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Two thumbs up dev(s), hope you're doing okay and getting some sleep in between. Had some rough production upgrades in my life, and this sounds like a pretty bad one. ๐
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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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.
Yep! All of which is important in the case of firefish as its main value is as an alternative to mastodon to increase diversity across the fediverse. In many ways firefish is probably dropping the ball along the lines you provide, and so lessening their potential influence while also creating a non trivial amount of bitterness amongst off-put users.
A lot of new Fediverse projects, too, misidentify who their audience is. Calckey has a really good UX (most of the time), and I had zero issues as just an account user on Calc's server, but the support for would-be admins is... A chat room, and documentation that is half so far out of date that some of it is in Japanese.
That's not going to grow the presence. That doesn't get new instances online. That doesn't get an ecosystem with good moderators and admins. That doesn't get the infrastructure in place - technical and social - to truly take off.