Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment" ...
-
BeAware :fediverse:replied to maegul on last edited by
-
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.
-
@[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.
-
@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.