Firefish has been abandoned.
Firefish has been abandoned.
Ugh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social. So, yeah, if you haven't not...
Just a headsup for any server admins running Firefish, apparently it is no longer being maintained. One of the core developers of Firefish has written about the situation in the link provided.
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Not to downplay all the blood, sweat, and tears that have been shed while making the fediverse work, but if I may offer some unsolicited advice to the author of the linked post: Publicly airing out a team’s dirty laundry tends to be… counter-productive. Usually it’s best to “keep it in the family.”
In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now. The author of this post could have just said “hey all, we apologize for the inconvenience, but the original project appears to be abandoned, so we’ve forked the project with the intention of patching some of the known issues and adding some new features.” (insert GH link here)
Although the original project dies, this new project is born, and who knows—the original project’s owner might even show up again someday and start making meaningful contributions to the new project (or not).
I say all this without knowing the full history of this project, and I don’t mean to downplay the author’s frustration, just my two cents.
All of that said, in my mind this situation makes for an interesting case study on the pros and cons of different ownership structures for public/open projects.
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In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now.
I had a quick look at the repository and the last commit was three weeks ago: https://git.joinfirefish.org/firefish/firefish/-/commit/db604b8f466e826fd8c93d3519898c8ab236a2ed
Freaking out over three weeks of silence during Christmas season is so weird.
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I'm fairly certain they're a college student also.
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I think firefish.social (the "flagship" Firefish instance) cratering at roughly the same time the dev went AWOL is more what prompted this.
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Usually I would agree but in this case it's important to provide context for people using the platform. According to the post Firefish's admin practically abandoned it for months now and was radio silent and now hasn't replied to the core team in over a week, someone had to say what's going on.
Everyone knows how hard managing these things are, and it's often a thankless job, but this sadly seems like another example of someone taking on a leadership role then bailing for whatever reason. The owner should've let someone else handle firefish.social if they didn't have the time.
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I'd like to add from a user's point of view. Firefish.social was advertised as the flagship instance and in the beginning everything was fine and nice on there but then they started to implement new stuff and this broke something leading to the flagship instance being down or unusable for most of the time. Days turned into weeks with the server not running or at least not without problems (only talking about timelines, not to mention other features like antennae or lists which wouldn't work at all) without any communication from the admins and no replies to direct inquiries. I eventually moved to another instance running a stable firefish version. But our admin also complains about being ignored by the dev team, so they decided we will be moving to Sharkey. And we all know that Kainoa is young, started uni last year and a new job - that's all fine and understandable but maybe not compatible with running such a big project. Which again is fine but also means that -for now- the project is not being worked on while in a broken state. I think this is valuable information for users and admins and it was good to hear this from someone in the core team.
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Open source devs being in a parasocial relationship with their projects uwu
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