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 and info.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

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[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 11 points 2 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I think we are getting there. Currently the biggest problem I see is that melroy and I are currently the main contributors with other experienced contributors gone or at least not regularly active (which is of course their right, but its just how it is). I do have a whole lot of ideas and plans for features and I am working on a lot simultaneously, though I wouldn't say that it is a burden, more like a fun hobby. Admittedly this hobby takes a lot of time though 😅

I am very happy that new contributors are currently dipping their toe in the water and I hope they do stick around. Also a lot of the server admins are active in the matrix chat to help others out. So in this regard we are not alone.

I was honestly shocked that debounced left so suddenly and basically completely vanished... I didn't think that anyone would do that... So honestly we cannot promise anything, but I think melroy will stay around and I certainly will as well 😇

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Good to hear you also hopefully stick around for longer. I'm also still flabbergasted regarding the sudden leave from debounced.

[–] BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I promise that I will never just suddenly vanish unless I actually die 😅

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 2 months ago

Let's just hope nobody is gonna suddenly die. 😖

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