FediOnFire was a simple, public-facing project designed to showcase a firehose of public statuses across the network. Roni Laukkarinen developed it as a personal hobby project, in the interest of facilitating network discovery.

This effort took inspiration from FireSky, a Bluesky project designed to show public statuses in an IRC-like layout happening in real-time. In Roni’s own words, his effort was to showcase how beautifully diverse the Fediverse can be.

Trouble Brewing

Unfortunately, part of the Fediverse community viewed the project in a bad light, casting assumptions that FediOnFire was violating user consent, scraping instances, and storing user data. Contrary to popular belief, FediOnFire was simply an HTML page that used JavaScript to pull public statuses from an Public Streaming API endpoint on fedi.buzz, a public relay for Mastodon servers.

After an onslaught of negative interactions, Roni saw no other option than to cease operations. The project folded late last month.

As an openness advocate I need to say that this whole ordeal has caused me a mental breakdown and that is the reason for my absence from social media since Thursday. I got too many vilifying comments and was torn from the pressure.

I’m not saying this because I’m trying to fish for pity or blame anyone else than me. For some people even saying this out loud is some kind of martyrism or trying to make myself a victim. If you like to think that way, it’s your right.

Roni Laukkarinen

Where Do We Go From Here?

This isn’t the first time a developer has felt public pressure to shut down a Fediverse project. Several efforts to build search engines, moderation tools, and even new platforms have been shut down in the past, although FediOnFire notably did very little to cause any offense. Compare this to Content Nation, which faced an aggressive backlash where a nefarious actor remote-loaded CSAM before reporting the instance owner to the authorities.

Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide

Some people think that privacy, openness, and user consent are all at odds with one another. Here’s a guide on how to navigate all three as a developer.

These kinds of experiences can hurt developers, and lead them to conclude that the Fediverse simply isn’t worth developing for. We’ve written a little bit about steps developers can take early on to avoid these misunderstandings and miscommunications early on. A big area involves announcing intent and soliciting community feedback prior to development work. By surfacing who you are, what you’re working on, and what your goals are, it’s possible to reduce pain by also establishing an understanding of what community expectations might be.

Even then, this isn’t an ideal situation. It’s difficult to maintain an excited and diverse developer community when people get chased off for building the “wrong kind of project”, especially when those developers had no malicious intent and wanted to make something nice for the community. People building for the space would benefit from a supportive and inclusive environment, where knowledge can be easily shared.

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