- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Announcement: Firefish will enter maintenance mode
For those who have been supporting Firefish and me, I can’t thank you enough. But today, I have to make an announcement of my very difficult decision: As of today’s release, Firefish will enter maintenance mode and reach end-of-support at the end of the year. The main reasons for this are as follows.
In February, Kainoa suddenly transferred the ownership of Firefish to me. This transition came without prior notice, which took me aback. I still wish Kainoa had consulted with me in advance. At that time, some people were already saying that “Firefish is coming back”, making it challenging to address the situation. Also, since there were several hundred active Firefish servers at that point, I could not suddenly discontinue the project, so I took over the project unwillingly.
Over the past seven months, I have been maintaining Firefish alone. All other former maintainers have left, leaving me solely responsible for managing issues, reviewing merge requests, testing, and releasing new versions. This situation has had a significant impact on my personal life.
Frankly speaking, there are numerous bugs and questionable logic in the current Firefish codebase. While I attempted to fix them, balancing this work with my personal life made it clear that it would take ages, and I’ve started thinking that I can’t manage this project in the long run. Additionally, vulnerabilities have been reported approximately once a month. Addressing vulnerabilities, communicating privately with reporters, and testing fixes have proven overwhelming and unsustainable. Moreover, a certain percentage of users have made insulting comments, which have severely affected my mental well-being and made me fearful of opening social media apps.
I will do my best to refund the donations made to Firefish via OpenCollective, but that’s not guaranteed.
firefish.dev
andinfo.firefish.dev
will remain operational until the end of February 2025, after which they will return a 410 Gone status.Server admins may downgrade Firefish to version
20240206
/1.0.5-rc
and migrate to another *key variant, or may fork Firefish to maintain.Downgrade instructions: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish/-/blob/downgrade/docs/downgrade.md
Thanks,
naskya
It’s very sad to see yet another great ActivityPub project disappear. Feel free to try Mbin, if you do not want to go back to Mastodon or something like that.
Also this work/life balance issues seems to be a repeating pattern in the AP development scene, I wish we could do something about it to make it more sustainable for developers.
How do you feel about Mbin in that regard? Do you feel like development is in a healthy place, with not too much of a burden on any one person?
I guess similar situations as the one described here could occur, with an inherited code base and all it entails.
Great question! I never shared this story. I can only answer this from my own perspective and NOT on behalf of the entire project or other devs if you can imagine. And you’re correct every open-source project can have this similar situation.
~Melroy
#mbin #firefish #kbin #activitypub #developers #developers #developers #fediverse
In regards to NLNet, you should know how it works. NLNet doesn’t give you money upfront and then expect stuff. You decide on a list of tasks to do and then complete them on our own time and get paid for each you complete. This reduces the pressure, as you can choose to handle these tasks as frequent as you want.
Then again. with NLNet getting defunded by EU, it’s likely most new can’t receive funding anymore.
Man, I know the exact feeling. We had a similar case in our FOSS project of a valuable contributor going suddenly MIA, even blocking us out of pypi in the process. It hurts.
Thanks for the response! I’m sorry to hear that a core contributor vanished like that. Hopefully (s)he’s allright and just needed to delegate time differently. And as long as there’s at least two of you who feel somewhat dedicated to the project, even if you cannot always be active, that’s great. :)
It reminds me of the old proverb that if you want to go fast, walk alone, if you want to go far, walk together. If Mbin can continue at a sustainable pace, where you’re not afraid to take time off when you need it, I have no doubt it can go far. :)
Something needs to change in FOSS culture. Too many people actively oppose any sort of compensation model other than opening up a Ko-Fi or something. I imagine Naskya would be more than happy to maintain FF as a primary career, but they probably have a 9-5 and have to do this in addition to whatever they have to do to feed their family.
I was never a big fan of the 'keys (way too much going on and still lacking basic features) but I appreciate the diversity of the fedi. Iceshrimp and Sharkkey are still kicking for the time being…
I completely agree, and I’ve seen some wild entitlement from FOSS users. People who haven’t spent one red cent have no problem making rude demands and calling developers “lazy.”
I watched some of Immich’s users throw a tantrum when Immich added a purchase button (that supports the project but changes nothing else). A lot of the complaints boiled down to “hide the purchase button so I don’t feel guilt.”
It’s a miracle anyone works on open source projects.
Immich was exactly what I was thinking of. FUTO is getting a ton of flack for trying to change exactly this. But they’ve already made a ton of really great “paid-optional” software. I don’t know if they’ll succeed but I sure hope they do.