early to consider firefish a dead project, but it sure seems like that for a few months now. Maybe it can be resurrected, idk. It's all up to Kainoa.
In the meantime, Namekuji and I are starting #Catodon, which will have some differences with Firefish, and will include many changes I had discussed with Kainoa but were never implemented. If you decide to stick with us, we promise to be serious about this. I strongly believe in the fediverse and its potential, and I want to build a great platform for it. This was my goal when I chose to be involved in Calckey/Firefish. It's still my goal with Catodon, only this time I can stand behind it 100%, as the project will be co-managed by Namekuji and me. If Firefish left you with a bitter aftertaste, we hope we can build a better relationship and prove ourselves worthy of your trust. Catodon will go public in a matter of days, possibly even hours. We'll have more to say about its direction then.
In the meantime, I just wanted to share my apologies for any inconvenience regarding Firefish, as I'm still technically a core team member, whatever that means. But frankly, I tried so hard to make things go differently - but there's only so much you can do when it's someone else's project. I'm really sorry for how things went.
But this is not the end of the fedi journey for me. I'm super excited about the chance to do some things right this time with Catodon. Life goes on, I guess! Hope to see you soon on our #codeberg repo, so we can start a new creative adventure together =)
The Feditext iOS client for Mastodon, GotoSocial, Firefish, etc. now has its own account on fedi.software! Please follow us here for official Feditext updates and announcements.
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
The flagship #Misskey instance is experiencing growing pains, but is also discouraging #Fediverse residents in #Europe (or rather the #EuropeanUnion 🇪🇺) from signing up due to #GDPR issues.
👉🏾 Misskey (https://misskey.io) signing up 20,000 new users per day
👉🏾 After consulting lawyers, Misskey.io will now discourage Europeans from signing up
👉🏾 #Firefish could fill in the vacuum in Europe
New #Firefish release! And this is the new official account for the project, under naskya's leadership, give them a follow if you want to stay updated. Best of luck in the new beginning! 🚀
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
Tbh, I'm on a proactively moderated server that has preemptively kept a lot of the worst folks from being able to reach us queers here, and the feedback from a handful of black users here is that #blahajzone has also been generally been harassment free in comparison to other servers they've been on.
Imo, it's actually not to hard as a queer or trans person to find #servers on the #fediverse that will protect you from harassment, but that it is harder to find servers that will also protect indigenous, black, Asian users from racist harassment. And too many queer white folks get a free pass for ignorance tbh, a privilege that many of us have had for far too long.
It's much the same on #Bluesky where I haven't been harassed for being #queer and trans - again there's large communities and plenty of allies - but anti-black racism has been in the spotlight again recently and the devs called out for lagging behind on safety and moderation features that bigots exploit for harassment campaigns.
Far too many fediverse projects are led by men, mostly white men, who are lionised, promoted and financed by another layer of mostly white men. They ultimately get the veto on minority protections.
The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.
Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.
Today marks my one year fediversary. I've written up some thoughts about what I've learned this year.
But in summary, I've found passionate communities and kind individuals that spark my interests in ways I never imagined. If you're seeing this, truly, thank you!
"Calckey heißt jetzt Firefish, … sonst ändert sich nüscht." 😉
Hab die Meldung mal aktualisiert:
Alles was auf Mastodon fehlt: Firefish im Fediverse mit zig Zusatzfunktionen
Die Zahl der Twitter-Alternativen wächst und wächst. Während die meisten das Vorbild ziemlich stark nachbauen, gibt es aber auch Versuche, weiterzudenken.
New instance, new introduction.
I'm Ali, I was over at outdoors.lgbt till it crashed and burned last night, we all lost our accounts so now I'm here. (If you had friends there we still show up in searches, but our accounts are toast and are never coming back, its fedi, it happens).
Old guide who now runs a rope access company, when I get the time I still get back into the hills or on a river somewhere.
Hoping to reconnect with friends and make a few new ones. If you hear of anyone else from outdoors that has washed up somewhere else I'm pretty sure most of us would like to catch up again, so boosts appreciated.
Peace. #Introduction
Sad to hear about #Firefish, but it's something to keep in mind.
If one person is keeping a project alive and is unable to build a long term, sustainable team around the project, relying only on that individual, that project is fragile.
Apropos of nothing, I'd love if I could build a long term, sustainable team around #owncast, if this sparks your interest at all! If I get hit by a bus tonight, Owncast is dead tomorrow.
can everybody please do me the hardest of solids and #boost this post so that this #firefish#instance gets #federation easier? i'm just testing stuff out on my local server uwu
After giving this a lot of thought and discussing with the wonderful people that build Iceshrimp, #Catodon will rebase to #Iceshrimp. We feel that it's the right decision for the road ahead, as Iceshrimp is another #firefish fork that focuses in improving performance and they have already done some amazing improvements, like full Mastodon API support. With Firefish's future uncertain, we think it's better to stay closer to an actively maintained project. The two projects will stay distinct, as we have different design goals, but we have a common codebase so we feel this makes sense.
Just to be clear on all fronts and to answer the obvious question in advance, yes, Iceshrimp is also currently doing a full rewrite in C#, which is a few months away, and we haven't decided if we'll adopt this yet - it's a strong possibility, but we're keeping our options open. We're confident they're doing a great job, still, we'll weigh what the best decision for Catodon is on this when it's ready and the time comes.
Just wanted to let you know that this might push Catodon's development back a little, as it's sort of a structural change, but we feel that it's worth it, and that it might be better for the broader community. Catodon development will resume once rebasing to Iceshrimp is finished, and then we'll have better foundations to build this on.
Just like that, Firefish Social now stopped loading properly. Not going to say any more about the project, but I think it's a good time to switch to more supported software like Sharkey or IceShrimp. Can't say much about Catodon since it's in early stages.
Alright, I think we now have a better idea of what's happening with #Firefish, so I might as well give a small update. Kainoa quit, and left the project to naskya, who is a person I appreciate very much, as they've always been kind and polite and willing to help. I also think they're very devoted to Firefish, and basically were the last person actively caring about the project. As far as I know, they intend to keep maintaining and developing Firefish, and a new stable version will finally soon be released. This is great news, as you don't need to worry that your server is running unmaintained and vulnerable software. So, alarm off everybody, no need to abandon ship.
As for us, we're standing by our decision to rebase #Catodon to #Iceshrimp. The changes we want to do are long term plans, but we've started redesigning some things and, whenever we are ready, I hope we'll show you something worth your attention. So yeah, firefish, iceshrimp and catodon are all alive and valid options (the first two to be precise, for the time being). All projects share code fixes and I think we're on very good terms, here in our corner of the fediverse. Enjoy the ride.
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.