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
…I noticed that they gave shoutouts to #Mastodon & #WordPress (#Tumblr was strangely ignored) as well as credited #Misskey for their quote implementation (even #Firefish received an honorable mention).
I do wonder how many Threads users have activated ActivityPub on their account‽
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
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.
Good to hear that #firefish is still alive and in good hands. They released a new version. I wish them luck with their future developments, even if we aren’t using FireFish anymore.
Actually it's not so much down as it's stuck in some sort of a loop, flashing warning messages about "Your ad blocker" and "An Error has occurred" "But it's (probably) not your fault"
Down at the bottom of the screen is the only coherent message:
Hello there! While we're still preparing things for opening registrations in catodon.social and making our repo public (which will be any day now), here's a sneak peek of what #Catodon looks like! You'll see some different terminology and some different icons compared to #firefish. Also, the server's logo is visible again under the menu, allowing each server to add more of its personal touch to its home page!
These are not the only changes we've made - but more on that really soon! xx
I've been meaning to do a "State of the Shark" post for a while, and go through and explain some of the history and important moments that blahaj.zone has been through. For those of you who have been here for a while, you know it got a bit rough at points, and I want to take the chance to explain some of what happened.
I joined the fediverse in April 2022, around 6 months before the big twitter exodus in November 2022.
I fell in love with what I perceived to be the freedom of instances to create safe spaces for trans folk that had been harassed on twitter (At the time, I didn't have an awareness of how that inclusion doesn't always extend to trans folk that don't have white privilege)
I was talking to a friend @supakaity (well, friend at the time. Now we're partners, together with @internutter) and she said that she was planning on spinning up a fediverse instance. Kaity would supply the technical skills, and I would bring my community building and development experience and be "front of house". We did some brain storming, and came up with several names centered on blåhaj, because we wanted the instance to be focused on trans and gender diverse folk, without being specifically restricted to trans users. And so, in late November 2022, blahaj.zone was born.
Initially, we tried Misskey, mostly because I hated the Mastodon interface and wanted something prettier. But Misskey has very little documentation in english, and not much usage outside of Japan. At the time, there weren't many Misskey forks, with FoundKey and Calckey being the main options.
We had a look at Calckey, and decided to go with it. It had a small but active development team, and several instances already running it. And so we went live with Calckey. Kaity, being Kaity, would listen to some of my frustrations around usability, and started to expand the feature set of Calckey. Many of these fixes got pushed back to Calckey main, but not all of them. Those that were not pushed up to Calckey stayed in use on blahaj.zone though, and eventually we named our little soft fork of Calckey "Hajkey" (pronounced Hi-Key).
Around this time, Calckey was starting to get traction, and we were starting to get users who would join, just to try out some of the features that Kaity was working on. And for a while, all was good.
But for reasons that don't belong in this post, we eventually fell out of step with the Calckey development team and decided to go our own way. When Calckey rebranded as Firefish, we formally parted ways.
But that left us a dilemma. We did not want to move to the Firefish software base, as it was moving in technical directions that we didn't want to go. And we couldn't stay on our version of Calckey/Hajkey, as some of the bugs were show stoppers. So we had to look at alternatives, and decided to rebase Hajkey off of Iceshrimp.
And then Kaity got in to a really bad accident. Concussion, broken jaw, and an injury to her arm that even now, still hasn't been resolved. So blahaj.zone entered limbo. We were partially rebased on ice-shrimp, but without the chance to fully integrate all of the Hajkey features, and with federation bugs and issues. The instance was up and running, but it was wounded, and the task of updating it seemed impossible, especially whilst recovering from a major accident.
And that's how we existed for many months...
Ultimately, we made the decision to rebase again, this time on Sharkey, but even then, the work of implementing all of the Hajkey specific changes was huge, and so, we made the decision to let Hajkey go, and move to vanilla Sharkey.
And here we are now, running Sharkey, and with the instance humming again! I've made Kaity promise to try and not end up creating a huge workload for herself by re-creating the Hajkey features as Hajkey, so our hope is that over time, we will add at least some of them to Sharkey itself. That way, every Sharkey update will not involve a day of code merging from Kaity.
As much as I miss some of our old features, I am so much happier to have blahaj.zone buzzing and alive again!
Thank you to everyone, and here's to a strong future!
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.
I'm giving Catodon.social a go.
Unfortunately Firefish.social has become so broken it doesn't even respect migration requests (let alone post downloads). So a lot of people will miss seeing my move 🫣. I suppose people will find me again over time, but that's a real shame for a server to get that neglected.
I do also have my @ArtBear account which I won't be migrating (it's just offline for DB maintenance for a few hours, don't freak out anyone).
Why Catodon?
I'm sure other projects are interesting too.
I liked how @panos interacted & was committed to community building on #firefish.social. I feel like it's important for any dev team to have in mind Community, not just features, nor just admin, nor just moderation it's all really important but community is the base. I liked how he posted his frustrations with the very large parts of the firefish project that were not a team endeavour that could be picked up & redistributed, but solely resting on only 1 individual. I like the Catodon mission statement about being a team wanting to dev for a lot of servers, and not dev for some mega flagship server (which is a vulnerability of fedi. decentralised & well distributed is good). Also the 1st set of improvement notes were really good at logical cleanup, changes & taking the good parts of stalled firefish forward again, but in a more streamlined direction.
Right away #Catodon feels like an old friend, I really missed:
markdown!
awesome super customisable UI!
properly rendered links so you don't have to click away!
multi links in a single post!
proper quote posts! (really it's users, not features!)
threading display so you actually know if you're in a thread & where!
floating user info cards with actions like follow (not clicking away to a profile)!
custom emoji reactions! (like 😻 or 🥴not just ⭐!)
custom feeds & also lists, are amazingly flexible, you really need to try them!
widgets!
storage with all media for re-use (with editable #altText!!)!
search your contentsearchbox [search]post controls!
blogs (pages)!
forums (channels)!
8000 word limit (be afraid, be very afraid muhahaha!)
and so much more...
Anyway, here's to a new #Fedi adventure! :catodon:💜🐻🎉
How did we go from way too many semi popular english Misskey forks to literally only having one soon (Sharkey)
Firefish kinda had its moment but currently doesn't seem that much will happen
Foundkey while still maintained is not really meant for more than one user instances
Iceshrimp is currently doing an full C# or well rather they are doing their own thing not using the MisskeyAPI and also rewriting the frontend, which means when thats done they aren't really part of the Misskey Family of forks anymore
Catodon, from the start is not trying to be anything like misskey and more like a user friendly mastodon-key mix, but they are also interested in using Iceshrimp as a kinda upstream meaning they would also not be part of the Misskey Family of Forks
how did we go from #Sharkey being hated on for being another #misskey fork, to it being the only major true english misskey fork left, if #firefish doesn't comeback to life and if iceshrimp continues its rewrite
After #Catodon (and the situation with #Firefish) went public, we've certainly had a lot of support and positive feedback. However, there were also people who shared irony and negativity. There were people who seemed happy to see Firefish's state, and who would be happy if Catodon failed. Some didn't like our name. Some found it unacceptable that the name resembles Mastodon, whereas we start as a Misskey fork. It's sort of a tribute, people. We're in a way a Mastodon alternative where you can be a cat. And we'll improve our Mastodon API support so you can use Catodon with Mastodon apps. No need to take things so seriously and with a hostile stance, if what we're doing doesn't click with you that's fine, we never asked you to like us. There are certainly better things to define and present youself than by your dislike towards an open source project. We're not hurting anyone, we're trying to build a free tool that people may find useful. Lose the hate, it's only a burden.
Just learned about the demise of #Firefish (head is M.I.A.). It's unfortunate for the thousands of instances running it, but with that comes #IceShrimp, #Sharkey, and #Catodon. All of them (I think) are being developed by former Firefish devs. Options.
Hopefully, current FF users are all, if they want to, able to move to another actively-developed community easily.
Im honestly kinda disappointed in all the people jumping on catodon now and calling it firefish successor its kinda very bad as the devs don't intend it to be a firefish successor nor is it trying to be anything like firefish or misskey in general, talking about migrating to catodon while also calling it firefish sucessor is like punching the catodon devs in the face
as they try to create something simple for newer users, not something for existing key users that enjoy fun shit like MFM
please everyone do you research before spreading shit this is also very harmful to the project at least from my POV. if everyone starts hyping the project for something that it is not.
please just give @panos and @catodon some time, and don't put them under pressure for something its not.
If you want a Misskey fork that is unlikely to die as its a softfork (updates with misskey) anytime soon and is community focused and includes #firefish inspired changes go with #sharkey
if you really really want to stick with the firefish sort of thing of doing things try the firefish fork #iceshrimp
and if u want something new more geared towards new users / casual users try looking into #catodon
but don't just jump the gun on things u don't even know fully about
Welp the bomb has been dropped, former #firefish team members basically telling us what we suspected is true firefish is basicly dead, since this is out now i might as well talk about some firefish things even tho i hate this happening i don't feel like i should continue to stay quite on some of the issues, as part of my promise to the firefish devs i've talked to i will not mention some things that i know of but will tell my personal experiences with the project and why i think the project is unlikely to recover.
well lets start of with the apparent issue, firefish is kainoa's project and as such he is fully in charge of the project, the issue is that firefish has been seemingly developed in a way that's basically right out of the Portal Quotes book
"I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the wall here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do. Probably nothing"
this Quote perfectly describes what firefish has been doing over the last releases, stuff like rust was added never to be touched again, scylladb was hyped and worked on (apparently because discord uses it?) just to be basically scrapped, and rewrite in bun was planned?
the attitude was basically adding stuff and making changes without fixing the underlying issues, firefish suffers from alot and by alot i mean a fuck ton of technical issues these won't magically be solved by rewriting it, or changing db sure rewrittes and switching to a better db can help (scylladb is not better for a thing like firefish btw) but that's just putting duck tape on the issue, instead a focus should have been to work on the underlying issues fixing whats causing the issues, like the monster db querys not to mention the fact that some things like scylladb were apparently done even tho multiple firefish devs adviced against it (not a firefish dev can't confirm this but ive been told such)
but also as we have seen firefish is extremely dependent on Kainoa being there, without him being there not much can be done on the firefish side of the team which is also very bad a project should not collapse as hard as firefish because the main dev is missing for multiple weeks, thats why in the ideal case u have multiple project leads
but even if kainoa comes back and everything returns to normal for a bit if firefish does not majorly change their attitude towards development and organization the project will just continue to crash straight into a wall
that said don't start harassing any of the firefish devs or even kainoa
firefish is a foss hobby project and projects come and go
as of writing this post both main firefish instances firefish.social and stop.voring.me are still down or up but don't federate and|or otherwise unusable
EDIT: if you are currently running firefish its highly recommended u consider migrating to either Sharkey, Iceshrimp or Catodon, ofc im going to recommend #sharkey but please do your own research
admin accounts on firefish can't migrate. supposedly this can be fixed by commenting out one line in a file, then rebuilding, but this doesn't work with docker compose. this is a problem that I don't know how to solve.
If you were to demo the #fediverse to somebody who had never heard of it, and only had time to show one single feature, what would you demo?
I don’t mean a demo that focuses on #mastodon or #lemmy or #firefish or any other software, but that focuses on the special value that the network, the fediverse, brings.
One that gets the coveted “wow” in response to the demo. Thoughts?
Alright, we wanna be as transparent as possible, so here's a small update on #Catodon's development: The idea so far was to have our first release more as a debloated, to some extent, version of firefish, which would be more like the foundation to build our next releases on, rather than something representative of what we want Catodon to be. But it turns out that, in order for things to be smooth in the first release, we'd have to fix some stuff that would need to be refactored anyway for the second release. So we realized it's better to just get directly to it.
So, what does this mean? We'll be sort of merging our first and second planned releases. This unfortunately means that we'll need more time to get where we want to. My advice to you, if you are running a #Firefish server and thinking of migrating, is to either stay on Firefish for the time being, or migrate to Iceshrimp - it will be easy to migrate to Catodon later if you want. The good news is that, when Catodon is finally released, I think it will be worth the wait, it won't be just a transitional version, and I'm much more excited now for the upcoming release. And yes, you can go back to Misskey and forget about firefish forks but... I wouldn't do that if I were you =)
firefish project in trouble (blahaj.zone)
bad news for firefish > the project is caught in limbo & might be discontinued #firefish