Firefish Mastodon alternative

Technology@lemmy.world – 103 points – 1 years ago

I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It's compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.

Worth mentioning that firefish is a fork of misskey

Is there anything wrong with it?

There are, actually. Since Misskey's culture are different from Mastodon's, they have been implementing more features than Mastodon from the start, and Misskey's APIs are different from Mastodon's so there will be many weird quirks when accessing Mastodon (even weirder if it's a Mastodon fork such as Glitch-soc, Hometown, Fedibird,... since they use older Mastodon versions as base) instances from Misskey instances (though Firefish devs are improving this by implementing Mastodon APIs and several Mastodon features). Also note that Misskey caters more Japanese users more than Mastodon, people who aren't familiar with Japanese culture may also even Misskey userbase and features odd and different as well

even weirder if it’s a Mastodon fork such as Glitch-soc, Hometown, Fedibird,… since they use older Mastodon versions as base

i myself have been active on calckey/firefish, hajkey and iceshrimp instances, and never had a problem interacting with people on mastodon forks > there had been some backfilling issues, but they got solved > but federation problems do exist: so far, it is not possible for *key users to interact with lemmy instances; also link posts from kbin do not show up on *key timelines

I didn’t enjoy firefish, it was buggy and seemed to have a lot of gatekeeping.

Agreed, I much prefer Mastodon over firefish. Firefish handles hashtags really strangely and (at least at the time I tried) wouldn’t allow you to even have followed hashtags show up in your timeline.

wouldn't allow you to even have followed hashtags show up in your timeline

Well, that would be because following hashtags isn't a feature of Firefish. Antannae are a fundamentally different thing - they're saved searches.

Right, which is exactly what I said I didn’t like about it?

What do you mean by gatekeeping?

I noticed that the interface seemed a bit slow. I toggled and option to reduce animations so hopefully that improves things.

How does software have gatekeeping? Does a dialog box pop up and say "I'm sorry, you are not cool enough to use this app"?

Yes, I agree. Firefish has a vastly better UI and I like it alot. The UX right now though is not so good. I will stick to it for the time being as it shows a lot of promise. In the long run though I will have to move away eventually if they are not able to improve the performance issues.

Wish they had a native app. The misskey clients make my phone itch

if I recall, Mastodon actually lets you change the character limit per-instance.

That being said, nice to see some love for Firefish here.

Unless they recently changed things, the creator said specifically that he isn't going to add the character limit as an option. I can understand that since sometimes you need to restrict certain features based on the goal of the project. I think it would be fine because I don't think it will turn into Medium since the interface isn't really set up for that.

I'd love to know where that setting is. As far as I've been able to see, I'd have to rebuild mastodon myself to be able to do that, and that's just less convenient for me than pulling the default docker images

I might be thinking about glitch-soc, which is a fork of Mastodon with extra features, some people have been asking for.

Fan of firefish but I will say the main, most popular instance (firefish.social) has been buggy for me for months. Often my feed/notifications won't load, or I have trouble replying to comments. Or I can't react to posts or open up fediverse posts. Real dealbreakers.

I'm going to try a different instance but otherwise I will likely move my acct to Mastodon.

I like firefish but the lack of an official app has been painful.

I recently moved from mastodon to firefish because of the "better" features, but I've been pretty disappointed so far. I don't know how much of this is just the instance I'm on, but its actually missing some of the features I like the most about mastodon.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't seem to mute/block instances, just users. I also can't keep personal notes on a user's profile (I loved this feature on my mastodon instance, I think every platform should have it). It's nice being able to mute users for specific lengths of time, but less nice that I can't choose to mute them on my timeline without muting them in my notifications. I also seem to have less control over my filters - on mastodon I could make a filter, provide a list of key words and hastags for it, and then have separate settings on which parts they applied to - whether it should also filter out replies to posts, or hide people's profiles that mention them. iirc the only option I have on firefish is to make the filtered posts disappear completely or hide them behind a warning. These are the ones that affect me the most but I've also seen people mention that they can't follow hashtags. I never did this but it seems like the people that did really appreciated it, so a bit of a bummer there too.

I don't really want to migrate again, but if I did I would move back to mastodon rather than another firefish instance. It doesn't "have better features", they're just a different set of features. If those are valuable to you, then great! Unfortunately I don't care anywhere near as much about the features firefish added compared to the ones I lost.

Comparable how? Need some ideas and facts on the assertion.

Well, they're both microblogging platforms that use ActivityPub to communicate with other websites.

But I'd assume Mastodon has way more users, so probably not "comparable" exactly.

The userbase is not that important with activity pub. If the features are good they can grow slowly and still enjoy the whole fediverse. Of course it is important to have users at all. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put work on the software.

You assumed well. I'm in a Firefish instance and the most content I can see from there comes from Mastodon users from other instances.

Don't missunderstand me. I think that is pretty cool because you can interact with both Mastodon and Firefish users using any of the two applications, but at least in case of my Firefish instance, most of the additional features of Firefish are underutilized.

Okay, I'm gonna bite. Why would they create a new one instead of working toward improving Mastodon?

This is part of the overall concept of the fediverse and the activitypub protocol.

Think of it this way - what is the difference between Twitter and Instagram? They're very similar. The one key difference being that Instagram requires you to include a picture. But you can include pictures in Twitter too. So wouldn't it be nice to be able to see Instagram accounts from your Twitter account? Speaking only of the technology and not the content or corporate shenanigans that is. (by the way, Pixelfed is an activitypub clone of Instagram, and it can interact with Mastodon)

What if you have an idea for a microblogging platform, but it's a little bit different from the vision that the developers of Mastodon have? You can try to submit code to Mastodon's code base but there's no guarantee they'll accept it. You can fork Mastodon, but then you have to work within the framework that they've laid.

Or you can create your own platform. The benefit is, you can implement the same set of interoperability standards that the community has agreed upon. You don't have to attract all the users to your service to the exclusion of other services.

So why is all of this a good thing? There are a few reasons. If Mastodon starts heading in a direction that users dislike, they aren't stuck with Mastodon. For example, if they started behaving like Twitter, users could just jump to a different platform, but they would be able to continue to interact with Mastodon users who choose to stay.

If someone has a much better idea for a platform and puts the time and effort in to make it truly great, there's no reason for users to be stuck on a now inferior platform.

And if one software package tries a cool new feature that Mastodon doesn't presently have, and that feature catches on, Mastodon and other services can choose to also implement the feature. It increases competition, but also increases potential for collaborative development.

if we keep on creating new ones, it would lead to fragmentations
there's no way that all these numerous admins would agree to enshitify the internet in a uniform manner like what happened with the big companies (e.g. with Twitter and Reddit); and even if they do we can just create a new instance or fork the good older version
for a lot of people, they'd just use what other people are using without caring about the technical prowess; 3000 char limit increase means nothing to them
most of the people who run these things don't care about competitions, they don't get more money (or perhaps even anything meaningful) from staying on top; they probably won't care about the next-door shop got better stuff

The creator of Mastodon said that he isn't going to add an option to set post length limits. I briefly tried to change it and wasn't able to make it work.

It's not configurable through the UI, but if you're the admin of an instance you can change the character limit with some fairly simple source code tweaks.

Firefish is a fork of Misskey which predates Mastodon by 2 years. As for why one would fork Misskey into Firefish or make Mastodon, some of the rationale for that is explained in the Fork a repo page by GitHub.

You can ask the developer of Mastodon personally why he didn't just make Misskey better, or the lead developer of Firefish why they didn't just contribute to Misskey or Mastodon, but fundamentally the platforms are very different even if they're inter-operable, and this comes down to the actual design of the platforms.

I think that's good to be aware of. The Wikipedia article mentioned that the APIs are not compatible. As long is the interoperability is good I think it works well enough.

The Mastodon instance I use has a character limit of 1000

firefish is rebranded calckey, a misskey fork > project has been in trouble since, hmmm, may 2023 > the *keys offer a very different interface, emoji reactions and lots of other features which mastodon does not have > *keys ui is pretty nice compared to mastodon - in the end, this is a matter of taste > but other than that, particularly firefish and its forks do not scale well: there is a reason why former firefish.social admin atomicpoet chose to migrate to another instance, though atomicpoet's post tries to hide the reasons for moving > note: firefish.social is a special case - this instance is a lost cause with outages beyond comparison > instead of building up a community at firefish.social, the admins effectively destroyed the community by introducing new experimental features instead of focusing on stability

since you are on a lemmy instance: be aware that people on the *keys cannot interact with lemmy instances

i picked the incorrect fediverse app but it's too late now to switch over to firefish