So the basic story would be that mastodon's dominance is pretty entrenched and the "migration" event is mostly "over" (whatever other "events" are on their way)
But I wonder about the details of the firefish moment
I think it revealed that there are/were plenty interested in novel & different platforms. We're novelty seekers after all right. Generally, I'd wager any new platform needs some degree of novelty to "make it".
Further, its collapse showed how hard creating a new platform is.
@maegul I’m not saying that you were blaming anyone. It’s just a shitty situation, one that I lament often.
I loved Firefish. I really thought the project had a moment where it was going to go big, but there were too many problems. It’s upsetting.
But yeah, I think we’re all hoping to see something get big like Mastodon, maybe even eclipse it. Why that hasn’t happened remains something of a mystery, with potentially depressing tells: most projects and developers in the space are barely making any income, are spread way too thin, and effectively doing hard work for years and years.
I want Fediverse projects to succeed. I think a few are in really good places. But, I worry that many are running themselves into the ground.
When you're blocked, I'm pretty sure its considered an asshole move to try to circumvent that block by using alts.
So rather than come back in with your alt to spew a multi-post manifesto, take the hint and go away. You weren't blocked because I "didn't like the answers," you were blocked because I have zero interest in a "you're doing it wrong" tech bro diatribe offering ridiculous solutions to end users that few have the time or inclination to implement.
And in case it gets lost in translation: Go away. You are not welcome in my @.
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!
uninstalling my previous instance which was #Calckey. Thank you for being my home on the #Fediverse for a while. I will miss the cat ears and the silly reactions.
but, with the spam stuff recently, it is time to come down. (after a backup of course...)
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.
Hat hier schon mal die Kommunikation zwischen #Gotosocial und #Friendica getestet?
Ich habe hier von Gotosocial Nutzern die Info erhalten, das er/sie mein Profil bzw. mein Profilbild nicht angezeigt bekommt.
Wenn er dann aber mit #Mastodon oder #Calckey einen Kontakt hat - dann wäre das gar kein Problem.
Da ich das jetzt nicht nachvollziehen kann in Ermangelung einer Gotosocial Instanz
I started out, like many, on #Mastodon, during the great Twitter migration. Not that I migrated from Twitter. No... I never had a Twitter account. Rather, I hoped that Mastodon could obtain the Network Effect, and help fundamentally alter the shape of social media for the foreseeable future.
So I made my own solo Masto instance and ran it for a good six months. It was cool. But then there was a glittery thing -- #Calckey -- that caught my eye. So I joined that. Pretty soon the maintainer of Calckey (young BTW) dropped out, but forks forked. I waited. Then #Firefish was the shit. But no...
Then, today, the admin of my former instance calckey.world made a new sharkey.world instance public, and I joined. #Sharkey is the new shit.
Because that's how I roll. On the Cutting Edge, baby.
Ummm ... Firefish was a rebrand of calckey ... same dev and everything. My impression was that some rust was being added to the project, but I wasn't aware that it was re-write in Rust ... my impression is that it was very much misskey under the hood.
Moreover, AFAIK, Sharkey is a fork of Misskey v13 and not associated with firefish at all (which was originally a fork of Misskey v~12).
@Lucy idk Spät, aber vielleicht bekomme ich das noch zusammen:
Der erste richtig große Forkey war Calckey von 2022. Wie in den frühen 2020ern üblich wurde das von Misskey softgeforkt, wohl vor allem, um Extrafeatures drankleben zu können und es ein bißchen mehr auf nicht-japanische Nutzer in der westlichen Welt zu trimmen. Dahinter steckte jemand, der sich ursprünglich ThatOneCalculator nannte, wonach auch Calckey benannt war, und später dann Kainoa.
Dann kam Supakaity, die Administratorin von blahaj.zone, und hat Calckey zu Hajkey softgeforkt, weil blahaj.social gewisse Änderungen und Spezialfeatures brauchte. Hajkey hat nur diese eine Instanz.
Bis irgendwann Anfang 2023 war ja der Pleroma-Fork Akkoma der heiße Scheiß im Fediverse, zumindest für die, denen Mastodon nicht reichte, die aber nicht irre genug waren, gleich den Schritt nach Friendica oder gar Hubzilla zu tun. Dann aber hat jemand Calckey so hart gepusht, daß es in aller Munde war und super-populär wurde. Weil es jetzt aber keine Nischenerscheinung war, war der Name "Calckey" auf einmal doof. Also wurde das Projekt in "Firefish" umbenannt und zwecks besserer Weiterentwicklung in einen Hard Fork umgewandelt.
Auch Hajkey wurde auf Firefish rebased und trägt hier und da immer noch Firefish-Logos, aber das ganze Projekt scheint im Gegensatz zu blahaj.zone tot zu sein. Die Website und das Repository sind jedenfalls offline.
Jetzt lag allerdings die gesamte Projektverantwortung für Firefish bei Kainoa, der auch die Leuchtturminstanz firefish.social administrierte. Und Mitte 2023 wurde Kainoa mit dem Studium fertig und begann in seinem Job. Und hatte auf einmal genau null Zeit mehr für Firefish in irgendeiner Form.
Ende 2023 wurde dann die Community langsam unruhig. Misskey hatte Firefish in der Entwicklung überholt. An Firefish war seit Juni 2023 genau überhaupt nichts mehr gemacht worden, weil der einzige, der irgendwas einpflegen und releasen konnte, also Kainoa, nichts mehr tat. Noch dazu machte firefish.social komplett die Grätsche, weil der einzige Tech-Admin, also Kainoa, futsch war.
Also war Eigeninitiative angesagt.
Iceshrimp wurde von Firefish hardgeforkt, um einen direkten Ersatz für Firefish zu haben. Dann wurde es meines Wissens quasi sofort auf Misskey rebased, weil Misskey die aktuellere Codebasis hatte, und gleich wieder zum Hard Fork gemacht. Aktuell wird das ganze Ding von Grund auf in C# neu geschrieben.
Hajkey wurde wohl mit einem Schweineaufwand auf Iceshrimp rebased. Wie gesagt, aktueller Status unklar.
Sharkey wurde direkt von Misskey softgeforkt mit der Intention, ein Misskey mit Firefish-Features zu bauen, das aber nie das als Basis längst untaugliche Firefish gewesen war. Gleichzeitig bewahrt sich Sharkey die Verspieltheit von Misskey. Also quasi das, was Calckey mal war, nur neuer.
Catodon ist noch vergleichsweise neu. Es ist auch ein Fork von Firefish, der von den anderen beiden Firefish-Kernentwicklern erstellt wurde und auf Iceshrimp rebased werden soll, und noch in der frühen Entwicklung. Und die Entwicklung steht momentan still. Man wartet darauf, daß der Rewrite von Iceshrimp fertig wird, um Catodon erst dann auf Iceshrimp zu rebasen und als Soft Fork von Iceshrimp weiterzuentwickeln. Bis dahin ist Catodon im Grunde "Firefish, aber mit anderem Logo und maintained". Die Idee hinter Catodon ist das technische Konzept von Misskey minus die japanische Anime-Verspieltheit von Misskey plus eine simple, auf den Geschmack westlicher Twitter-Umsteiger zugeschnittene Bedienung à la Mastodon.
Ach ja, Kainoa hat sich doch noch geregt. Vor vier Tagen hat er das seit Monaten völlig unbrauchbare firefish.social abgeschaltet, und gestern hat er das Projekt Firefish an sich in andere Hände übergeben. Ich glaube aber nicht, daß es wieder groß rauskommen wird oder irgendjemand, der Ahnung hat, darauf noch einen Fork basieren wird.
Meisskey ist wieder ganz was anderes. Das ist ein japanischer Fork von Misskey, der auch schon einige Jahre auf dem Buckel hat, auf dem Stand von Misskey 10 stehengeblieben ist und seinen letzten Pull Request vor fünf Monaten eingepflegt hat. Zum Vergleich: Firefish entspricht Misskey 12, während Misskey schon im Januar 2023 Version 13 rausbrachte und seit August ein ganz anderes Versionsnummernschema hat. Also Asbach Uralt.
Übrigens hat Misskey alleine auf GitHub an die 1200 Forks, von denen etliche eigene Namen haben. Und imaginäre Forkeys mit Namen mit irgendwas mit "-key" am Ende sind längst zum Meme geworden.
Is there a painless way to upgrade #calckey server (13.1.4.1) to something with more perspective (that will not die in the next 6 months)? What do you suggest? #Iceshrimp? #Sharkey? #Catodon?
I'm still running #calckey because I'm too lazy to update to any of later *fishes or other sea animals.
Will simply wait until one of the branches stabilizes.
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