237
Panos Damelos (Catodon) (@panos)
catodon.socialUgh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social.
So, yeah, if you haven't noticed, things aren't looking good for firefish. Its owner, Kainoa, has practically abandoned the project, which had its last stable release out on July. My last message to them was a week ago, and I haven't heard back since. Firefish.social, besides the other severe technical problems it's had due to mismanagement in the last few months, now also has serious federation issues. I hope Kainoa is well irl, but this is irresponsible and unacceptable.
I hear some of you saying "but you're in the core team too, don't try to put the blame elsewhere!". So I have to explain what being a core team member in firefish meant. Kainoa invited me, Namekuji and a few others to be part of the "core team", but kept all decisions and responsibilities. We didn't co-own this. We never shared donations. We were just volunteers, who were honestly trying to make it a great project. This didn't work well due to concentration of power to one person, who didn't keep their promises. I don't mean to be harsh to Kainoa, I mean we knew they were only 19 when they started the project. Still, it's a bummer to anyone who chose to trust and support Firefish. This includes myself.
I don't know if it's early to consider firefish a dead project, but it sure seems like that for a few months now. Maybe it can be resurrected, idk. It's all up to Kainoa.
In the meantime, Namekuji and I are starting #Catodon, which will have some differences with Firefish, and will include many changes I had discussed with Kainoa but were never implemented. If you decide to stick with us, we promise to be serious about this. I strongly believe in the fediverse and its potential, and I want to build a great platform for it. This was my goal when I chose to be involved in Calckey/Firefish. It's still my goal with Catodon, only this time I can stand behind it 100%, as the project will be co-managed by Namekuji and me. If Firefish left you with a bitter aftertaste, we hope we can build a better relationship and prove ourselves worthy of your trust. Catodon will go public in a matter of days, possibly even hours. We'll have more to say about its direction then.
In the meantime, I just wanted to share my apologies for any inconvenience regarding Firefish, as I'm still technically a core team member, whatever that means. But frankly, I tried so hard to make things go differently - but there's only so much you can do when it's someone else's project. I'm really sorry for how things went.
But this is not the end of the fedi journey for me. I'm super excited about the chance to do some things right this time with Catodon. Life goes on, I guess! Hope to see you soon on our #codeberg repo, so we can start a new creative adventure together =)
:catodon: xx
Just a headsup for any server admins running Firefish, apparently it is no longer being maintained. One of the core developers of Firefish has written about the situation in the link provided.
We partly moved to ice shrimp, but it was quite divergent from Hajkey, and after being burnt by our Calckey experience, we lost a lot of momentum and energy, so it’s sort of sat there in a mostly working state, not ice shrimp and not Hajkey for a while now.
Once we’re both back from South America though, we’ll do a migration to Sharkey (a direct soft fork of Misskey). After that, Kaity will look at gradually adding our Hajkey specific features directly in to Sharkey where possibly.
Wait, what? How is anybody supposed to keep up with so many forks? Why does everyone and their mom rather make their own fork than to work together? What’s even the problem with Misskey to begin with?
It’s like eating at a fancy restaurant up in here.
Just wait until you hear about the number of Linux distros 😛
Most are just repackagings of Debian and Ubuntu, not actual forks.
You’re not. The only people who need to know are instance admins choosing what platform to run. If you’re not an admin you can deep dive as much or as little as you like in to the differences between the forks!
It’s both of those things. This stuff is all open source. For our fork, Hajkey for example, we added the stuff that we wanted that wasn’t anywhere else. We’d also submit our changes to Calckey (which would later rename to Firefish due to a name clash) if the Calckey team wanted them. Some they did (like translation, post editing etc) and some they didn’t (such as our timeline filters).
So we were doing our own thing and working together.
Sharkey does the same thing, but they feed back in to Misskey.
And as a user, if that’s too much to bother with, well, most of the differences are minor and you can just ignore it all, and pick your preferred instance for other reasons
And how are admins supposed to know which the week’s hottest fork is? If I google for Sharkey, the results I get are people with that Irish surname, most notably Feargal Sharkey. When I google for Hajkey, https://git.hajkey.org/hajkey comes up which doesn’t even open in a web browser (perhaps the web server is down and now only a git client can access it, no idea and how would I get an idea about that…). Googling for Ice Shrimp mostly results in recipes and photos on shrimp on crushed ice.
I start to understand why everyone rather makes a new fork: Because nobody knows of other projects to contribute to.
Admins know which forks are which and what benefit they bring because they’re active in spaces talking about this stuff, and often talking to other admins.
A first time admin with no real Fediverse experience won’t end up running any of those forks.
Sure…
My apologies. I incorrectly assumed you were involved in this conversation in good faith, rather than looking for an axe to grind.
ooh yess thank you i didn’t mean to imply i was in charge or anything i was just reading from the announcement :3
Hah, no stress. That’s not how I read your comment. I was just taking the chance to expand on it :)