Announcement: Firefish will enter maintenance mode

For those who have been supporting Firefish and me, I can’t thank you enough. But today, I have to make an announcement of my very difficult decision: As of today’s release, Firefish will enter maintenance mode and reach end-of-support at the end of the year. The main reasons for this are as follows.

In February, Kainoa suddenly transferred the ownership of Firefish to me. This transition came without prior notice, which took me aback. I still wish Kainoa had consulted with me in advance. At that time, some people were already saying that “Firefish is coming back”, making it challenging to address the situation. Also, since there were several hundred active Firefish servers at that point, I could not suddenly discontinue the project, so I took over the project unwillingly.

Over the past seven months, I have been maintaining Firefish alone. All other former maintainers have left, leaving me solely responsible for managing issues, reviewing merge requests, testing, and releasing new versions. This situation has had a significant impact on my personal life.

Frankly speaking, there are numerous bugs and questionable logic in the current Firefish codebase. While I attempted to fix them, balancing this work with my personal life made it clear that it would take ages, and I’ve started thinking that I can’t manage this project in the long run. Additionally, vulnerabilities have been reported approximately once a month. Addressing vulnerabilities, communicating privately with reporters, and testing fixes have proven overwhelming and unsustainable. Moreover, a certain percentage of users have made insulting comments, which have severely affected my mental well-being and made me fearful of opening social media apps.

I will do my best to refund the donations made to Firefish via OpenCollective, but that’s not guaranteed.

firefish.dev and info.firefish.dev will remain operational until the end of February 2025, after which they will return a 410 Gone status.

Server admins may downgrade Firefish to version 20240206/1.0.5-rc and migrate to another *key variant, or may fork Firefish to maintain.

Downgrade instructions: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish/-/blob/downgrade/docs/downgrade.md

Thanks,
naskya

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As with all things in life, as soon as I touch it, it explodes, lmao.

I think this means I'm done with trying to host fedi-Twitter. Discoverability on a small instance sucks, maintenance on a small instance sucks, and the software available designed to do a reasonable small instance doesn't exist.

That, and since relays are almost entirely required if you expect ANY useful content discoverability, you're just wasting a huge amount of resources on crap you don't want, don't care about, and can't really delete because all of these pieces of software expect you to keep everything from everywhere forever.

Think I'll just do a rm -rf and get that ~25gb of disk space back and stick with Lemmy (which is my preferred interaction format anyways).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like.. uncomfortable business? :)

More seriously though, couldn't a.gup.pe help with discoverability? Tag a larger group, and the post is automatically forwarded to a lot of servers and shown to a fair share of users.

But yeah, bring on a smaller fedi server for microblogging has obvious drawbacks that people tend to brush over. It does require more effort to become discovered.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to get shit on, but outside of Lemmy, there are just... no active groups on the various fediverse group site aggregators that I'm remotely interested in.

It's all news, politics, political news, and political peacocking. Which fine, if that's what you're after, but I'm here for nerd shit, and Lemmy is utterly completely awash in nerd shit.

The other problem is an ActivitPub problem. Even if you follow someone, if you're not following every single human on fucking earth, you're not going to see all the replies to their posts on your server. So your clever post was already made 8 hours ago, and unless you click on another link that takes you to their instance you can't actually browse what replies actually exist before posting.

Which is just stupid: if I have to visit someone else's shit in order to see if I should reply, I might as well just you know, use that server and save myself the trouble.

IDK, I liked the UX and it was interesting while it lasted, but it was really just a massive resource drain and had far less interesting nuggets than other options did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, very fair. I'm lucky enough that the things I use Mastodon for has more or less established communities there.

The federation of comments is a huge headache. Intuitively it makes no sense the way it's solved - if I go to the comment section, I don't want a bunch of it to be randomly hidden from me. It's something that just needs to be solved better, even though we'll always see slightly different things as not all content is equally welcome everywhere.

I'm happy Lemmy works better for you though! I think it might just be a better format for nerd stuff. I like Mastodon for many things, but this is where I go to embrace nerd stuff. Politics here are more insufferable than at the Mastodon instance I'm on though. ;)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I'm not one to tell developers what to do, but from a user perspective, comments (which is like, most of the damn point, no?) are effectively broken and that makes the whole platform kinda... defective.

I've discovered I follow topics but very very rarely care about who is posting/commenting, which makes microblog feeds doubly not my thing. Forums and Lemmy match far more what I'm after than Twitter-style feeds ever will, because the amount of curation to find a single interesting person (who then doesn't turn out to be an utter monster) is just... too much involvement for some idle time-wasting.

Also I don't know what you mean about the politics being insufferable on Lemmy, comrade. Perhaps you need to take a nice long vacation to the People's Re-education Retreat and hot spring?