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.
I completely missed that #IceShrimp was doing a .NET rewriting. That's quite exciting, there wasn't a lot of .NET #ActivityPub implementation so far, and I'm curious to see how they will tackle some of the tricky parts of the protocol.
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# 😯
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 👪
Kinda big day tomorrow as catodon.social's getting updated to our latest dev version, since our announced rebase to #Iceshrimp is finished, which means that, if everything goes well, after tomorrow catodon.social will have all of the performance improvements of Iceshrimp, including full Mastodon API support. It took us back a few weeks but we think it was worth it, and now we can resume development towards our first release. #Catodon
Sadly it looks like #firefish is going to die a slow unmaintained death now, and I need to pick a successor to run.
#iceshrimp and/or #catodon appear to be the spiritual successors, but I think I'll be waiting to see who publishes and maintains a public Docker image first.
Bon visiblement les réglages fait dans PostgreSQL pour les workers semblent avoir résolu le problème, ça fait un peu moins d'un mois que tout tourne nickel du coup sans que la RAM pète un câble et que PostgreSQL ne se vautre 👍
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.
Websocket issue on Jistflow has been fixed, and we have migrated to #iceshrimp.
Jistflow previously ran Firefish, which was almost too good, but recently I discovered via the official Firefish matrix channel that there seems to be a little bit of hault in maintenance due to @kainoa not being available, based on really valid reasons which I'll agree with him that he need some time off to take care things IRL.
However noticing #iceshrimp and seeing that "they have been focused on stabilizing what exists over introducing new features" which is a very big YAY for me, coupled with the amazing team and community behind it, I'm excited to migrate Jistflow to it, and also help in maintaining #iceshrimp,
it also my greatest excitment to announce that Jistflow now has full support for mastodon API which means you can now use your favorite mastodon apps with Jistflow, this was made possible by #iceshrimp of course.
Finally made the jump off #FireFish, and swapped the live server over to #IceShrimp. Not an entirely smooth process if I'm honest - the migration instructions take a bit too much for granted. I've made records though, so I'll try to suggest alterations. Anyway, nice to be here 👋
It doesn't matter if you are new to the #fediverse or if you have been here forever, it's always good to keep in mind that (a) what server you pick, and (b) what software that server runs, matter.
I should admit am fairly new at this. I created my first fediverse account only a year ago. It was a #mastodon server with about 8,000 users. And while it "worked" there was something missing from the experience.
While researching the idea of hosting my own server, I discovered #FireFish which in turn led to discovering #IceShrimp. It's hard to describe how much better the experience is with IceShrimp.
The #UI is just so much better, and the feature set way more robust. The way it handles replies, the ability to quote, to use multiple emojis, etc.
If you have friends or family thinking about joining the Fediverse or are feeling unimpressed with your mastodon experience, I highly recommend getting an account running IceShrimp or other similar software.
Probably also worth mentioning that I also looked at using a #Wordpress integration and #Hubzilla#GoToSocial#Pleroma#Humhub and #Streams. I found them to be clunky; reminding me of how email was in the early 90s.
If the fediverse is going to thrive, then it needs to make a good first impression. Moving beyond mastodon is a good step in the right direction.
An interesting feature of the Misskey forks (#Forkeys) is Pages, long form posts with a CMS editor. I wrote about it, and the changes you can expect over the next year! Check it out.
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.
This development makes me very happy. #Iceshrimp is a project that involves many people who were important in #firefish development but were unhappy with how things were handled there, so at some level it feels like righting a wrong and bringing the broader community closer together - even if we've ended up with two projects, both of which I feel that cover different needs though. This is also an answer to everyone who thought that our corner in the fediverse was falling apart. We have a healthy ecosystem, we have ways to communicate and stay on good terms - let's build bridges, not walls! I like the place we are right now. Nature is healing =)
#Csharp rewrite and ditching the #Misskey API... It feels to me like they took one of the factors that led to #Firefish's downfall and said "hey we can do worse than that!" :SanaeConfuzzled:
We're one week into 2024, do you know what that means? Time to clean up your #SNS “following” especially here in the #Fediverse.
Check the “dormant” accounts if you can unfollow them.
Check which accounts “moved”. Follow their new account, then unfollow their old account.
And maybe there are other accounts that you haven't interacted with in the past few months; and their content is no longer something that you are interested, you can unfollow them too.
If you still want to see their content, you can encourage them to use #hashtags and you follow those hashtags. Or, join a federated “group” like those powered by #Mbin#Kbin#Friendica#Chirp and #Lemmy.
Of course, depending on the fediverse platform your instance is using, there are probably better features to the content of users without seeing their content that is not of interest to you. A good example, #Firefish / #Catodon / #IceShrimp can do that through the “Antenna” feature.
Take some time to do this, and start your 2024 fediverse better than 2023.