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] 3 points 2 months ago

Same here, I also have several ways of supporting me, see: https://melroy.org/thanks.html.

I do have some small donations and 1 or 2 people paying monthly. But this is for all the open-source projects I contribute towards (which are 50+ projects), plus all the servers and infrastructure I run, plus all the time I spend helping people in the chat, forum or online.

Just to give people a perspective, a single 10GbE S5850-24S2Q switch from FS is costing me €1466 (excl VAT). A single rack DPU is costing me 593 euros (excl. VAT). A single DEC3852 firewall is costing me €1600 (excl. VAT). I now get 5 euro per month, so to cover of ONLY these 3 devices above, it will take: 731 months == 60 years. Don't get me started on all the other hardware I have, maintenance costs and electricity bills etc. We are talking way over €10.000 per year.

#support #donate