Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment" ...
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Another platform that some people got excited for about 1yr ago. It was obviously not a direct clone of twitter in the same way mastodon is, but based on a japanese platform (misskey) and so just came from a different place with a whole bunch of features quite separate from the "mere microblogging" of mastodon.
It had flaws, sure, but there was genuine hope it'd become "the other platform".
But it was run like crap and fell apart and its flagship server is dead.
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Congrats and/or condolences for this “moment”.
I guess I’d have to check mastodon to find the rest of this thread and the context of what it actually references. Posting into Lemmy/Kbin groups from long mastodon threads is quite janky experience, I find.
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Yea I stuffed up the rest of the thread by not tagging the lemmy community (which was provided automatically but I was trying to save on characters).
Otherwise, no need for congrats/condolences ... it just struck me that there may be a wider implication in an otherwise small moment.
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@[email protected] at the end of the day Firefish burned brightly but quickly. It might be worth doing a post-mortem of it purely as a technical exercise because building a fediverse application has some unique constraints... though I imagine when you get down to it the failures may end up being the same social and/or technical failings you see anywhere else.
Sometimes I wonder how much their name choice (Calckey, specifically) set them back on their fedi speedrun.
After all, NodeBB isn't exactly a "hip" and marketable brand name
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@maegul The cost to migrate to calckey was minimal b/c it federated. I moved my follower list & arrived with enthusiasm! No walls! Refreshing!
I liked the "calckey" approach to aggregating content w/ emojis. But there were times when I couldn't post or get new messages for days, which stretched to weeks at a time!
Just wait, devs were working on it. DB issues, etc. By the time it rebranded to firefish it was down so frequently I gave up and ended up happily on a stable Mastodon server.
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Lol re "nodeBB".
AFAICT (where some rumours likely to have truth to them are behind this) the essential failure was a flawed lead dev and an excessive tolerance of their BDFL approach by fellow contributors and "backers".
When those flaws become critical there was no governance/org to compensate. That dev was making weird decisions on the fly that were ruining the platform. Then they walked and nothing was left. And so all the promise of being big/serious was facade/hype.
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@GeekinKorea
> By the time it rebranded to firefish it was down so frequently I gave up and ended up happily on a stable Mastodon server.Yea that's the story in a nut shell. The lead dev wasn't fit for the role and ruined the whole thing.
What interests me though is that others were involved and that an unhealthy "team" or lack of a team may be indicative of the fediverse's ability to bring people together to build sustainable and stable projects.
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@[email protected] said in Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment" ...:
And so all the promise of being big/serious was facade/hype.
But being honest here, who hasn't thrown out a few "company we's" in order to sound bigger or more established?
I did not see firsthand what happened (I guess I didn't follow the right people!), so I'm probably off. How much of it was bluster and when does it become problematic? Bluster is rewarded in the capitalist Americas, blech...
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I hear you. IMO it was more than bluster.
Here's the homepage of the platform, which strikes me as relatively "serious/big" for something run by a dev who didn't really know how to manage a database: https://joinfirefish.org/
I'm pretty sure there were "backers" trying to make it a thing and the "vibe" was very much "invite everyone, LFG!!". They even had a total rebrand (name and logo) in the middle of the "moment" with multiple posts hyping it up ahead of time.
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And to get a sense of what it looked like: https://calckey.world/@[email protected]cial
All those of emojis are native, as is the animation you'll see if you press "play" (some of which glitch because this is a different instance/version).
You could add as much visual sugar to your posts as you wanted and it was so much more fun.
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Andy Nortrup :cascadia: 🌳replied to maegul on last edited by
@maegul @ajsadauskas very much dependent on one maintainer who maybe wasn't ready for their project to go mainstream.
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maegulreplied to Andy Nortrup :cascadia: 🌳 on last edited by
Yep ... but interests me is that there were people around them, including us users. What culture did we all bring to the table that enabled it to grow and die like that with such a lead dev?
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to julian on last edited by
@julian @maegul hate to interrupt, but why are you discussing FireFish like it's dead? https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish
It's very much not.️
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pedrocx486replied to BeAware :fediverse: on last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Firefish is essentially on a terminal stage, being barely kept alive just for the sake of it existing, no real changes/features… but I’m kinda curious what happened previously. I spent 2 years out of the Fediverse and came back to find a lot of people vanished, including “Calc”.
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pedrocx486replied to BeAware :fediverse: on last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Firefish is essentially on a terminal stage, being barely kept alive just for the sake of it existing, no real changes/features… but I’m kinda curious what happened previously. I spent almost two 2 years (okay, only 1 year and something…) out of the Fediverse and came back to find a lot of people vanished, including “Calc”.
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maegulreplied to BeAware :fediverse: on last edited by
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to maegul on last edited by
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as far as I'm aware, something happened in their personal lives that required their attention. I don't know how serious it was though. It may have just been that they got a job and needed to focus on their studies and job.
It also may have been that they had properly mismanaged their project (calckey/firefish) and upset a lot of people over that to the point that the fediverse was just a bitter/sad place?
Either way, they walked away and let their servers die.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Fair enough, shit happens... It's just sorta sad to see projects die out of nowhere.
Can't say I'm surprised knowing the people behind the original Calckey (college freshmen aged at the time), experience is indeed something you need to scale a project like that :gotapoint: -
@[email protected] @[email protected]
college freshmen aged at the time
Depending on who you ask in SV, college age freshmen are ideal founders.
But that's because they have no dependents, work for nearly nothing, have far too much free time on their hands, and you can burn through 1000 of them in order to chase your unicorn.
The feeling I get is that the founder of Calckey/Firefish (as @[email protected] intuits) simply approached the project like it was a fun endeavour, not realizing that when people buy in (either with time and money), you have a responsibility to continue that work.
Shit gets real when money gets involved, and maybe they bailed.