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Firefish is entering maintenance mode

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

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

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.

aasatru ,
@aasatru@kbin.earth avatar

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.

themadcodger ,
@themadcodger@kbin.earth avatar

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!

sabreW4K3 ,
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al avatar

Loved the branding and was so hopeful, but like everyone else, I long thought the project was dead.

Blaze ,
@Blaze@feddit.org avatar

I thought it was gone last February as mentioned in the post.

Again, sad to see, but good luck to IceShrimp, Sharkey and all the others!

Coelacanth ,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

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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