Reflecting on the firefish/calckey “moment”

which was about a year ago now, I can’t help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of #mastodon in the #fediverse

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that’s smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse
#firefish #calckey

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

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  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    I’m on a Firefish instance and have been really enjoying the features but the constant *key forks and failures means I am not exactly committing myself to it (I also have a Mastodon account). However, I am also not the biggest micro-blogger as that needs brevity. Perhaps when/if I find the right home that’ll change.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    7 months ago

    Copying the linked thread here (cuz I stuffed it up):

    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.

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    Firefish did well at presenting itself as “professional”, capable and rich. But these were over-promises, and despite a number of people being involved or contributing, a good deal of user enthusiasm, the whole thing fell into a heap.

    And that’s the bit that concerns me. How many people/teams are there both capable and willing to put up a good, successful and sustainable platform?

    The #firefish lesson may be that the fediverse just hasn’t attracted a healthy building culture/personnel. 3/3

    • 0xtero@beehaw.org
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      7 months ago

      Thanks for the context.

      And yeah - a lot of fedi is built on spur of the moment inspiration without much planning on the long term. Sometimes it works out (like pixelfeed and the other related projects) and sometimes the passion of one (or small group) of devs just isn’t enough.

      Lemmy is pretty good example (from the other side of the scale) as well - we’re at version 0.18.4 - and the devs are pretty hostile.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
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        7 months ago

        Lemmy is pretty good example (from the other side of the scale) as well - we’re at version 0.18.4 - and the devs are pretty hostile.

        Don’t know exactly what you mean … but AFAICT, this is a relatively beehaw situation, for better or worse.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        7 months ago

        As far as I can tell, Lemmy was just a bad choice for Beehaw. The people maintaining Beehaw don’t have the knowledge or skills to maintain the software themselves (as Lemmy us written in Rust), but they also don’t want to update their software at the moment.

        I’m not sure of the reasons why Beehaw decided not to bother updating, but trying to run a stable platform on decidedly unfinished software (note the 0 in the version number) written by a tiny group probably wasn’t the best choice.

        However, Beehaw also doesn’t seem to have found an alternative, nor do they seem interested in building something themselves, so I guess Beehaw will have to linger in limbo for a while.

        • 0xtero@beehaw.org
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          7 months ago

          Yeah, as a beehaw user, I’m pretty familiar with the situation. I’m not going to re-hash the whole thing here (and I don’t represent the instance), but let’s just say PR’s for features were offered, but not accepted. Discussion was attempted but it resulted in Lemmy devs asking beehaw to fuck off - so that’s the end of that.

          There’s an alternative being tested. I believe we’re going to Sublinks, but there’s still active development going and sizeable migration. So we’re still here. For the time being.

    • Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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      7 months ago

      To me, FireFish got replaced by IceShrimp. Good looking interface, nice features (Antenna) and regular releases.

  • 0xtero@beehaw.org
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    7 months ago

    Congrats and/or condolences for this “moment”.

    I guess I’d have to check mastodon to find the rest of this thread and the context of what it actually references. Posting into Lemmy/Kbin groups from long mastodon threads is quite janky experience, I find.

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