I was on firefish’s previous instance, known as calckey, before I migrated back to Mastodon.
There were definitely warning signs that the project was facing maintenance issues in those days as well, and it felt that the Firefish rebrand was an attempt to “start a new”.
But just like my post on KBin’s demise, it should be a warning to those who want to make the software and host a “big” instance: Don’t do it. I think it’s smart to host your own mini instance for testing, but you should probably solely focus on the code development side of things to make sure that you aren’t over burdening yourself with managerial tasks. If your software is good, people will make spins inevitably. If people use it, then you will probably have enough people contributing that you can scale up your mini-instance if needed. But don’t jump in without the finances in place, because you’re essentially taking on two jobs.
It did when it was still called Calckey, but around the time of the rebranding their main server got into issues (Kainoa, the previous maintainer, was messing around with it to improve performance but that just broke things).
RIP. Was on firefish a few months but saw the writing on the wall back then and jumped ship. In retrospect, probably the 3rd or 4th federated product I’ve been a user of that flamed out. WATTBA
Did the Misskey network not advise against e.g. EU people signing up because of legal reasons like GPDR? Anyway, Iceshrimp works very much as intended and has active development so that could be an alternative for some people (have no experience with Sharkey).
Yeah it looked promising. Also a shame I never got to try it properly because it didn’t work for me from the start. Home timeline never loaded and errored out and I never got any kind of support response so gave up on it. Oh well.
Glad I held back from suggesting Firefish for my wife. I’ve been slowly trying to convince her to jump to the fediverse for microblogging and figured to have her try Firefish simply because it’s prettier than Mastodon. Guess it’s back to ol’ Mastodon.
It's very sad to see yet another great ActivityPub project disappear. Feel free to try Mbin, if you do not want to go back to Mastodon or something like that.
Also this work/life balance issues seems to be a repeating pattern in the AP development scene, I wish we could do something about it to make it more sustainable for developers.
Great question! I never shared this story. I can only answer this from my own perspective and NOT on behalf of the entire project or other devs if you can imagine. And you're correct every open-source project can have this similar situation.
I try to make Mbin as decentralized as possible in terms of development, contributors and no single-maintainer. I hopefully advise that by putting time and effort in writing out the C4 specification: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/C4.md. This means that every contributor can become a maintainer. So even today, I'm not the only maintainer and hopefully I will never be the only maintainer. And this goes as far as full access on the git repo(s) as well as Matrix chats.
Recently, a very dedicated contributor did left Mbin sadly without any announcement. This person is still being missed to this day (I hope he is doing well in RL). So bad things do happen, at the same time I hope we as a project will also attract new developers and contributors (even documentation, translation or picking up a simple UI change can already help a lot and often that is the best way to getting started).
I believe it's important to also take some time off. Like in the recent holiday period I forced myself to take some time off. Even then, I also do feel the pressure sometimes. At the same time; nobody is actually pressuring me. Crazy right?. Nobody is paying me to contribute to Mbin. And nobody expect me to spend time on it daily. So it's important to be aware of this situation and know it's mainly in your own head, sometimes just let it go... But you're right, you do feel a kind of obligation.
I also asked among the contributors if you should accept any form of money or NLnet funding or anything in that regard. Our common conclusion was: NO. Because we are doing it for fun, asking money will only create a situation were you might even feel more obligated.
Luckily the state of Mbin is also getting better and better over time. I'm really glad about that. In the past year we really focused on stability and scalability. Mbin also inherited a lot of issues from /kbin to be honest, and we really did some major overhauls to get the stability we and the server admins want and need (thank you all for this!). I can say that we are now in a good spot at the moment, Hopefully we also stay focused on the quality of the code, so the project will still be alive for years to come. Since nothing is worse then inheriting technical dept on top of a huge pile of issues, that is no fun.
Developing software for the fediverse is in general quite demanding work, no doubt about that. On top of the social media drama that often also happens. So the most important part of each open-source project is the community, the people, the interactions we have. The jokes we sometimes make. I can't thank the community enough and in the end we are all part of the fediverse community, so only we can make it fun and lead by example.
I think we are getting there. Currently the biggest problem I see is that melroy and I are currently the main contributors with other experienced contributors gone or at least not regularly active (which is of course their right, but its just how it is). I do have a whole lot of ideas and plans for features and I am working on a lot simultaneously, though I wouldn't say that it is a burden, more like a fun hobby. Admittedly this hobby takes a lot of time though 😅
I am very happy that new contributors are currently dipping their toe in the water and I hope they do stick around. Also a lot of the server admins are active in the matrix chat to help others out. So in this regard we are not alone.
I was honestly shocked that debounced left so suddenly and basically completely vanished... I didn't think that anyone would do that... So honestly we cannot promise anything, but I think melroy will stay around and I certainly will as well 😇
Sad, but mostly awful that the project has gone down in such a messy way. That sounds like a tremendous personal load that was completely uncalled for.
Popular take, but I also thought it was dead. I was on Firefish and noticed it was seriously degraded in day to day use. I started with Mastodon, but the *isskey platforms just have a better ux/ui (IMO) and I really didn't want to go back to Mastodon. So now I'm on Sharkey, and hoping this one sticks around!
Iceshrimp is also in a weird place right now, as it’s currently also in maintenance mode while the ongoing iceshrimp.NET full rewrite is happening. Seeing the OP’s comments about the Firefish codebase, that rewrite might be just what’s needed - provided it’s actually completed.
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