Panos Damelos (Catodon) (@panos)
catodon.social
Ugh, I really tried to stay out of #fediverse drama but I guess I have to say a few things. Most of you know me as a #firefish core team member, so I think I owe it to the admins of almost 500 firefish servers out there and to the almost 5000 members of firefish.social. So, yeah, if you haven't noticed, things aren't looking good for firefish. Its owner, Kainoa, has practically abandoned the project, which had its last stable release out on July. My last message to them was a week ago, and I haven't heard back since. Firefish.social, besides the other severe technical problems it's had due to mismanagement in the last few months, now also has serious federation issues. I hope Kainoa is well irl, but this is irresponsible and unacceptable. I hear some of you saying "but you're in the core team too, don't try to put the blame elsewhere!". So I have to explain what being a core team member in firefish meant. Kainoa invited me, Namekuji and a few others to be part of the "core team", but kept all decisions and responsibilities. We didn't co-own this. We never shared donations. We were just volunteers, who were honestly trying to make it a great project. This didn't work well due to concentration of power to one person, who didn't keep their promises. I don't mean to be harsh to Kainoa, I mean we knew they were only 19 when they started the project. Still, it's a bummer to anyone who chose to trust and support Firefish. This includes myself. I don't know if it's early to consider firefish a dead project, but it sure seems like that for a few months now. Maybe it can be resurrected, idk. It's all up to Kainoa. In the meantime, Namekuji and I are starting #Catodon, which will have some differences with Firefish, and will include many changes I had discussed with Kainoa but were never implemented. If you decide to stick with us, we promise to be serious about this. I strongly believe in the fediverse and its potential, and I want to build a great platform for it. This was my goal when I chose to be involved in Calckey/Firefish. It's still my goal with Catodon, only this time I can stand behind it 100%, as the project will be co-managed by Namekuji and me. If Firefish left you with a bitter aftertaste, we hope we can build a better relationship and prove ourselves worthy of your trust. Catodon will go public in a matter of days, possibly even hours. We'll have more to say about its direction then. In the meantime, I just wanted to share my apologies for any inconvenience regarding Firefish, as I'm still technically a core team member, whatever that means. But frankly, I tried so hard to make things go differently - but there's only so much you can do when it's someone else's project. I'm really sorry for how things went. But this is not the end of the fedi journey for me. I'm super excited about the chance to do some things right this time with Catodon. Life goes on, I guess! Hope to see you soon on our #codeberg repo, so we can start a new creative adventure together =) :catodon: xx

Just a headsup for any server admins running Firefish, apparently it is no longer being maintained. One of the core developers of Firefish has written about the situation in the link provided.

  • yo_scottie_ohEnglish
    1026·
    1 year ago

    Not to downplay all the blood, sweat, and tears that have been shed while making the fediverse work, but if I may offer some unsolicited advice to the author of the linked post: Publicly airing out a team’s dirty laundry tends to be… counter-productive. Usually it’s best to “keep it in the family.”

    In this case, we don’t know what’s going on in the original project owner’s life right now. The author of this post could have just said “hey all, we apologize for the inconvenience, but the original project appears to be abandoned, so we’ve forked the project with the intention of patching some of the known issues and adding some new features.” (insert GH link here)

    Although the original project dies, this new project is born, and who knows—the original project’s owner might even show up again someday and start making meaningful contributions to the new project (or not).

    I say all this without knowing the full history of this project, and I don’t mean to downplay the author’s frustration, just my two cents.

    All of that said, in my mind this situation makes for an interesting case study on the pros and cons of different ownership structures for public/open projects.

    • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
      152·
      1 year ago

      Usually I would agree but in this case it’s important to provide context for people using the platform. According to the post Firefish’s admin practically abandoned it for months now and was radio silent and now hasn’t replied to the core team in over a week, someone had to say what’s going on.

      Everyone knows how hard managing these things are, and it’s often a thankless job, but this sadly seems like another example of someone taking on a leadership role then bailing for whatever reason. The owner should’ve let someone else handle firefish.social if they didn’t have the time.

      • wiase@discuss.onlineEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’d like to add from a user’s point of view. Firefish.social was advertised as the flagship instance and in the beginning everything was fine and nice on there but then they started to implement new stuff and this broke something leading to the flagship instance being down or unusable for most of the time. Days turned into weeks with the server not running or at least not without problems (only talking about timelines, not to mention other features like antennae or lists which wouldn’t work at all) without any communication from the admins and no replies to direct inquiries. I eventually moved to another instance running a stable firefish version. But our admin also complains about being ignored by the dev team, so they decided we will be moving to Sharkey. And we all know that Kainoa is young, started uni last year and a new job - that’s all fine and understandable but maybe not compatible with running such a big project. Which again is fine but also means that -for now- the project is not being worked on while in a broken state. I think this is valuable information for users and admins and it was good to hear this from someone in the core team.