ShittyKopper

I also wish there was an app that let me browse/post/comment on Lemmy using a Firefish/Iceshrimp account so I could theoretically consolidate accounts.

that'll be difficult. Lemmy killed interoperability when they first decided that users and groups could share the same username, and now itd be a breaking change in order to solve this on Lemmy's end.

each software willing to federate with Lemmy correctly needs to be modified to handle multiple "users" having the exact same username, and i suspect most have more important priorities to tackle before getting to that

(misskey 12 derived software also has their own interoperability bugs regarding Lemmy, but those are usually not as big of a refactor as the username thing)

It was never unusable beyond the stability issues large instances (from 1k to howevermany people ff.social had) had. For smaller instances it worked fine and continues to do so. The issues with large servers were the result of it being based on an ancient codebase (Misskey v12) with extremely questionable changes thrown on top (muting enough words could cause the entire instance to slow down), and the issues with ff.social were specifically caused by throwing everything at the wall to try to duct-tape that ancient codebase to function (ScyllaDB was the nail in the coffin i believe...?)

Firefish itself is still going (see firefish.dev), there are forks like Iceshrimp which reigned in the issues enough for larger servers to not fall over every few seconds (iirc both the infosec.exchange hosted Firefish instances migrated over which caused the main issues to be found and fixed). I wouldn't be surprised if "Modern" Firefish took the most important changes over from Iceshrimp (the devs are friendly, and the Mastodon API implementation and some security fixes were shared between both)

If you want something a bit lighter, Misskey itself is still ongoing, and there are forks like Sharkey that do some of the modifications Firefish and similar forks did to tailor it towards a non-Japanese audience.

(And Iceshrimp.NET is a project worth keeping an eye on, which aims to get rid of the technical debt of the Misskey codebase by completely rewriting it, but is not ready for much more than a single user instance just yet considering it's been a thing for just about a year)

Iceshrimp is a fork, yes, but Iceshrimp.NET (the repo you're linking to) is not, being a complete rewrite unassociated with any Firefish or Misskey code beyond keeping the database schema (for easier migrations).

No. They changed hands after the original developer decided to leave for good (and start some crypto scheme which, AFAIK, went nowhere). The repos are now at https://firefish.dev, and no official flagship exists (which IMO is the right way to develop a fedi software)

Simply by choosing a lesser used fedi software you're helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software's whims. So that's a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ""threadiverse"" that's Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that's Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you're, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.

Your own local communities being "dead" mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn't that much you can do there.

In my experience, it's always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it's true in the ""threadiverse"" (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).

So really, don't worry about the size of your own instance's communities. As long as you trust your instance's staff to keep you safe there's no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where "discoverability" is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.

Mastodon moves also take your following with you. You'll still have to reimport followers, but you don't lose your ""audience"".

There are software out there (Sharkey for microblogging (Firefish also had it but theirs was broken and leaked DMs), PixelFed for images from Instagram specifically) that allow some form of post imports, but these are only brand new posts that happen to have the same content as the old ones, and not "replacing the author of a post".

There are work going on regarding nomadic identity and more seamless account migrations across instances, but hell will freeze over before any of the mainstream fedi software implement anything close to that, mainly due to how significant of a conceptual change that is.

Mastodon's WIP implementation uses the conventions of Smithereen semi-standardized as FEP-400e. It's not something "incompatible with any other platform" (it's not commonly implemented, but it's not bespoke for no reason either). FEP-1b12 used by Lemmy also has it's own quirks (why are we Announceing activities?) and the specific implementation used by Lemmy will likely not interoperate far without breaking changes that will upset one or the other party, mainly the fact that users and communities can use the same webfinger handle.

Either every single other software needs to have specific quirks for Lemmy in order to handle this as most (reasonably) assume the username@domain combo will be globally unique, or Lemmy instances need to go on an account or community deletion spree to make this non-unique. You can easily DoS a user or community's federation outside the threadiverse bubble by setting up one of the other with the same username on the same instance.

PS: Lemmy is the only platform that has had an exploit that overshadows Mastodon’s success

what? I'd like to remind you Lemmy is the third most largest open AP server software. After Mastodon, and Misskey. (by a not insignificant margin, with Misskey having 8.6% of all known users by FediDB, and Lemmy having 3.8%) Just because they're Japanese doesn't make them any less a part of the network, and they do have their own innovations (MFM, and emoji reactions are just the ones that federate. They also had quotes before many others but I think they're not the first on that one).

small correction: the post that displays the instance you're on (https://void.rehab/notes/9umvfd1lgoulvm0j) won't work with "'regular" iceshrimp. it depends on an extra patch added to the version on void.rehab to function.

After seeing a team of fedi software developers drop their Matrix bridge to their Discord after the total lack of moderation tooling resulted in an extremely transphobic spam wave, I for one am not surprised.

Another team I'm aware of also dropped Matrix for other reasons, but went for Zulip instead, which is also open, but more collaboration oriented a la Slack rather than community oriented like Discord, which probably would not fit what the group in the OP is looking for.

Lemmy's cross posts are separate posts that just happen to link to the same thing. so only replies to the original post would be sent with the current design.

that said, i severely doubt Lemmy will gain anything from this. publishers will not be sending out their posts to any communities, and i highly doubt they will expose any fep-1b12 group actors you can subscribe as a community.

kbin/mbin with it's ability to follow users may work better, assuming people test their federation with software other than mastodon, and accept any of the interoperability bugs as actual bugs instead of ignoring them. (lemmy itself is no stranger to this: the fact that users and communities can share the same username break quite a bit)

tbf Lemmy's behavior is documented and standardized (https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/1b12/fep-1b12.md) it's just that their fallback code for instances that don't federate the Lemmy way also boosts the target posts for each update as opposed to just once on creation like you'd expect

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