Hey folks, just discovered this thread thanks to @[email protected] 's mention above!

To be more accurate, I was in the Firefish core team, I started Catodon with another Firefish dev when Firefish was being abandoned, but that dev quickly lost interest. Since then (a couple of years ago now) I've been trying to work with a dev but had no luck. So yeah, I recently started experimenting with LLMs and it went much better than I expected - you have to be careful with some things, but it's doable.

So Catodon (which was first announced as a Firefish fork in 2023) finally had its first stable release in March, and I intend to continue working on it. It's based on Sharkey, but I've also ported some Firefish features, and so far I've added a Direct Messages chat-like page, an RSS timeline and a LOT more smaller features, and my next goal is implementing Lemmy/Piefed/NodeBB compatible forums (which I wanted to do -and had suggested- since I was in Firefish).

If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer, and thank you for taking interest in my project! Hope to join the threadiverse with my main account very soon - the goal is within April.

@[email protected] if you want to use Mastodon, you are very welcome to just do that. I never liked it, never used it, it always felt to me like an outdated Twitter. I respect everything they've accomplished, of course, but that doesn't mean I want to use the software :p

Misskey is probably the second biggest fedi microblogging platform, and has a very different approach, less strict, more fun, and with a much better looking interface. It also has emoji reactions, it has had quotes since forever (which Mastodon added very recently), there's a ton of things that are different, another one is that Mastodon has a 500 character/post limit while Catodon has 5000 etc.

There's wonderful ecosystem in fedi, and it would be a shame if we lost that pluralism and only use one or two platforms. Another thing that is obviously different (or will be very soon), is what is described in this topic. The reason that you made your post from a Piefed account, and not a Mastodon one =)

https://lemmy.world/post/45381392 =)

Now that I think about it more, Cyborg with the sidebar and middle column colors exchanged (Black for the sidebars, grey for the middle) could be awesome. Perhaps with a brighter font color too, like Slate.

I'm guessing to draw attention to questions: In the topics list, your topic has a bright yellow "Unsolved" button, which prompts users that there might be something there where they can help. The distinction is more important before the question is answered correctly, than afterwards. If all topics are potentially questions, then questions won't be getting extra attention.

Gotcha, yeah, I think that makes sense, I can't think of a serious reason why all topics can't be marked as solved, regardless of whether they were originally posted as a question or not.

...forum? =)

Unfortunately I'm still having issues in this forum. Latest still shows what seems like all posts this server receives, instead of my follows:

Also, when I try to search for my account on another server, it shows my account on nodebb instead:

@julian ah, "panos@" worked. Cool, as long as it's a known issue. As for your question, no, I follow very few people, and I get new posts all the time, it's literally like the "global" timeline in other platforms. It's been like this for months now, and in practice it means that it doesn't make any difference if I follow someone or not, I'll still get every post from everyone.

@[email protected] sure, in Settings > Preferences > Other you have three options, Catodon, Misskey and Sharkey styles, with Sharkey being the more squared one (and Catodon the roundest one). You can also change themes or create your own.

@[email protected] I'm also using a vpn regularly though with no issue. If it persists and if you have the time, I'd appreciate a dm so I can investigate this further, thanks!

If you cross post something to an unfederated or private forum, does it still get shared with your followers from remote servers? I mean I might want to share something with the members of the forum, without my remote followers seeing it. You have probably got that covered and it doesn't go to remote followers (or you can't cross post to unfederated forums), but asking just to be sure.

@[email protected] ugh - I can fetch it from this NodeBB server though by using the original url! I gave the url through lemmy.world above. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/439c1e92-64f5-41ae-8dd4-24d763313149/hello-world-from-catodon?_=1775733822991

It might be useful though to have the option to set some subforums as questions-only, where only admins and mods can start plain topics and everything else is automatically a question. No idea if this is already possible as I don't run a NodeBB forum myself (yet). But I can see how this would be handy for support forums.

say