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Firefish (@firefish)
info.firefish.dev**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
Edit: Removed the photos due to lemmy crawler displaying the toot.
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.
You can suggest Akkoma to her if you want a Mastodon alternative.
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
Closer to Firefish would be Iceshrimp, a fork of Firefish started when the writing started to appear on the wall.
Does anyone know if Mastodon have that “multiple frontends” thing Lemmy has?
There are some. Mastodon has a lot of garbagey nonsense, but they do at least have a proper API which will let you make a non-shit front end if you wanted.
That’s not what I mean. Lemmy has two separate repositories: one for the backend, and one for the default frontend. New frontends can be written and straight-up hooked into the server’s backend instead of making all those API calls. For example, see https://photon.lemmy.dbzer0.com/ vs https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/.
Well, Lemmy’s front end talks to it’s back end via an API, which is pretty much how every web app of any scale works these days.
There’s really not any particular difference between a monolithic app vs a seperate front end in terms of “all those API calls” since everything is basically calling APIs at this point, if they’re not made by complete incompetents. (In the case of Mastodon, though, I suppose complete incompetent is possible.)
Oh, I didn’t realize that.
photon doesn’t directly communicate with the backend, it’s not intended for that. but even then, lemmy-ui is almost entirely client side (for some reason) and it makes its calls to the API
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See what I said above. I don’t mean clients, I mean frontends.
Have you checked out Tangerine UI
https://github.com/nileane/TangerineUI-for-Mastodon
Sharkey might also be worth a look.