I’d be more interested in why than how
Everything is moving so quickly these days, and the exodus from other failing sites along with the expectations of those transitioning from them is creating a crescendo that is just unrealistic.
So many people have been working very hard to keep up with all of these new and increasing demands (and they ought to be credited for that), but what is lacking is patience for those working behind the scenes.
They’re doing a great job, but, for God’s sake, give them some slack!
It does everything Mastodon does but more, honestly. I use both, and definitely prefer Firefish. But I’m a developer so a lot of things about Mastodon really bothered me. The core difference is Firefish fka Calckey is being developed much faster and with a more modern stack. The click to play MFM feature was developed in a few days when the community was concerned about potential seizures due to unasked for auto playing or animated text.
A few key features: QT & Full text search (search I don’t use except for specific posts so can’t speak to that) MFM & cat mode (these are just fun, Misskey flavored markdown has things like tada and sparkle and rainbow. People make art with it)
You can react with cute sticker-like things to a toot and that’s all it took to really convince me. Also I feel like there’s a lot more artists there
The interface is more customizable, and there are more features (quote posts, for instance)
mastodon didn’t have quote posts because:
it inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for “good” like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way
Some mastodon apps do support quotes though, by loading any linked toots in the posts themselves
That just sounds like them deciding how I can communicate. Quoting is not inherently toxic, they’re just used to how Twitter users utilize it. I’ve also seen plenty of people use quoting of posts for boosting someone’s post without copying it, since copying it breaks the link back to the original post. I used to quote-tweet Patreon, GoFundMe, or donation link posts sometimes.
I’m with you. If we keep migrating to something else we’ll never actually settle to create a real community. I’m sticking with Mastadon. It’s grown into something pretty stable and decent at this point.
Why stick to the worse one, though?
The point of federation is that you can create community with people all over it, no matter what software the server they joined is running.
Mastodon being too big to the point that 90% of it users things it’s the whole fediverse is not positive nor contributes to create an stable community. Many people coming from twitter run from the fediverse, because they’re told there’s nothing other than mastodon, which they find hard to use, lacking and extremely toxic.
Misskey, Firefish, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Microblogpub, etc give people other options that may fit their need for/usage of a microblogging platform better than mastodon does, as each (including Mastodon and each of its forks) has it’s own “profile”
Why stick to the worse one, though?
Why is mastodon the worse one?
Many people coming from twitter run from the fediverse, because they’re told there’s nothing other than mastodon, which they find hard to use, lacking and extremely toxic.
Why is everyone so adamant that Mastodon should accommodate to users leaving Twitter by being a Twitter clone? It was meant to be federated, privacy friendly, self-hosted, less toxic twitter alternative for small communities , not a clone of Twitter. People act like everyone becomes seasoned to using Twitter or other mainstream social media websites by default and it’s mastodon’s fault they leave because its not exactly like Twitter. It’s pretty straightforward to forget all about the fediverse and rant all day, just like Twitter.
It’s one thing to improve UX for users and another thing entirely to specifically chaperone users leaving Twitter, which is not Mastodon’s goals.
FWIW migrating from Mastodon migrates all your followers automatically and you can interact with them just as you did on Mastodon.
You do need to manually recreate your list of people you follow though, from what I could tell.
Once that’s done you haven’t really lost anything unless you were or were intended to be heavily active with the feed on your local mastodon instance. (Vs federation etc)
Firefish just has a different ✨vibe ✨ going on, although it’s not for everyone, here’s the guide I’d use:
Twitter -> Mastodon Reddit -> Lemmy Tumblr -> Firefish YouTube -> PeerTube
They all work the same, and are (to some extent interoperable), but it’s just what layout you’re used to the most.
Tumblr is focused more on microblogging, so there are longer form posts, fandoms, and artists. I still have my Tumblr account (for some reason, I never use it) so here’s a screenshot of what it looks like compare to Firefish.
HOLY SHIT… I just tried firefish.social and there’s TONS of right wing anti trans lies in their trending “news.”
No fucking thank you.
Ew. I’m on easymode.im and it’s a lovely Firefish instance, I don’t see any shit like that.
Honestly, I migrated from Mastodon just when Calckey (now Firefish) seemed to be gaining more traction. I looked at available instances, and this was one of the first to pop up that checked most of my boxes, being that it is a generalistic instance (skewed a bit toward video game/nerd culture), was up-to-date and properly utilized HTTPS, and had limits I was cool with (character limits, drive storage, etc.). I later found out that it’s run by a tech YouTuber I admire, so that was a nice bonus.
My only complaint is that there aren’t many custom emojis. lol
What are you talking about? Trending isn’t even working right now… sources please.
they posted multiple anti transgender stories. obvious astroturfing. I’m out.
Isn’t that a problem with specific instances/federation rather than the software itself? There are some hateful right-wing Lemmy instances too but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for you as the instance you use has probably defederated from them.
Just to be clear, which firefish server did you join?
I just checked out the main server (firefish.social) and there wasn’t any transphobic content in the “Global” or “Local” section.
I’m wondering if you ended up on a really toxic right-wing fediverse instance, that happens to use Firefish as its software, and so the Firefish main site stupidly/ignorantly listed it as a possible place to sign up. If that’s the case they need to get rid of it.
There is a variety of instances for Firefish, such as kitty.social. One weird thing I notices is that the Firefish logo is not consistent across all instances. ThatOneCalculator, creator of Firefish, was recently involved in some drama, so some instance owners put an alternative logo instead.
To the uninitiated, Firefish is to Mastodon what Kbin is to Lemmy
I have a friend who is even less initiated than that. Can you explain for his sake what that means?
Firefish and Mastodon are both microblogging platforms (like Twitter) on the fediverse. Kbin and Lemmy are both forum style platforms (like Reddit).
Where Lemmy and Mastodon are for people who prefer a more basic just the necessities experience, kbin and Firefish provide a more stylish experience with more options and customization.
It is a Mastadon alternative where Mastadon is a Twitter ( X ) alternative.
Kbin is a Lemmy alternative where Lemmy is a Reddit alternative.
This is potentially confusing to Kbin users as Kbin also does microblogging.
No, not really. Firefish is a microblogging platform. Kbin is a link aggregation and topic discussion platform, with a wonky attempt at microblogging.
I wouldn’t call it an alternative to Mastodon or Twitter either, because Firefish has features that neither of them have. The only Microblogging platform it could be seen as an alternative to, now that it has gone beyond being just a fork, is Misskey.
People tend to compare Firefish and Misskey more to Tumblr, but they still have things that either were inspired by other microblogging platforms (twitter, included), or that are unique to them. So they aren’t fully “Tumblr alternatives” either.
Cool things on Firefish/clackey, that Mastodon and most of it forks don’t have:
• Quote notes (Misskey and Akkoma, a fork of Pleroma, also have them)
• Antennas. They allow you to add words, tags and accounts to lists and create parallel timelines that you can see whenever you want, without having to follow this accounts
• You can create personalized timelines for certain accounts to appear in.
• It has a drive section where you can upload files.
• Channels. This are public local group that the members of a server can create, join and interact within.
• Private chat groups. Local only.
• Emoji reactions
• Clips. These are collections of notes (“note” is the name post receive in Misskey and Firefish)
You can create multiple clips and manage them by giving a name and description to each. You can also choose to make your clips public to make them available to other users.
• You can create custom web pages. For now they don’t federate.
• Customisable (by admin) character limit.
Here a better explanation from the Misskey (from where Firefish took this feature) official page
I haven’t seen any Misskey or Firefish admin commenting negatively about the existence of the drive feature itself
I wasn’t a fan last time I tried it out. I’m glad they changed the name though. Calckey sounded more like an excel alternative.
I’ll have to check it out again at some point though.
