“Firefish is a hot new microblogging platform”: it’s not that “new” at all, #Calckey, which has been around since 2021, has only recently changed its name to Firefish
the antennas / news picker had apparently not yet been fully understood by the author: they do not fill retroactively and it is a full-text search that also finds parts of words. Therefore, if it doesn’t fit, search words can be excluded - it works very well for me! If you use it for a little longer instead of just taking a quick look, you can use it to structure your content very well.
“Lack of an official app is kind of disappointing”: “official” apps are perhaps important as a “brand” for some, the so-called “Mastodon” app is also the worst app ever for Mastodon (fortunately with many better alternatives). The PWA for Firefish works great on all devices, if you don’t want to miss out on any features and want the best look, you don’t need an app.
The biggest hindrance at the moment right now is the flagship instance at firefish.social:" The instance has clearly communicated that it primarily serves as a test instance, i.e. it does not strive for or want to guarantee stability. In contrast to mastodon.social, Firefish itself also makes clearer reference to the selection and there are now really many Firefish instances.
For me, the biggest disadvantage of Firefish at the moment is that it doesn’t yet federate properly with Lemmy.
If you would like for your own posts to be reachable by the search system, all you have to do is go to Preferences > Public Profile > Privacy and Reach. Once there, check the box that says Include Public Posts in Search Engines.
I'm happy that this is opt-in for users, though something that would be good to know is how users on other instances (as well as platforms like Lemmy, Kbin, Misskey, etc.) are handled. I guess the search system would not handle these users?
@fazalmajid Maybe so, but Mastodon historically has only allowed users to look up other users, search hashtag indexes, and depending on the server, search your own posts. A lot of this was done under the pretense of protecting users from harassment, but it's a bandaid covering over insufficient tooling for post-based interaction capabilities.
Anyway, the bigger problem is that it's harder to find stuff in federated systems, which can be a big headache for getting new people into the Fediverse. Search isn't a silver bullet, but it goes a long ways towards making discovery easier.
The biggest thing to note about the new messenger, by far, is that the developer intends to provide end-to-end encryption. More impressively, the app is intended to work with any Fediverse account.
This would make cross communication across the fediverse easier and may even interest others to join. It gives a leg up to the InstaRedFaceXTwitThreadApps since you can just use your one fediverse account.
There are definitely some open questions about how Sup works with the rest of the Fediverse. Do users just sign in to a service via an OAuth dance with their Fediverse accounts? Do the messages federate over ActivityPub? Does my server store my messages, or does just the app store those?
These questions and more would have to be answered before I signed up though.
So many chat apps that no one will realistically use. Until we have interoperability between different apps it’s completely pointless releasing new ones.
You won't get interoperability without people creating these kinds of apps. There's no reason Company A would futureproof their platform to communicate with apps that don't exist, because that's unnecessary development; the interoperability comes after the platforms exist. Email is a prime example of this.
So basically signal for the fediverse? Certainly sounds interesting, would be cool if it could hook into Lemmy and Mastadon as a common chat client and share between the two.
There’s a potential for surveillance capitalism to become more normalized on the network.
I think these tools can be a real benefit in legitimizing the fediverse, but they need to be developed carefully, with concern for user privacy.
Seems to me that by their very nature the for-profit, business- facing of these are going to prioritise the needs of surveillance capitalism over user privacy in the way they develop.
Thanks the thing, when internet folks get riled up we can have a serious impact. Redditors have always been great at this -- Restore the Fourth, the SOPA/PIPA protests in 2011 -- and Lemmy and kbin can be a great vehicle.
@DrChickenbeer The guy's write-up that we linked is really something, just absolutely wild what he was able to do. Apparently he tests his app in MAME before actually running it on his Apple IIc.
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