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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.