this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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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.
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!
Vegan sausage is a perfect analogy! Thanks!
Yea I feel you. I check in occasionally to see where things are at and from what I’ve seen, including your reports here and in the review, it really hasn’t dramatically gotten better. Which makes sense as I suspect the root cause hasn’t been fixed either.
It’d be curious to know how other instances are going and if they’re far more stable. I suspect they are, and if true, then the admins of firefish.social are doing a disservice to the platform (and a silly one at that) and should really make clear that their instance is experimental and unstable and that anyone wanting stability should go to another instance (of which there are a sufficient amount).
if anything, its gotten worse tbh. the upside is that the move account feature to mastodon works, was a bit concerned about that.
it doesnt block your old account after a move like mastodon does, so i still have a functional firefish account, just not my followers anymore
chris stating that hes hesitant to open his new (4 person) firefish server to other people until theyve tested more for stability makes me quite hesitant to recommend the platform for now, if stability issues are this deeply ingrained
Yea well instability has been such a perennial problem , especially given what you say, and it’s essentially a legacy platform so it would only be logical to presume it’s ingrained … not to mention that stability is basically the first job of a social media platform. Occasional downtimes are fine, but if it isn’t reliable it is likely not worth using … so it’s not something to fast and loose with.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but the lead dev has openly admitted to lacking the DB expertise they feel is necessary, and he and Chris were hoping to rely on an expert they know that didn’t show up for whatever reason. That on top of the legacy of the old misskey code base and it seems likely that the lead dev is just struggling to stay on top of the issues without creating new ones. Which is very reasonable! There’s a lot that goes into writing and running a social media platform! You really need a team.