https://wedistribute.org/2023/07/calckey-is-now-firefish/
After nearly a month of waiting, CalcKey has announced their official rebranding as Firefish.
CalcKey adopts a new name, new logo, new site, and new project infrastructure. While the name is somewhat odd, this feels like a really big step forward for the project.
It will be interesting to see if any browser adds features to become basically an activitypub client.
You know, it's not impossible. But, very few ActivityPub platforms actually support the Client to Server protocol in any meaningful way. Most platforms use some variation of the Mastodon APIs.
Yep. And I think it's becoming increasingly controversial as the fediverse increases in diversity while simultaneously looking for what its "killer app" or "killer feature" is.
I've hassled Evan (co-editor of ActivityPub) about this and they say they've got a blog post coming about their views on the client-server protocol and why it isn't used more. I've also seen others, including the dev of calckey/firefish, say that it actually isn't a good protocol ready for use in production, which given how other platforms, including calckey/firefish, are adopting the mastodon API, is basically a soft concession to the idea of that being the de facto standard.
And, FWIW, my bet on the fediverse's "killer feature" is relatively seamless interop across a diverse, internet spanning ecosystem of platforms with decent nomadic identity or at least identity ownership. Once that starts to feel like a thing (which is definitely not the case now, at all), then I think the fediverse will actually be born. All of this right now is prototyping and groundwork. Which is also why (and I know I'm ranting now, sorry, I wouldn't bet against AT-Protocol/BS. Though I don't know the technical details, if they've sorted out how to get nomadic identity going with a protocol that allows for new platforms to grow and scale on top of it along with flexibility around feeds and moderation, it would be reasonable to expect that we might not talk much about ActivityPub in 10 years time.
Yep, you're preaching to the choir. I ended up writing an article with some ideas of what goals need to be met: https://deadsuperhero.com/2022/02/towards-a-greater-federated-architecture/
Also ... a quick skim and I can see that it features friendica/diaspora (and hubzilla?) heavily ... which totally tracks!
While those platforms all seem to be born out of a facebook model of social media (?), in terms of creating user empowerment and a diverse ecosystem, it does feel like the modern fediverse has a little bit of NIH syndrome. It'd be interesting to nail down if that's true or not and if so why/how. Either way, that the whole fediverse is dominated by the Twitter/microblog model instead, does not feel like a positive phenomenon to me.
Thanks for the post!!
They may end up rebranding again as there is already software put there using the name.
Have any trademark lawyers weighed in on this? I've only seen speculation.
It seems more complicated to me because it's actually the name of several fish and not just the name of a company. It's not like they're called Ford Motor Company Social, right? I'm also not sure that the other software out there is similar enough. They have to argue that customers would be confused but is social networking all that similar to a CRM?
Take Mastodon, make it pretty, and add about 1k useful features and settings (Maybe too many?)
It's basically an alternate version of Mastodon, similar to how Kbin and Lemmy both do similar things while being seperate projects, and a fork of another project called Misskey
For the most part. There's a bunch of different microblogging and macroblogging platforms that all talk to each other through ActivityPub, but of course there are occasionally quirks when it comes to compatibility.
Firefish is very close to the perfect Tumblr replacement, it even has the custom looks for each blog
Eh, mastodon has better apps available though. So user experience in that regard differs.
Haven’t tried it out yet, but supposedly the newest update makes calckey work with some mastodon clients!
Firefish supports now all apps afaik that are compatible with mastodon. You might just not have access to certain exclusive features of the instance.