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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[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 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. ;)

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 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?