And yea, it's a nice alternative to mastodon, not least because you'll be able to interact with mastodon people just fine, and will have more features than them not fewer.

The main thing its got going for it is a nicer/better/richer UI with longer comments as default.

It also has a lot more actual features (like search, channels, pages, grouped bookmarks, markdown that allows animation and antennas for creating feed from filters). But in the end, having poked around it a bit, many of these features require polish before they're true selling points in comparison to markdown.

The selling points that apply now are the UI or interface, the emoji reactions, richer markdown support (where mastodon has none, WTF, it's 2023!), longer post lengths, and actual threading of conversations! You could also add that mastodon is too dominant and platform diversity needs to be supported.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I started poking around on Firefish yesterday and it looks very promising. The biggest issue I've found is that following Lemmy communities doesn't work on the flagship instance, perhaps something broke in the latest update. Otherwise it seems like it has fantastic potential.

Since you seem familiar with it, is it possible to set up an Antenna that listens to both all posts from specific users (such as Lemmy communities) as well as defined hashtags from all users? I'd like a sports feed set up in that way, for example.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea, for some reason following groups like lemmy communities and others seems broken. Others are aware and I don't know where that's up to in terms of a fix.

As for antennas, my experience is not to get your hopes up with them. Generally, anything moderately complicated/useful is unlikely to work. Their main use case, AFAIU is to apply boolean logic to hashtags. Additionally, you can define the source of posts that the logic will be applied to. Anything beyond that and you'll be fighting the feature.

In your case, I don't think it's possible to combine a specific source such as a community (which will be seen as a user) with all users seen by the instance. You either specify users or servers or everything as the source.

My post above was trying to hint at this in a general sense ... don't let all of the bling and features fool you into thinking it's a super powerful platform. It's got some nice things going for sure, but many of the features are closer to being proof of concepts than powerful tools you can wield to meet your needs.

The stuff that works well are:

UI, which looks nice and is customisable (except on mobile where it's too cluttered and small for many including myself)
Markdown (MFM specifically) with provides fun animations and other unique features. Add longer post lengths and reaction emojis to this too.
reply threading
clips (groups of bookmarks which can be made public, which is oddly useful given how simple an idea it is)

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 1 year ago

What's strange is that following communities works fine on Calckey.world, which runs the 1.0 software. So I guess a recent update must have broken something.

I think the antennas are useful even as-is. Simply setting one up that is posts-only (no replies) with some sports communities from Lemmy and some Mastodon sports news accounts ends up working quite nicely.

If development continues well I can see it becoming a very good platform.

[–] Suoko@feddit.it 7 points 1 year ago

Go firefish in case you want to try this fedi-family, it already has notes editing if compared to misskey

[–] ren@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

no, did calckey for a bit (now firefish) which I think was based on misskey. It’s nice, basically a rich-text with lots of emoji reaction support etc expansion of Mastodon in many ways.

In the end, found the more simple approach of Mastodon my speed.

[–] KalabiYau@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

more of a Firefish guy

[–] monerobull@monero.town 4 points 1 year ago

Looks like it's quite popular in Japan.

[–] i11@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, but it’s almost all in Japanese (for now) so I can’t relate to its contents. Kinda looks like Mastodon imo but with more features.

[–] TheRealBob@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I run a mastodon instance with some friends, and a single user misskey instance for myself because I like it better than mastodon. It’s its own thing, it’s been around since 2014 and it’s very robust and stable. I love being able to format posts, easily customize the instance and write more than 500 characters.

I’m personally not a huge fan of firefish but it also works pretty well and has many of the same features as misskey.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Only thing I don't really like is their Markdown flavor, for example why are headings so weird to type? But that's just a nitpick, it's really good in most aspects

[–] Taur10@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've tried it a couple times, it's neat, lots of features, but that makes it a bit confusing. I've also had trouble finding a stable English speaking general purpose server that's reliable, all the one's I used were down more than they were up. You might want to look at Calkey or whatever they're calling it now, that's an active fork.

[–] Noki@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Its called firefish!