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

Auster , 3 hours ago

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.

noodlejetski , 3 hours ago

looks like the code is still being worked on on Forgejo, but apart from that there doesn’t seem to be any presence established. looks like Iceshrimp is a fork of it: iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp.net

ShittyKopper , 1 hour ago

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).

ShittyKopper , 1 hour ago

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

otter OP , 1 hour ago

Oh so firefish.io was related, that’s unfortunate

Coelacanth , 1 hour ago

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?

Blaze , 50 minutes ago

Iceshrimp and Sharkey are good alternatives

ShittyKopper , 50 minutes ago (edited 43 minutes ago)

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)