Uraael

Uraael, 7 months ago

@maegul

It is very sad to see.

The scaling issues aren't entirely the fault of the devs. Until servers got popular enough this issue lay dormant, and we've seen some herculean efforts by instance runners to keep things working but sadly it appears to be a fundamental issue with the misskey v12 codebase, that was also affecting Misskey itself.

Iceshrimp is similarly afflicted, I believe.

But Sharkey is based on the v13 codebase which saw Misskey work hard to overcome the scaling problems. If they've done enough then Sharkey might be the stable platform with longevity we all thought Firefish was back in March.

Not all of the current state of affairs is technical, however. Firefish also suffered from concerted attacks on the lead dev, started by Mastodon.art (who else?). Additionally, support cooled and then split off almost immediately as Iceshrimp appeared. Disagreements about the direction Firefish was taking, the alleged focus on Fun features over User Safety, and even grumbles about finance partners all combined to damage Firefish as a venture.

Hopefully lessons have been learned so Sharkey can have a decent chance. I find Mastodon really lacking, and even Pleroma/Akkoma don't quite nail what Calkey et al got so very right.