Links below:

  • https://firefish.social/ - Redirects to a Korean warranty (?) company
  • joinfirefish.org - Domain is available, but very expensive
  • https://vancity.social/ - Seems to time out after some time
  • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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)

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        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)

        • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          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!