Firefish is a new Fediverse social platform with a beautiful design, cool features, and great tools for your feed. It has a lot of potential to grow.

Firefish is a new Fediverse social platform with a beautiful design, cool features, and great tools for your feed. It has a lot of potential to grow.

  • caos@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    very nice article…

    …Just a few small comments:

    • “Firefish is a hot new microblogging platform”: it’s not that “new” at all, #Calckey, which has been around since 2021, has only recently changed its name to Firefish
    • the antennas / news picker had apparently not yet been fully understood by the author: they do not fill retroactively and it is a full-text search that also finds parts of words. Therefore, if it doesn’t fit, search words can be excluded - it works very well for me! If you use it for a little longer instead of just taking a quick look, you can use it to structure your content very well.
    • “Lack of an official app is kind of disappointing”: “official” apps are perhaps important as a “brand” for some, the so-called “Mastodon” app is also the worst app ever for Mastodon (fortunately with many better alternatives). The PWA for Firefish works great on all devices, if you don’t want to miss out on any features and want the best look, you don’t need an app.
    • The biggest hindrance at the moment right now is the flagship instance at firefish.social:" The instance has clearly communicated that it primarily serves as a test instance, i.e. it does not strive for or want to guarantee stability. In contrast to mastodon.social, Firefish itself also makes clearer reference to the selection and there are now really many Firefish instances.

    For me, the biggest disadvantage of Firefish at the moment is that it doesn’t yet federate properly with Lemmy.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I get that it’s not that new, especially since it’s a rebranded fork. But, as a fediverse project with its own brand and design sensibilities, it’s relatively new, especially compared to Mastodon.

      Unfortunately, I’ve used the Antennas for like two months, and they’re janky. The “non-retroactive data fill” point that you make is only partially true, and seems to mostly apply to filters pertaining to a collection of users, or a collection of servers as a data source. It’s a confusing UX papercut. Worse yet, my Fediverse Devs antenna example has been around for two months, and barely produces anything most of the time.

      I don’t believe that an “official branded app” is strictly necessary. What I meant was more in line with “Firefish could really use apps developed for its features specifically.” Sadly, Misskey compatible apps continues to be a wasteland compared to the plethora of Mastodon ones.

      The whole “the flagship instance is a sandbox test instance” is kind of a sometimes-true sometimes-not situation. It’s definitely less stable now than it was two months ago, but that kind of messaging and expectations management didn’t seem to really happen until sometime after the CalcKey migration.

      And yeah, proper group / community federation with Lemmy is a huge deal! I’m looking forward to what Pixelfed is doing with Groups, as they look somewhat similar, and aim to maximize compatibility while providing good management tools.

      • caos@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for your answer. I hadn’t realised before that you yourself are the author ;-) So it’s a really good article, I just selectively quoted the aspects that I see differently or have experienced differently.

        I don’t use Firefish that much yet. My main account is in Friendica and I would like to move my Mastodon account to Firefish, but the lack of federation with Lemmy (or other groups like Friendica forums) is still holding me back. However, I have had very good experiences with the Antennas in particular and have also heard of many good experiences with them. I get a lot of content there that is usually appropriate and not covered by subscribing to hashtags. Lemmy accounts/communities cannot yet be followed from Firefish, but I get content from Lemmy via the News Picker. You might have to ask Firefish experts what the problems could be.

        I am perhaps a bit sensitive to the topic of the flagship instance, because it reminded me of all the discussions about Mastodon-social and their onboarding process, which pushed their instance very aggressively, which in my opinion had negative effects for the Fediverse (centralisation) and for the users of this instance (very slow, lack of moderation, spam bots, etc.). When I have heard from Firefish users about performance problems, it was always users of firefish.social (or previously calckey.social), never from other instances. But that is of course a subjective impression.

        On the subject of apps, it was also difficult that the “Mastodon” app pushed itself so to the fore. Many who enter the Fediverse via this app do not even know that 1. there would have been other instances than Mastodon.social 2. that they are in the Fediverse and also communicate with many users who do not use Mastodon 3. that there are many other apps they could use.

        Very often questions like “Help, x and y don’t work, I can’t find that etc.” come up and very often it turns out that it really doesn’t work in this official app (but in all the others). In any case, Firefish doesn’t need an app like this. But of course it would be great if there were an app that really included the Firefish-specific features. In my opinion, an app as an end in itself has no added value when the PWA is much better. I think the Firefish project should therefore prioritise the stable functioning and further development of the existing functions rather than the development of its own app. But I can’t really comment because I don’t really need any apps (for the Fediverse).

        I hope that the proper group / community federation will come soon. In any case, the devs wrote to me once about the question, saying that it is planned.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    As someone who spent a bit of time earlier this year (pre-rebrand) on firefish poking around on it I can personally vouch that the reviewer (@deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml) has definitely eaten the dogfood here and is pretty much spot on about everything.

    I was pleasantly surprised to see clips described as your favourite feature … mine too! One thing you didn’t quite make clear is that they can be either private or public. A public “clip” (collection of bookmarks) is a great way of sharing a series of posts. In a way it’s a nifty and very easy way of building up a web page of some sort. A nice example usage I ran into was creating a public clip of polls which together formed a survey that I could link to with a single URL.

    Another thing you didn’t seem to touch on is MFM and the properly crazy things you can do with it (here’s a public clip of notable animations using MFM) but also the simple things that really do add some expression to your posts (colored text, actual bold and italic formatting, font size changes).

    Longer posts may have been missed too? In my experience the 500 char limit of mastodon is just annoying. On firefish, with 4000 chars, you never have to worry about it … just write and it’ll be fine … just about any thread on masto can fit in a single post on firefish.

    You’re absolutely right about Antennas … biggest disappointment I’ve had on the fediverse … seriously don’t trust anyone who tells you they’re awesome as they’re just spouting hype without having actually tried to use the feature for anything but the most basic things that can be done elsewhere.

    And yea, the instability of the main instance is a serious problem. It’s the main reason I don’t use firefish anymore. Not only was the stability annoying, but the admins, IMO, are not quite upfront about how much of an issue it is and why it’s happening (there’s a competency gap that isn’t or wasn’t being managed well enough). Which is a shame because there was a moment there where firefish really could have taken off more than it has but a number of people, myself included bounced off of it.

    While you praise the UI, I think there’s a fair critique around it being too much with too many features with text that is generally too small for many. Users have been asking since I was there for a more streamlined UI and I think many would enjoy that.

    As you say, the Gallery feature could do with some love. Same goes for the Page feature which is a much more flexible tool for building effectively a web page except the UI is pretty bad and way too complex (an unaltered hangover from misskey I suspect).

    In the end, what firefish/calckey/misskey shows is that the fediverse doesn’t need to merely be either a twitter or instagram or reddit clone … it can be many things often combined in different ways. Many have kinda forgotten (or worse never realised) that that can be the case largely because of how stagnant big social platforms are. If firefish gets its shit together, I agree with the reviewer, it could really take off.

    Another more gossipy story around this is that some past maintainers forked firefish (over some sort of spat with the current lead dev and admin AFAICT). It’s called iceshrimp and last I heard the blahaj zone instance, who’ve always run a downstream fork, were going to align with iceshrimp over firefish. I don’t know where all of that is up to now, though iceshrimp is still going (they have a few servers and users: https://fedidb.org/software/iceshrimp), but it does emphasise I think that there’s something non-ideal at the developer level of the platform that probably needs to stabilise.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Wow, thanks for the great in-depth feedback! 🤩

      Yeah, there’s definitely other areas I could’ve delved into, like Public Clips or MFM or pagebuilding. These in-depth reviews are challenging, due to trying to strike a balance between features and actually getting something published. Most articles of this nature takes me weeks, sometimes even a month or more.

      The UI definitely has a learning curve, too, but as a veteran Fedi user, it suited me just fine. I’ve dealt with far, far worse 😂

      The instability really bums me out. I’d like to think that things are slowly improving, but the lack of transparency (and frankly useless error messages) make it really hard to triage where the problem is and forge a path forward. The lead dev has also been sick recently, and suddenly is not very active online.

      Finally, I think Firefish takes part in a long tradition of Misskey forks, where a half dozen systems all branch off of each other. It’s a shame that more of them don’t collaborate on the same platform, leaving many devs to cherry-pick across forks. I wonder sometimes whether this hurts development more than it helps.

      • caos@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        "In the end, what firefish/calckey/misskey shows is that the fediverse doesn’t need to merely be either a twitter or instagram or reddit clone … it can be many things often combined in different ways. Many have kinda forgotten (or worse never realised) that that can be the case largely because of how stagnant big social platforms are. "

        This statement by @maegul@maegul@lemmy.ml is a very important sentence for me. It reminds me of a statement that a participant at a Fediverse meeting said: “Maybe the Fediverse shouldn’t be sold as a substitute product like ‘vegan sausage’, but as something in its own right.”

        (transl./ original in german: “Vielleicht sollte man das Fediverse nicht wie ‘vegane Wurst’ als Ersatzprodukt verkaufen, sondern als etwas Eigenständiges.”)

        Thank you for your articles @deadsuperhero@deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml , which show that!

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      1 year ago

      Antenna used to work differently, but were changed to be less performance intensive (and less useful) somewhere after the rebrand to Firefish.

      Before the change, they were the single best feature of Firefish IMO

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Interesting. I wrestled with them before the rebrand and concluded that where they were useful I could do the same with mastodon, but that they introduced too much complexity that just wasn’t helpful, and that was apart from the performance. From memory a central issue was that antennas pull down partial word matches and you couldn’t opt of that, which meant hashtags were the most useful queries as the leading hash avoided spurious matches.

        The one exception to that would be the way you could select sources for any antenna, that is useful for sure.

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I found the extra flexibility really useful. I could have an arbitrary number of words or hashtags in each antenna, rather than 4 like mastodon, which allowed me to cover all of the variations I wanted. I could use multiple words on one line for a boolean “and” function. Rare words, I would use without hashtags, common words, I would restrict to hashtags.

          I could follow instances, I could follow people, I could follow keywords, and I could follow regular words, with more control than basic hashtags.

  • Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    1 year ago

    I tried firefish. When I tried to do something, I was told my account was suspended for violating the rules. I hadn’t done anything on the platform yet, so I don’t know how I could have violated any rule. It also didn’t tell me which rule I violated.