this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Two thumbs up dev(s), hope you're doing okay and getting some sleep in between. Had some rough production upgrades in my life, and this sounds like a pretty bad one. 😖

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 39 points 2 years ago (10 children)

They have had similar difficulties before.

As someone who jumped on the calckey/firefish bandwagon relatively early (like earlier this year) and as someone who wishes all the best for the platform and lead dev …

I have to warn anyone thinking of committing to it that it is still basically beta software and the main dev isn’t really interested in making that clear or even realising it. There’s a lot of hype and excitement around the platform (it is refreshingly cool, along with its base, misskey) that doesn’t accurately reflect the difficulties the platform will put you through as a user.

Last I checked, they were pretty much out of their depth on database engineering. As in the lead dev openly admitted to this with their personal account. So another database upgrade going bad without any reasonable estimates of down time completely tracks. It happened a few months ago and that’s why I no longer use firefish. The main problem being that the dev doesn’t actually know how long things will take and is clearly hacking things together the best they can.

Which is all fine, I hope things come together. But you’re not getting a stable platform with firefish or a lead dev that is completely on top of what they are doing. It might all come together soon! But I can’t help but suspect moving off of Postgres to another DB isn’t gonna fix their problems however much they think it will.

Going through firefish taught me that when it comes to offering software to users, your first job, before any features or aesthetics or design ideas, however awesome they might be, is to make sure it works well and reliably. Fail at that and you’ve failed as a developer.

At points this year, I’m afraid to say, firefish failed as a piece of software, which was simultaneously easy to understand as a FOSS indie Fedi project, but also sad to see as a FOSS indie Fedi project.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's a shame. As an end user, it's a really nice experience, but running my own private instance I kept running into issues that just made it really difficult to keep it online, especially once life started to put a lot of pressure on my time and mental health.

One thing I've noticed about a lot of small FOSS projects is that they do very little to actually educate potential users on how to use their stuff. The underlying motivator is often to provide alternatives to existing products, but they fall down entirely when it comes to actually making those alternatives usable for the users of the things they're trying to provide alternatives for.

The big ones get big by creating their audience. The small ones look for the small intersection of people who use the mainstream product, care about open source, and also are fluent enough in that world that they already know what to do to make things work, and that pool of users often doesn't reach any kind of critical mass.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep! All of which is important in the case of firefish as its main value is as an alternative to mastodon to increase diversity across the fediverse. In many ways firefish is probably dropping the ball along the lines you provide, and so lessening their potential influence while also creating a non trivial amount of bitterness amongst off-put users.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A lot of new Fediverse projects, too, misidentify who their audience is. Calckey has a really good UX (most of the time), and I had zero issues as just an account user on Calc's server, but the support for would-be admins is... A chat room, and documentation that is half so far out of date that some of it is in Japanese.

That's not going to grow the presence. That doesn't get new instances online. That doesn't get an ecosystem with good moderators and admins. That doesn't get the infrastructure in place - technical and social - to truly take off.

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