Cool things on Firefish/clackey, that Mastodon and most of it forks don't have:
• Quote notes (Misskey and Akkoma, a fork of Pleroma, also have them)
• Antennas. They allow you to add words, tags and accounts to lists and create parallel timelines that you can see whenever you want, without having to follow this accounts
• You can create personalized timelines for certain accounts to appear in.
• It has a drive section where you can upload files.
• Channels. This are public local group that the members of a server can create, join and interact within.
• Private chat groups. Local only.
• Emoji reactions
• Clips. These are collections of notes ("note" is the name post receive in Misskey and Firefish)
You can create multiple clips and manage them by giving a name and description to each. You can also choose to make your clips public to make them available to other users.
• You can create custom web pages. For now they don't federate.
I just tried it out and the UI and additional functionality is a massive upgrade over the current stock Mastodon experience. And it federates seamlessly with Mastodon accounts. The Antenna feature is something that I've been looking for in Mastodon since day one. The fediverse rules. Use it if you like it!
I like Firefish, I am on a Firefish instance myself, and I feel really good about it. It's fun to use and it federates with Mastodon most of the time, and with Misskey some of the time. Unfortunately, microblogging on the fediverse is not as straightforward as forums on the fediverse, as they're a lot more fragmented and there are 5 or 6 different platforms instead of 2 like we have here.
Like every open source platform there are so many alternatives. Like all the open source Linux distributions and all the open source messaging apps. The social media space now has lemmy, kbin, mastodon, now firefish. So many places, Firefish doesn't appear to be federated yet, hopefully they will soon, users now will have too many options to choose from. This brings me back to when I picked my first linux distro, I had Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, PopOS, Arch, Manjaro, and hundreds more. It's a bit overwhelming, I'll be following the development and hope everything goes well.
What about mobile apps? I’m on mastodon, but I basically never see the mastodon UI as I stick with Ivory (as I’m a former Tweetbot User on some ancient Microblogging Plattform which has transformed to something… else).
I don’t want to use some „nice looking“ Webpages which are optimized for mobile screens. I want dedicated Apps, as they offer mostly the much better experience.
I think the recent run of developing high class Mastodon Apps earlier this year (as the mentioned ancient Plattform kicked them out) gave mastodon an enormous boost.
It was actually created in 2022 as Calckey, as a fork of Misskey, so one of the Fediverse social networking sites. It has recently rebranded though to the Firefish name. It is a real breath of fresh air though in terms of features and great UI!