It seems like there's a rivalry brewing between #Sharkey and #Iceshrimp on which one's gonna be the definitive "Western #Misskey" of the #fediverse :sagume_think:
One could even say that there's a.. cold war going on between them 🥁:laughing_cirno:
If this gets added in, this will bring in Misskey (and #Sharkey too!) a lot more compatible third-party clients.. :gyate_patchouli_wow: Thus the issue of lack of clients in Misskey is workarounded and we may not need the #Mastodon#API (aka #MastoAPI) after all... :sagume_think:
This also AFAIK makes Misskey the first mainstream #fediverse software out there to support Micropub; earlier than Mastodon! :SuikaWOW:
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.
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.
Ich betreibe eine Misskey-Instanz (YunoHost), die ordentlich funktioniert, föderiert (98 föderierte Instanzen in der Liste) und bei welcher die Suche (Notizen und Handles) gut funktioniert. Sie weist aber einige Unzulänglichkeiten auf, die auf die wirklich alte Version (12.119.2) zurückzuführen sind. Leider bin ich durch den Betrieb mittels YunoHost auf Updates der Betreuer der YunoHost App angewiesenund da scheint nichts mehr zu passieren.
Deshalb habe ich kürzlich eine weitere Instanz mittels #docker installiert (nach der Anleitung der Misskey Dokumentation). Das hat auch problemlos funktioniert. Es läuft dort nun Misskey Version 2023.12.2 unter der "jungfräulich" angelegten Domain pepekey.pepecyb.de und frischem Zertifikat. Es sind etliche Relays eingetragen (Misskey, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish, Hubzilla, Friendica Instanzen). Trotzdem hängt die Zahl der föderierten Server bei 19, die Suche von Notizen bringt wenig Ergebnisse und die Suche nach (bekannten) Handles fast gar keine. Ich konnte etlichen Nutzern nur folgen, indem ich in der Notizsuche z.B. die Domain des Handles eingegeben habe und mich durch die Ergebnisliste gescrollt habe, bis zufällig mal ein Beitrag des gesuchten Nutzers auftauchte. Über das Handle konnte ich dann ("+") folgen. Was mich besonders erstaunt: Gebe ich das Handle eines Nutzers, dem ich nun folge (und dessen Beiträge in meiner Timeline erscheinen) in die Nutzersuche ein, so erhalte ich trotzdem noch immer kein Ergebnis ("Keine Benutzer gefunden").
Woran kann das liegen? Ich habe schon intensiv gesucht, finde aber keine Lösung. Kann mir jemand auf die Sprünge helfen, an welcher Stelle ich nach dem Fehler suchen kann und wie ich ihn ggf. beseitigen kann?
My Thoughts on Misskey/Sharkey aka fun with markdown
The world of Misskey is an interesting beast. Being mostly popular in Japan Misskey itself isn't widely used outside of the East. Here in the West we enjoy one of many forks that have sprung up most recently Sharkey.
The biggest difference you'll immediately notice is the UI. Oh my the UI. Colors and delightful button presses galore. Everything is animated, elements are often semitransparent/frosty, and the customization is endless. From a full css theming engine to little touches like wallpapers and animated emotes. The world of Facebook style reacts is alive and well on this fork of the fediverse but on steroids.
It's packed with features like an advanced integrated markdown format called MFM. You can do everything with it. Big text. Little text. Emojis that go spinnnnnn. It's like having superpowers at your figer tips.
You also get a neat little cloud drive akin to google/onedrive that stores all your images, videos, etc with a hardcap of (usually) 1Gb. This makes it easy to pop in to your drive and get links or clean out old photos you no longer want to be accessible by the internet at large.
Hashtags? Yes of course. The Mastodon staple returns here but with a twist. No longer do you follow hashtags in your main feed, but you place them into separate containers called "antennae." These little guys can be stuffed with hashtags under different categories that will crawl out into Mastodon and scrounge up anything they find with the keywords you input. A very nice feature to be sure.
You want xbox style achievements in your social media? ✅ Fun little flash games? ✅ There's loads of little things I haven't even touched on like a social feed that combines your home and local timelines. A bubble feed that links to servers set by your admin (typically sister servers that are very similar to your local). And...and...and...
You get the point. There's a lot here. There's a. lot. here. Honestly, at the end of the day, it might just be too much of a good thing for me. You see there aren't many apps that are compatible with Misskey/Sharkey and of the few you can use nearly all of them strip the fun UI design out of the website in favor of an atypical mobile layout for your respective OS turning it into essentially vanilla mastodon with reactions. This pushes me into using the PWA app/web browser to browse the site which looks spectacular but DESTROYS your battery. My phone gets hot. Like.. HOT. Sweat trickles down my forehead as I watch my battery percentage slip away.
Furthermore with all those pretty lights, animations, and colors the UI gets a bit overstimulating. Now when I go back to a vanilla mastodon instance I'm like, "ah yes there is beauty in simplicity." The information you want is presented cleanly with slick performance and ease of use.
Another fun fact about Misskey: some of the defederation logic works by inserting the entire list of blocked instances directly into each individual query. This, of course, kills the Postgres.
How did syuilo find this low-effort shitpost I just replaced a few words on, I literally did not mention him (despite how tempting it is to actually do :koakuma_giggle:, but it kinda is rude to mention people for such a random post :sagume_think:) :koishtare:
Does he have an #antenna listening for every mention of his handle or #Misskey without the hashtag :chuckling_okuu:
I could not locate the tech support contact info for #NASA or the #Whitehouse, but I did message them both them via their general contact forms.
I asked if they would consider installing the #ActivityPub plugin on their respective #WordPress websites, so that the #Fediverse can follow their content unfiltered by any algorithm or angry super villian firing rockets into space.