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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

Iceshrimp and Sharkey are good alternatives

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

that'll be difficult. Lemmy killed interoperability when they first decided that users and groups could share the same username, and now itd be a breaking change in order to solve this on Lemmy's end.

each software willing to federate with Lemmy correctly needs to be modified to handle multiple "users" having the exact same username, and i suspect most have more important priorities to tackle before getting to that

(misskey 12 derived software also has their own interoperability bugs regarding Lemmy, but those are usually not as big of a refactor as the username thing)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Wait, what? Can a Lemmy instance have a /c/foo and /u/foo at the same time?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven't been keeping up on backend development so I didn't realise Lemmy made that change. That's a shame. Thanks for being so helpful though!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

oh no that's not a new change afaik it was always like this

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm fairly sure I was able to comment on Lemmy threads while experimenting with Firefish like a year ago - though it of course struggled with displaying threaded content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

that post will have been a text post, not a link (those are likely broken now, and certainly were broken a year ago due to a bug in the misskey 12 codebase inherited by firefish and forks. modern versions of misskey just fixed that a couple months ago)

the username thing does not completely break federation, but it will randomly confuse instances. there's a 50/50 chance whether an instance will get the correct user it asks or not, and once an instance resolves a user once it'll have a similar 50/50 chance for each profile update (icon change, sidebar change, etc.). of course, if there's no conflicting user for a community (or vice versa) then federation will be fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah, I see! Thanks for the explanation. I'd go back and check but firefish.social isn't around anymore.

It's really a shame since interoperability is such (theoretical) benefit of ActivityPub, but what can you do.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

the specs are so open ended that i doubt real interoperability will ever happen. you can break interoperability with basically every other current software out there and still be compliant with the specs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

@[email protected]

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

@[email protected]