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 =)
OK, since this post exploded (which means there is a lot of interest in #Firefish!), and since some people might have misinterpreted some of the things I said, let me point out a few things:
I am NOT saying that Firefish is necessarily dead. I hope that this post works as a wake up call for Kainoa - whenever he sees it. If nothing changes (either Kainoa getting more involved again or sharing responsibilities or whatever), yes, it will be dead. Really hope something changes drastically, a lot of people love this project.
I am also NOT saying that #catodon is a continuation of firefish, but a different project. Honestly, if that's all you're looking for, there are other project which might be more suitable - we don't want to mislead anyone. We will gradually change quite a few things, the goal is to make it a great and easier to understand all-around software for fedi communities, so for example some of the misskey-specific features will go. In a way, it will sit somewhere between Mastodon and Misskey. So our goal is NOT to replace/continue firefish but to find our people, who will be interested in what we -and not firefish- are trying to do with the platform, and maybe do it together.
It's interesting sitting here on an old version of #Calckey seeing someone on #Mastodon server telling their fellow user that posting to unlisted will opt-out of #search when I can see Unlisted posts in my antennas quite easily though I believe this has been rightly rectified in the newest versions of [#Firefish / #Iceshrimp but need to confirm]. Being hidden from the Explore tab on Mastodon is not the same as being unsearchable across the fediverse. Frankly, there's little understanding even among admins across the #fediverse about what's a Mastodon / Mastodon API function that is federated to other Mastodon servers but doesn't translate well outside of Mastodon on other #ActivityPub connected platforms like #Misskey and it's forks, #Hubzilla and #Friendica, or rapidly growing platforms like #Lemmy and #Kbin. Kbin also scrapes posts from across the fediverse and puts them into its own magazines.
Unfortunately simple, up-to-date documentation doesn't really exist to explain the realities of federation vs what your admin said was the reality. AP was not built with privacy in mind, and 'security through obscurity' was mostly a Mastodon thing from when folks thought either the Mastoverse was almost the dark web, or the whole fediverse [which has never been the case], and Google et al weren't interested in scraping it.
Unfortunately we have a cadre of devs across all fedi platforms who'll give glowing lip-service to both the fedi and ActivityPub histories of being built by queer or other minority identities but still won't work on giving folks the granular #privacy and #safety controls that weren't included in those protocols, and whose feature roadmaps now just look like bird site 2.0 funded by the milquetoast liberals in political tech who provide their seed money.
Beyond Mastodon and GoToSocial, every other fediverse project treats posting to public as opting in to search and indexing. Indeed, this is pretty much how the ActivityPub protocol handles such too.
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 👪
Every morning, an instance administrator wakes up knowing they need to keep the infrastructure running smoothly for their users, ensuring a good and free social experience.
Every morning, a Fediverse user wakes up knowing they will find many people eager to socialize and interact, who strive to keep the Internet a place for the free exchange of ideas and opinions, away from the dynamics of closed protocols and Big Tech monetization.
It doesn't matter if you are a server administrator or a Fediverse user, thank you for being here and for contributing every day with your efforts to keep the Internet a free place.
Apparently, Tumblr's CEO stepped on his crank and outed himself as a TERF. We does not abide the TERF. No we doesn't.
If you're fleeing #Tumblr and checking out the #fediverse, welcome! I hope you find a home here. You have quite a few options with #Mastodon, #Miskey, #Firefish#Sharkey (I'm posting this from sharkey.world), and the practically thousands of instances within those. Each have their own flavor and features, so don't feel you have to settle on one off the bat. It's not unusual to see new users sign up on one instance, then eventually move to another, then another before they find the community that fits them best.
Looking for something more "bloggy"? Bear Blog and Pika are two services offering simple blogging tools with an emphasis on "small blogging". They are unassociated with the major blogging platforms and offer a fresh alternative to them.
The number of Misskey forks continues to expand. How do we mention them collectively? I'm veering toward Forkeys, as in "Catodon is the latest Forkey to enter the stage." or "The Forkeys have one thing in common - emoji reactions."
I suggest checking them all out - each has their own strengths. :blobcatstrong:
A big hello and welcome to all the new people who've joined #blahajzone the past couple of days. It's great to have you here!
Our admins are @ada and @supakaity.
Ada leads the front of house and moderation side of Blåhaj Zone, while Kaity leads the back-end and maintains Hajkey for us & a small group of other instances.
We also have a #Lemmy server available for signups at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone and a #kbin server that's soon to be open, for those looking for #Reddit - like communities. They can also be interacted with from here or other places in the Fediverse.
Hi! I am excited to share a brand new FediVerse iOS app I developed and published that works with :mastodon: Mastodon, :misskey: MissKey, and :firefish: FireFish (with BlueSky support coming next week).
Some features include:
Learns your interests from your interactions, uses smart algorithms (combined with local ML) to feature posts:firefish_bongo:
Direct Message support (extracted from direct mention notifications) 💬
Floating emoji reaction picker (long press like button)
#firefish and #misskey seem to have problems with the WordPress Plugin. Could be the signature maybe!?! Is there someone who can help me debug this issue?
The #Mastodon software setting of #Spoutible is now a dropdown menu. Currently only for mastodon.social and mastodon.online.
Maybe it's temporary but if it's not, they'll have to add at least a hundred reputable and popular servers. Also, it's Mastodon software only. There are far more software, older and/or better than Mastodon which will probably not get support, at least as far as the approach I am seeing.
Okay, my parser now (correctly) works with objects from #mastodon, #firefish, and #bovine and covers all of AS2, JSON-LD context objects, and a few actor-specific extensions from Mastodon specifically.
I also implemented some (thread safe) caching so as to not annoy myself later.
There's a lot of spit-and-polish still required and a bunch of tests still to write to explore all of the corner cases, but I can call that good for now and move on to something else for a bit.
We have now opened registrations at https://catodon.social - you can now have your own catodon.social account and use a fully functional pre-release version of Catodon!
Please keep in mind that this is still beta, you will notice some changes compared to #Firefish but more things will change! This isn't even our final form 😼
Also please be patient if there are delays due to increased traffic. There shouldn't be, but if there are, we'll sort them out.
This means that our repo on #codeberg is also now public!
Learn all about #Catodon, the ideas behind this new #fediverse project, our mewssion, and the first changes we're doing in our first blog post:
From a #sharkey Dev to People On Fedi (pls boost):
While i understand that there's lots of drama around firefish, please do actual research. Sharkey is not and has NEVER been a firefish/#calckey fork, it didn't spring of from firefish. it started off as just an indipendent Misskey soft-fork(updates with misskey), there is no relation at all to firefish, it is incredibly damaging to call it a firefish fork, as the sharkey team actually spends lots of time just implementing features that people wish for (this include some features firefish has), while also spending time on making sure they work decently unlike (firefish some times)
also it's just as damaging to call Iceshrimp an offspring of the whole firefish drama now, Iceshrimp while an actual fork of firefish existed way before the entire recent firefish drama the only recent ofspring of firefish is #catodon and then again catodon is not trying to be firefish, catodon is its own thing it wants to sit inbetween mastodon and *key as a more userfriendly thing with alot of the "fun" misskey stuff removed, and #iceshrimp is doing a full rewrite of firefish in c#, none of these projects are even remotly similar to the firefish way of doing things, some of them aren't even in any relation to #firefish
tldr: stop calling things firefish sucessor, esspecialy don't call sharkey a firefish ofspring it was never in any way related to firefish
So, as you may have heard, #Firefish development seems to be in limbo. But the good folks at @catodon.social and @iceshrimp.social have picked up the ball and run with it. So if you’re looking for an ActivityPub-based solution for your community ambitions, do take a look.