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Otter @lemmy.ca

Is Firefish gone for good now? Many of the links I had saved are redirecting to other stuff now

Links below:

  • https://firefish.social/ - Redirects to a Korean warranty (?) company
  • joinfirefish.org - Domain is available, but very expensive
  • https://vancity.social/ - Seems to time out after some time
21 comments

  • 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)

    • Oh so firefish.io was related, that's unfortunate

  • Unfamiliar with it, but in the regard of instances going down, specially after my previous main instance died with no signs of returning (again), if you find any interesting posts even on instances seemingly stable, I think it is a good idea to back up those pages. Personally, I would propose methods like Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and its alternatives like Archive Today, the print to PDF option from browsers, and/or saving a given page as a MHTML bundle.

    • 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).

  • firefish[.]social is even worse, that's (illegal) online gambling site! Sad to see its domain sold to those bastards.

  • I remember being really intrigued by Firefish a while back, but after attempting to use it a bit it was clearly not ready for casual everyday use. What's the status on it/its forks? Does anyone use any of it, and have any recommendations?

    • Iceshrimp and Sharkey are good alternatives

    • 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)

      • I'll keep an eye on Iceshrimp. I always wanted to like Mastodon, but the chronological feed never did it for me - I think I've been spoiled by algorithms. Antennas in Firefish seemed like a decent compromise.

        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.

    • @Coelacanth@feddit.nu

      What's the status on it/its forks? Does anyone use any of it, and have any recommendations?

      I use Sharkey instance as my main and it's pretty good, it's stays upstream with Misskey (Like Glitch-don stays upstream with Mastodon), so I feel like there's a smaller chance of it being abandoned

      @otter@lemmy.ca

  • I still wish it remained Calckey

21 comments