Firefish is a new Fediverse social platform featuring fresh design, robust features, and powerful tools. Can it compete with Mastodon?

Firefish is a new Fediverse social platform with a beautiful design, cool features, and great tools for your feed. It has a lot of potential to grow.

  • caos@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    very nice article…

    …Just a few small comments:

    • “Firefish is a hot new microblogging platform”: it’s not that “new” at all, #Calckey, which has been around since 2021, has only recently changed its name to Firefish
    • the antennas / news picker had apparently not yet been fully understood by the author: they do not fill retroactively and it is a full-text search that also finds parts of words. Therefore, if it doesn’t fit, search words can be excluded - it works very well for me! If you use it for a little longer instead of just taking a quick look, you can use it to structure your content very well.
    • “Lack of an official app is kind of disappointing”: “official” apps are perhaps important as a “brand” for some, the so-called “Mastodon” app is also the worst app ever for Mastodon (fortunately with many better alternatives). The PWA for Firefish works great on all devices, if you don’t want to miss out on any features and want the best look, you don’t need an app.
    • The biggest hindrance at the moment right now is the flagship instance at firefish.social:" The instance has clearly communicated that it primarily serves as a test instance, i.e. it does not strive for or want to guarantee stability. In contrast to mastodon.social, Firefish itself also makes clearer reference to the selection and there are now really many Firefish instances.

    For me, the biggest disadvantage of Firefish at the moment is that it doesn’t yet federate properly with Lemmy.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I get that it’s not that new, especially since it’s a rebranded fork. But, as a fediverse project with its own brand and design sensibilities, it’s relatively new, especially compared to Mastodon.

      Unfortunately, I’ve used the Antennas for like two months, and they’re janky. The “non-retroactive data fill” point that you make is only partially true, and seems to mostly apply to filters pertaining to a collection of users, or a collection of servers as a data source. It’s a confusing UX papercut. Worse yet, my Fediverse Devs antenna example has been around for two months, and barely produces anything most of the time.

      I don’t believe that an “official branded app” is strictly necessary. What I meant was more in line with “Firefish could really use apps developed for its features specifically.” Sadly, Misskey compatible apps continues to be a wasteland compared to the plethora of Mastodon ones.

      The whole “the flagship instance is a sandbox test instance” is kind of a sometimes-true sometimes-not situation. It’s definitely less stable now than it was two months ago, but that kind of messaging and expectations management didn’t seem to really happen until sometime after the CalcKey migration.

      And yeah, proper group / community federation with Lemmy is a huge deal! I’m looking forward to what Pixelfed is doing with Groups, as they look somewhat similar, and aim to maximize compatibility while providing good management tools.

      • caos@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for your answer. I hadn’t realised before that you yourself are the author ;-) So it’s a really good article, I just selectively quoted the aspects that I see differently or have experienced differently.

        I don’t use Firefish that much yet. My main account is in Friendica and I would like to move my Mastodon account to Firefish, but the lack of federation with Lemmy (or other groups like Friendica forums) is still holding me back. However, I have had very good experiences with the Antennas in particular and have also heard of many good experiences with them. I get a lot of content there that is usually appropriate and not covered by subscribing to hashtags. Lemmy accounts/communities cannot yet be followed from Firefish, but I get content from Lemmy via the News Picker. You might have to ask Firefish experts what the problems could be.

        I am perhaps a bit sensitive to the topic of the flagship instance, because it reminded me of all the discussions about Mastodon-social and their onboarding process, which pushed their instance very aggressively, which in my opinion had negative effects for the Fediverse (centralisation) and for the users of this instance (very slow, lack of moderation, spam bots, etc.). When I have heard from Firefish users about performance problems, it was always users of firefish.social (or previously calckey.social), never from other instances. But that is of course a subjective impression.

        On the subject of apps, it was also difficult that the “Mastodon” app pushed itself so to the fore. Many who enter the Fediverse via this app do not even know that 1. there would have been other instances than Mastodon.social 2. that they are in the Fediverse and also communicate with many users who do not use Mastodon 3. that there are many other apps they could use.

        Very often questions like “Help, x and y don’t work, I can’t find that etc.” come up and very often it turns out that it really doesn’t work in this official app (but in all the others). In any case, Firefish doesn’t need an app like this. But of course it would be great if there were an app that really included the Firefish-specific features. In my opinion, an app as an end in itself has no added value when the PWA is much better. I think the Firefish project should therefore prioritise the stable functioning and further development of the existing functions rather than the development of its own app. But I can’t really comment because I don’t really need any apps (for the Fediverse).

        I hope that the proper group / community federation will come soon. In any case, the devs wrote to me once about the question, saying that it is planned.

        • caos@feddit.deEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Mastodon cannot display posts with headings and the thread view is very rudimentary. In my experience, the best way of displaying and federating with Lemmy is with Friendica.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      the so-called “Mastodon” app is also the worst app ever for Mastodon (fortunately with many better alternatives).

      Btw, can you suggest some?