Fediverse

It's a fine balance. A service like this needs so many talents, it's very difficult for one to know all of them. You need 1. a infrastructure engineer/linux sysadmin, 2. an API/backend software dev, 3. a Frontend/GUI dev and a 4. Database Engineer/Administrator. These 4 are very very difficult to do well in one person, since almost each of them has infinite depth.

It seems like Firefish developer is good at 2 and very good at 3. That helps attract people to the software because it seems to fancy. But that sets up for failure, as its popularity becomes its own undoing, as the infra and/or the database cannot cope, and then the hapless developer is left running around like a headless chicken. I feel like similar issues are affecting kbin at the moment.

But the opposite is also not great. I'm great at 1 & 2, can kinda handle 4 but I absolutely suck at 3 (UI). As a result, while I can run a custom service with 200K accounts reliably, I can't make it look good for shit. To cover my failings, the backend and the API are completely open, and I've invited anyone who wants to make an frontend, no questions asked. It's not perfect, but it works.

The scope of building a large webservice is so large, it's impossible for one person to handle it alone. But it's also very very difficult to find competent and trustworthy people to cover the aspects you cannot. Especially DBAs! DBAs could be considered like the healer in a "Holy Trinity" game (Tank/Healer/DPS). It's the role everyone needs but very few enjoy playing.

I wish firefish luck, but I doubt moving to a different DB is going to solve this issue. I'm honestly surprised this is the approach they went for, instead of just tuning postgresql.

That's a shame. As an end user, it's a really nice experience, but running my own private instance I kept running into issues that just made it really difficult to keep it online, especially once life started to put a lot of pressure on my time and mental health.

One thing I've noticed about a lot of small FOSS projects is that they do very little to actually educate potential users on how to use their stuff. The underlying motivator is often to provide alternatives to existing products, but they fall down entirely when it comes to actually making those alternatives usable for the users of the things they're trying to provide alternatives for.

The big ones get big by creating their audience. The small ones look for the small intersection of people who use the mainstream product, care about open source, and also are fluent enough in that world that they already know what to do to make things work, and that pool of users often doesn't reach any kind of critical mass.

Firefish definitely seems like it's overly concerned with aesthetics over anything else. Nearly every instance I checked out had a ton of custom CSS which frankly reminded me more of something like Tumblr than what it really is (Mastodon with a coat of paint.) I don't mean this as a slight since it's obviously attracting a community, but it's completely inscrutable to users not familiar with the platform its based on and seems to be very taxing to maintain (my experience mirrors yours somewhat.)

If they can get more people on board to keep it together then I'd definitely be willing to spin up another instance.

is there only the one dev?

ive been watching the kbin development pretty closely, and they seem to have some contingency in case the lead dev gets burned out.

Federated microblogging platform, like Mastodon.

To add to scytale's description, it's a fork of misskey that was formerly known as calckey