- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
108
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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.
I see. BTW, I never figured out the details either, but wanted to bring matters up anyway in case it still would be considered useful.
Honestly, I think the issue is still relevant because many users coming to fedi, don’t get exposed to this kind of discussion. I wasn’t. I was bored with mastodon so looked around and found firefish. But my instance was shutting down. So I decided to just use the source of all the *key software, misskey and went to sign up for misskey.io but couldn’t. I had to search a lot to finally figure out the situation. Later, I joined a smaller instance, instead of the flagship instance. My server admin is amazing. They run an instance that also follows US specific laws as well despite being primarily Japanese server because there are a few english users.
What I learned all of these is that, mastodon is not fedi, there are a lot of software, look around before you settle down. And instances with small number of users form a better community. So, you don’t have to choose the largest instance out there.