Calckey/Firefish is based off of Misskey, a powerful microblogging server on ActivityPub with features such as emoji reactions, a customizable web UI, rich chatting.
Wow, what a wild ride, huh? From those first brainstorming sessions that sparked Calckey, to the epic journey that brings us here today, rebranding as Firefish - I’ve gotta say, I’m seriously blown away.
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.
The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.
(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)
What’s the reasonable extent of their trade mark? Anything involving “Fire” + “animal” … or “animals” starting with “f”? Actually, now that I think that through, “fish” alliterating with “fox”, and the non-trivial amount of “fox”/“furry” love on the platform does make this seem like a less trivial issue.
But still … it seems to be in the space of similar but not trade mark infringement no?
Good question! Whether it’s actually infringement is a legal judgment I’m certainly not qualified to make. 🙂 But my understanding is that it hinges on whether a court thinks a “reasonable person” could be confused. For example, a clothing brand called “Firefoxy” would probably be in the clear since Mozilla isn’t in the clothing business. And maybe even a clothing brand named “Firefox” might be okay! For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records (founded by The Beatles) coexisted nicely for a long time until Apple Computer started getting into the music-selling business. I forget how it got resolved (maybe a licensing agreement?) but The Beatles’ music wasn’t available on the iTunes Music Store for a looooong time while that dispute was going on.
Firefish is an online service and software package, the very space Mozilla operates in, so there’s at least a case to be made that reasonable people might incorrectly assume it’s from Mozilla. It’s come up many times in this discussion already, and we as active Fediverse users are already pretty well informed about this!
Yea it might fall into the “similar, but not really infringement, but similar enough to cause some headaches especially for a very small volunteer run social media platform” territory.
Thanks for the response!!
Wow checking out the site now, Calckey/Firefish looks great. Is this meant to be another Fediverse replacement for Twitter?
Replacement yes, but also its own thing that doesn’t really care about replacing Twitter. I like to think of it as kinda a fusion of MySpace and Twitter.
MySpace…that’s a name I haven’t heard muttered in years…
Will Tom be my friend?
I’ve heard it compared to Tumblr
Not a tumblr user, but AFAIU, the post length or lack of character limit kinda tracks, but on the fediverse character limits like twitter and mastodon are much more forgiving basically everywhere else, so I’m not sure that’s a major factor. Plus, the colorful graphics and theme customisation and UI options are a big part of firefish/calckey, and I’m not sure that’s a thing on tumblr.
Any recommendations for good instances to try?
I’m on calckey.social … now probably firefish.social (as in they’re making the change today).
It’s the main flagship-style instance. But they’ve been having performance issues for a month or so that aren’t fatal but not ideal. There’s a good chance the move to the new server (ie firefish.social) will fix all that but I wouldn’t guarantee that.
Other than that I’m not really sure. blahaz.zone seems to be run well. the admins of infosecexchange and mastodon.world also run instances, but I’m not sure how they’re going. So, firefish.social is probably the best recommendation … though there are actually a number of instances out there!
Cool! Thanks - I’ll check them out.
“Firefish isn’t just a cool name”
Yeah, it’s also a generic name that isn’t very good?
Firefox, but make it wet
(I don’t know if it’s a worse than “calckey” tbf)
Waterfox is already a thing
It also sounds too much like Firefox. But either way, it doesn’t sound like accounting software anymore which was my issue with calckey’s branding prior to now anyway lmao
But it’s by far the best fediverse platform I’ve used from a functionality standpoint and I’m quite fond of it so hopefully this puts more eyes on it
Agreed. I just wish they had native mobile apps. The PWA on iPhone is good, but not as snappy as a native app. The design otherwise is soooo nice.
A lot of issues with PWAs on iPhone are due to Apple limitations. Maybe one day Apple will improve their support for PWAs. The thing is that they have no incentive to make the experience as good as apps, since they can’t charge their Apple Tax (30%) for purchases in a PWA.
@pixel any recommendations for some cool Calckey instances to try?
I’m on Sakurajima.social because it was partered with the small anime-oriented masto instance I used previously so it felt like an easy swap and i could trust the moderation policy but my advice is, if you wanna use it like mastodon find a small instance where you can trust the mods and talk to them, and if you want to use it like its own platform (using channels, namely) find the biggest instance that’s catered towards the niche you’re most passionate about. Channels are a big feature sell of firefish for me so being on an anime-centric instance makes a lot of sense for me :)
Cheers. It’ll be fun to explore.
I wonder what the overlap of Calckey users and Beehaw users is.
That’ll be me 😏
Removed by mod
I don’t like it. I did sign up for an instance though just to poke around. Seems nice! Not sure if I’ll use it over Lemmy / Mastodon combo though. My attention can only go so many directions.
Firefish sounds like what someone would call malware targeting Firefox users. I was hoping the name would be better.
Anyone remember Firesheep?
Calckey was a bloody awful name because it was hard to say and difficult to know how to say.
Firefish fixes that but is honestly quite generic.
Either way, I wish them the best.
It’s not just specific to Clackey, but I really hate when sites hijack the right-click menu, either to remove options, or to modify it for “theme”. I get that it looks pretty wrt to the site’s theme, but seriously, leave browser controls the fuck alone.
You can hold shift while right-clicking in Firefox to bypass any custom right-click code and always show the browser’s native context menu.
At least I think it’s shift. Might be alt.
I like that they’ve read the memo about fediverse projects being named after animals, but firefish doesn’t fit. They should have gone with Coelacanth or something like that… but easier to spell.
All these federated services suffer from similar well-publicized problems, but Calckey appears to offer one of the nicer user interface schemes so far. Though unrelated, maybe the rebrand can help build mindshare for Firefox.
Also not a fan of the new name sorry. like others said it sounds too much like trying to be firefox
Calckey now Firefish seems really cool, but tbh I really can’t say I’m a fan of this rebrand. Calckey was distinct. Firefish sounds either like a Mozilla product, or a Firefox browser fork, or else bland office software. Definitely a downgrade imo.
CalKey would have cause a little less choking when trying to pronounce it…
Calckey sounds like it should be a spreadsheet name
I adore Calckey/Firefish. It’s amazing software, but these are both pretty bad names. lol
I guess Firefish is better, because it sounds like software you’d want to use and not something you have to put up with to file a tax return, but also… why?
Yeah… They’re definitely 0-2 on naming…
Calckey is functionally 39584882x better than Mastodon but I’ve tried several servers now that are all pretty weak.
Calckey sounds like a calculator/math/graphing application and Firefish sounds like another generic fork of Firefox.
