Interesting. I wrestled with them before the rebrand and concluded that where they were useful I could do the same with mastodon, but that they introduced too much complexity that just wasn’t helpful, and that was apart from the performance. From memory a central issue was that antennas pull down partial word matches and you couldn’t opt of that, which meant hashtags were the most useful queries as the leading hash avoided spurious matches.

The one exception to that would be the way you could select sources for any antenna, that is useful for sure.

Ooooh, is that what happened? I noticed Antennae got worse after the rebrand but wasn't sure what happened.

"In the end, what firefish/calckey/misskey shows is that the fediverse doesn’t need to merely be either a twitter or instagram or reddit clone … it can be many things often combined in different ways. Many have kinda forgotten (or worse never realised) that that can be the case largely because of how stagnant big social platforms are. "

This statement by @maegul@maegul@lemmy.ml is a very important sentence for me. It reminds me of a statement that a participant at a Fediverse meeting said: "Maybe the Fediverse shouldn't be sold as a substitute product like 'vegan sausage', but as something in its own right."

(transl./ original in german: "Vielleicht sollte man das Fediverse nicht wie 'vegane Wurst' als Ersatzprodukt verkaufen, sondern als etwas Eigenständiges.")

Thank you for your articles @deadsuperhero@deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml , which show that!

The instability really bums me out. I’d like to think that things are slowly improving, but the lack of transparency (and frankly useless error messages) make it really hard to triage where the problem is and forge a path forward.

Yea I feel you. I check in occasionally to see where things are at and from what I’ve seen, including your reports here and in the review, it really hasn’t dramatically gotten better. Which makes sense as I suspect the root cause hasn’t been fixed either.

It’d be curious to know how other instances are going and if they’re far more stable. I suspect they are, and if true, then the admins of firefish.social are doing a disservice to the platform (and a silly one at that) and should really make clear that their instance is experimental and unstable and that anyone wanting stability should go to another instance (of which there are a sufficient amount).

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.

Have a look at Megalodon and Moshidon.

I've been happy with Tusky https://tusky.app/

I've tried a few of them but haven't found anything better than the PWA 🤷

I believe it is. Calckey was the old name of the platform.

@RookieNerd
Also seen from a pixelfed account, the main post of a lemmy thread is fully readable, but I can't see the comments
@caos @deadsuperhero

@RookieNerd
Nope, the main post of each lemmy thread is a title+link only as seen from mastodon web client and background interface. Although comments are fully readables.
Let's hope this will be better in lemmy/masto future versions
@caos @deadsuperhero

Didn’t know about atomicpoet moving on from firefish.social. Makes sense. Interesting time for firefish then, as it seemed atomicpoet and their contacts were supporting the platform in a number of ways. The departure seems a little like that got burnt out leaving the lead dev and their contributors to their own devices.

This is perhaps not representative it's just random infos that reached me. I am not in the Firefish community or even sect, but only have a test account on a small instance as a supplement. I only have a relatively large number of contacts to other Firefish users, who in turn help newer users get started with Firefish. And there is very often the recommendation to avoid the "flagship" instance, also with reference to the recommendations of devs. I had also followed Atomicpoet for a while, but there was a bit too much input, so I rather heard from Kainoa or Calculator.

Thanks! No wonder there are a lot of Japanese servers there. I'll try making an account now :)