Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment" ...
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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.
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@julian
But being honest here, who hasn't thrown out a few "company we's" in order to sound bigger or more established?
Ah, yes, the "royal we." So named because monarchs would often refer to themselves in the plural form. -
->> [email protected]replied to maegul on last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Yea that's the story in a nut shell. The lead dev wasn't fit for the role and ruined the whole thing.
That's a harsh and ungenerous interpretation of events.
While the lead dev was only, what, 18 when they started the project, and you can definitely make an argument for a social media platform being a bigger bite than someone that age and experience could chew, what they achieved with Calckey/Firefish is something they can be very proud of. For a time it did look like a modern, credible and rising alternative to Mastodon itself. That's a hugely laudable achievement given the infinitely smaller timescale and far smaller resource they were working with.
There are a few reasons the Firefish project unravelled that weren't directly their fault, one big one inherited from the codebase they'd chosen to adopt (Misskey v12). The slow-downs and performance issues were due to that server codebase simply not being engineered well enough to scale well with increased population sizes. If you were running a Firefish instance of more than a couple of hundred users, performance tanked. I'd suggest that this issue was bigger than one dev or even the small team gathered around Firefish could address. They tried workarounds and tried swapping back-ends etc but I don't know if it was ever understood that the codebase itself was fatally compromised until it was way too late. Notably, Sharkey, basically Firefish but forked directly from the re-factored Misskey v13 codebase, has proven far better at handling scale and way more performative. Meanwhile, Iceshrimp and others still on v12 have failed to gain significant traction of their own and I believe they're basically inhabiting technical cul-de-sacs unless they address the codebase issue.
Additionally, the lead dev attracting the ire of a notoriously toxic/bullying personage/instance in the Fediverse is I think what took the wind out of their sails, killing the project as far as they were concerned. That personage levelled accusations of screenshot tampering at the dev (among many others) in a grotesque display of Trial By Public Forum but has actually been found out to have been doing exactly that themselves. I very nearly left the Fediverse over that person's behaviour and the scale of the support they enjoyed apparently legitimising it: there's a spider in this web and the power they wield via weaponised victimhood has been used to silence and harm far too many in this network.
In short, I don't think it's fair to lay the collapse of the Firefish project entirely at the feet of the lead dev. -
maegulreplied to ->> [email protected] on last edited by
You're probably very right about all of that. (Would you mind letting me know who that "spider" was, as I mostly didn't pay attentioon to that episode)
In the end though, AFAIU, as a lead dev they were very happy to hold onto their role as BDFL. Which, if you're up for it, great, sometimes that's necessary to make things happen. But if you're not and then become the vulnerability, then that's a bad call and the buck has to stop with you for it.