this is what it feels like reading a post from a mastodon.social user except they have a character limit of like 2 so instead of separating the #hashtags they will #PutThemInline #LikeThis so you get an #aneurysm reading a post
ShittyKopper
iirc mastodon was implementing smithereen's flavor of groups. no idea if they ended up changing course or anything (not following masto dev tok closely) but the way they work is fundamentally different from how Lemmy and compatible groups work
from what i can tell (from the work in progress pull request) mastodons group implementation explicitly does not aim for compatibility with lemmy
other than that, i agree on activitypub being crap in terms of making interoperability easy
the specs are so open ended that i doubt real interoperability will ever happen. you can break interoperability with basically every other current software out there and still be compliant with the specs
that post will have been a text post, not a link (those are likely broken now, and certainly were broken a year ago due to a bug in the misskey 12 codebase inherited by firefish and forks. modern versions of misskey just fixed that a couple months ago)
the username thing does not completely break federation, but it will randomly confuse instances. there's a 50/50 chance whether an instance will get the correct user it asks or not, and once an instance resolves a user once it'll have a similar 50/50 chance for each profile update (icon change, sidebar change, etc.). of course, if there's no conflicting user for a community (or vice versa) then federation will be fine.
oh no that's not a new change afaik it was always like this
I also wish there was an app that let me browse/post/comment on Lemmy using a Firefish/Iceshrimp account so I could theoretically consolidate accounts.
that'll be difficult. Lemmy killed interoperability when they first decided that users and groups could share the same username, and now itd be a breaking change in order to solve this on Lemmy's end.
each software willing to federate with Lemmy correctly needs to be modified to handle multiple "users" having the exact same username, and i suspect most have more important priorities to tackle before getting to that
(misskey 12 derived software also has their own interoperability bugs regarding Lemmy, but those are usually not as big of a refactor as the username thing)
It was never unusable beyond the stability issues large instances (from 1k to howevermany people ff.social had) had. For smaller instances it worked fine and continues to do so. The issues with large servers were the result of it being based on an ancient codebase (Misskey v12) with extremely questionable changes thrown on top (muting enough words could cause the entire instance to slow down), and the issues with ff.social were specifically caused by throwing everything at the wall to try to duct-tape that ancient codebase to function (ScyllaDB was the nail in the coffin i believe...?)
Firefish itself is still going (see firefish.dev), there are forks like Iceshrimp which reigned in the issues enough for larger servers to not fall over every few seconds (iirc both the infosec.exchange hosted Firefish instances migrated over which caused the main issues to be found and fixed). I wouldn't be surprised if "Modern" Firefish took the most important changes over from Iceshrimp (the devs are friendly, and the Mastodon API implementation and some security fixes were shared between both)
If you want something a bit lighter, Misskey itself is still ongoing, and there are forks like Sharkey that do some of the modifications Firefish and similar forks did to tailor it towards a non-Japanese audience.
(And Iceshrimp.NET is a project worth keeping an eye on, which aims to get rid of the technical debt of the Misskey codebase by completely rewriting it, but is not ready for much more than a single user instance just yet considering it's been a thing for just about a year)
Iceshrimp is a fork, yes, but Iceshrimp.NET (the repo you're linking to) is not, being a complete rewrite unassociated with any Firefish or Misskey code beyond keeping the database schema (for easier migrations).
No. They changed hands after the original developer decided to leave for good (and start some crypto scheme which, AFAIK, went nowhere). The repos are now at https://firefish.dev, and no official flagship exists (which IMO is the right way to develop a fedi software)
Simply by choosing a lesser used fedi software you're helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software's whims. So that's a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ""threadiverse"" that's Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that's Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you're, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.
Your own local communities being "dead" mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn't that much you can do there.
In my experience, it's always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it's true in the ""threadiverse"" (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).
So really, don't worry about the size of your own instance's communities. As long as you trust your instance's staff to keep you safe there's no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where "discoverability" is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.
upvoted but realized which community this was posted so i had to un-vote (i think thats how it works here)
emoji reactions and especially actual custom emojis that are not broken inline markdown images are one of the defining parts of the actually fun parts of the fedi and not having any (even as an option you can disable) just makes this site look even more of a boring politics shitflinging and linux evangelism platform instead of somewhere you can expect people to relax and have fun at
they are way less of a distraction than replies with reaction images and 10 gigabyte animated gifs which take up half your screen and seem to be favored by the people here considering the negative reactions (ha!) this opinion got
i'd also be in favor of MFM, too. doing MFM art is much more of a creative expression than shilling firefox or grumbling about how the US is falling apart
just,,,,, please implement them correctly and in an interoperable fashion, and not like the broken mess of a custom emoji system lemmy has today