Firefish is a hot, new microblogging platform with a gorgeous UI and tons of new features! Here’s a guide on how to easily switch over from Mastodon.

How to Move from Mastodon to Firefish

Mastodon is a great microblogging platform, but maybe you want to try something new. Firefish made a splash recently, and a lot of people are talking about it. If you’ve played with it for a while and want to officially take the plunge, here’s some tips on moving from your Mastodon Instance to a Firefish one.

Table of Contents

• Account Migration
  
  • Register a New Account
  • Point New Account at Old Account
  • Direct Old Account to New Account

  
  

• Data Migration
  
  • Import Old Posts
  • Import Follows
  • Import Lists
  • Import Mutes / Blocks

  
  

• What’s Different?
  
  • Emoji Reactions
  • Widgets / Deck Mode
  • Antennas
  • Clips
  • Channels

  
  

Account Migration

Register a New Account

The first thing you need to do is to find a new place for your account to live. The official Firefish website has a server listing, with each instance following the project’s Server Guidelines.

We highly recommend doing a quality of life check on whatever instance you join. This boils down to a few key considerations:

• Policies: Does the instance have some kind of Code of Conduct or Terms of Service?
• Drama: What kind of things do members of the community post? How do they treat others?
• Scale: What kind of operation is this? Is it a big server, with lots of people? Is it a one-person server?
• Reputation: What do people who know about the instance have to say about it?

A good starting point to check for this information is on a server’s About page. Bonus points if they have a Terms of Service and Admin page. These generally set expectations up front.

Point New Account at Old Account

Now that you’ve created your account, it’s time to set up the initial import. This will move over your Followers collection to the new account automatically. Go to Settings > Other Settings > Migration, and scroll down to the Move to this account from an older account pane.

Fill in your Mastodon user handle like in the example above, and click Save.

Direct Old Account to New Account

This is the other half of the initial import. You need to head back over to Mastodon, and go to Preferences > Account > Account Settings. Scroll down to Move to a Different Account, and enter your new Firefish user handle. You’ll also need to enter your current Mastodon password.

Data Migration

One really nice Firefish feature is that, in addition to your followers, you can also move your data over with you. You can import old posts, people you were following, lists of people, and muted / blocked users. As of the current release of Firefish, you’re not able to import Bookmarks, but maybe that will change in the near future.

The Data Export page in Mastodon. Pretty much everything you need to download involve these CSV files.

All data imports can be performed on your Firefish server at Settings > Other Settings > Import / Export Data, but you’ll need to grab that data from Mastodon at Preferences > Import and Export > Data Export.

Import Old Posts

One really cool thing that Firefish does is that it lets you import all of your old status updates from Mastodon, Pleroma, or Akkoma. as well as other Misskey systems. The project is also planning to support post import from Twitter.

One thing to be aware of: the import is not magically moving your old posts from your old account. Instead, it’s recreating them from scratch. Comments, likes, and responses from other people won’t show up in these new statuses on Firefish, because ActivityPub platforms don’t support that kind of feature yet.

Note: When you go to import posts, upload the whole .zip archive! Don’t just give the importer outbox.json, otherwise your media attachments will get skipped!

Import Follows

When I initially tried to migrate to Firefish, I found that my followers came automatically, but the list of accounts I was following wasn’t there. The good news is that this a really easy fix – just download the CSV of Follows from your Mastodon account, and import it.

If you’re following a couple thousand people, the process will take a little bit of time. Your timeline might refresh a lot to rebuild itself. I generally recommend taking a break while waiting for this process to finish.

Import Lists

Lists are a lesser-used feature on Mastodon, but they can be an incredibly useful way to filter your timeline to just a handful of accounts. Thankfully, you can import those over to Firefish as well.

After your lists have been imported, you can access them from the top nav bar.

If you want to edit entries in the list, click the Gear icon, and feel free to make changes.

Import Mutes / Blocks

The process here is basically the same as everything else. You’ll need to throw in corresponding CSV files for these, and your data will get updated accordingly.

If you ever need to review these lists, you can find them under Settings > Other Settings > Mutes and Blocks

What’s Different?

This is a topic that’s worthy of an article in itself, which we hope to get out sometime soon. That being said, there are a number of things about Firefish that are very different from Mastodon.

Emoji Reactions

You can respond to any post that comes up with any emoji you like, including custom ones.

Widgets / Deck Mode

Firefish is based on MissKey, which has a heavy emphasis on customization. You can totally transform the interface, and rearrange the widgets and columns to your heart’s content.

Antennas

You know how Mastodon can let you filter stuff out of your timeline? Antennas let you filter your timeline to a set of keywords and accounts, so that you can focus on them.

Clips

Clips are basically bookmark collections. You can put your favorite memes in a Clip. Or, you can put important announcements from your favorite projects, or fun memories that you want an easy link to.

Channels

Channels are basically groups for your local instance. They don’t federate (yet), but they provide a nifty way to share a love for niche topics.

These are just a few of the things that are different about Firefish! Keep an eye out for our impending review this coming week!

#Migration

https://wedistribute.org/2023/07/how-to-move-from-mastodon-to-firefish/

We Distribute

2023-07-21 03:33:09

After nearly a month of waiting, CalcKey has announced their official rebranding as Firefish.

CalcKey Officially Rebrands as Firefish

CalcKey, the beautiful microblogging platform, is now Firefish. Earlier this month, the creator of CalcKey announced that the project would soon be undergoing a rebranding. The rationale was that the project had expanded far beyond one personal MissKey fork, and was instead a community effort. The unveiling was made to great fanfare, with the project’s creator explaining the importance of this change.

One year ago, Calckey was just my side project, after being a Misskey contributor for a while. But when y’all jumped on board, you made it so much more. You transformed it from my dream to our reality.

Firefish isn’t just a cool name. It’s everything we’ve been working towards. It’s late nights, strong coffee, wild ideas, laughs, and even the occasional tears. It’s our little space on the web where we’re constantly pushing for the next big thing, and always looking out for one another.

So here we are, at the start of something new. Firefish is more than just a rebrand – it’s a celebration. A celebration of you, me, and us. It’s a tribute to the amazing community we’ve built together. Firefish is all of YOU.

Kainoa Kanter, branding announcement

https://videopress.com/embed/tnuucL9X?cover=1&autoPlay=0&controls=1&loop=0&muted=0&persistVolume=1&playsinline=0&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=1&posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fvideos.files.wordpress.com%2FtnuucL9X%2Ffirefish-trailer-rev2.1-final_mp4.scrubthumb.jpg&hd=1
Source: Firefish Project
Chris Trottier, the project’s advisor and outreach contributor, had this to say.

Firefish isn’t just a name. It represents our welcoming and passionate community, underpinned by our robust, feature-filled software that never stops pushing boundaries. Firefish is like this friendly deep-sea explorer taking the plunge into the wild waves of the social media world. Ready to jump in with us? Let’s make a splash!

Chris Trottier, branding reveal statement

The Redesign Process

The Firefish team partnered with Black Spike Design, who put a vast amount of work into designing a logo that would fit in well with the existing platform and community. Given that CalcKey’s existing website was all about motion graphics, the designers found a way to add some cute, simple details to the logo.

As a fun little extra, the client asked if it was possible to animate the logo.

We are big fans of SVG animation and we were happy to oblige. You can insert CSS animations into SVG markup, which is performant and cheap.

We simply added some CSS @keyframe animations to scale the eye height and some opacity/translation to the bubbles and it worked great.

Black Spike Design’s Firefish Branding Showcase

https://videopress.com/embed/eUKuGglz?cover=1&autoPlay=1&controls=0&loop=1&muted=0&persistVolume=1&playsinline=1&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=1&hd=1

What’s In a Name?

The new branding and project infrastructure feel like a big step, migrating from the heritage of MissKey, its upstream project. With that being said, more than a few community members are a bit bewildered by the change.

“I have absolutely no idea what they were going for here,” one user writes, “can someone explain it?”

“I was there in the devchat while the name was being decided,” another user responded “Firefish wasn’t suggested by anyone, so I am legitimately curious how that name was selected.”

“I was hoping for platypus,” a third voice chimed in, “the server software is a strange but good combination of everything anybody might want out of their internet account.”

I’ll be honest, I was a bit surprised at the name choice, too. I looked up the fish in hopes of some deeper, symbolic description, but cultural descriptions fall short. The explanations offered kind of sounded like they’re trying too hard to “make it about us”, with ham-fisted ocean metaphors about the network.

Chris sets the record straight in a subsequent update.

First and foremost, the name stands out due to its vivid imagery. The term “Firefish” brings to mind a vibrant, energetic, and dynamic creature.

It’s not something you’d typically encounter in your everyday life, right? And that’s what makes it so memorable.

It mirrors the dynamic and vibrant nature of social networking, where ideas, thoughts, and creativity are constantly bubbling, much like a firefish would dart around in its environment.

But honestly? It’s fine. The logo is great, the website is fire, and I’m excited to try out the new instance.

The Future

Firefish has already set up a new site and infrastructure under their new name. The flagship instance of Calckey.social is in the process of moving over to Firefish.social. The migration effort is intended to retain users, posts, credentials, and data. The move is expected to officially happen over the course of the next few days.

Honestly, that’s a damned good project website.

The project already has a comprehensive roadmap laid out for future development. With FoundKey going into maintenance mode, a number of instance operators are looking into migration paths onto Firefish. This may further consolidate the user community, as well as development efforts.

In all, a very exciting development, and a huge step forward for the project. I can’t wait to try it out, and give an in-depth review soon.

---

Thanks for reading about the new Firefish project! You can check it out, and support the project below.

• Project Website
• Code Repo / Issue Tracker
• Official Fediverse Account
• Matrix Chat
• OpenCollective / LiberaPay

#CalcKey #Firefish

https://wedistribute.org/2023/07/calckey-is-now-firefish/

blackspike design - creative web development

blackspike design is a freelance full-stack creative development team working remotely from Brighton, UK

^{blackspike design - creative web development}

In the past months development of Kbin slowly came to a halt, development was bottlenecked by a single maintainer. I have tried several times to start a discussion about the way of working and trying to address the problems and to come up with a plan to keep development doing and more importantly keep contributors happy!

Despite all of this; no response on Matrix and nothing has really changed at Kbin. I saw the project slowly dying over the past months, and I couldn't let this happen. That's why I decided to fork the project called Mbin. I wanted to avoid a fork initially, but I didn't saw any way out.

Mbin is community-focused fork, build upon trust and embracing the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4).

Despite the fact I'm the creator of Mbin, I am NOT the only maintainer, several contributors already have owner rights on the GitHub organization as well as on the Matrix Space and Weblate. We are all maintainers, we peer-review each other's code and are allowed to merge pull requests from other external contributors and our own. The community of Mbin will now decide what will be picked-up and resolved, what will be merged or not. The community is in charge. And I am "just" another contributor, following the C4 rules.

Mbin development has been accelerated tremendously over just one week time. With tons of improvements in GUI, backend, security and documentation. We have great internal discussions and a friendly community. We work as a team, sharing knowledge and helping each other out. We review and test our code changes together, we all feel responsible. I think all this is the real reason why I created the fork; it's about the people and about empowerment.

Various instances already migrated towards Mbin, see: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin. Mbin is backwards compatible with kbin, so migration should be straight forward and easy.

Success story: Jerry almost gave up fedia.io, if it weren't for Mbin, we would already have lost a big federated instance (I genuinely didn't know he was about to give up). Luckily the fork gave him hope. And hopefully I gave everybody hope again.