During a recent community call, it became apparent that there is a community split over whether or not to use large language models to generate content. While some people expressed that tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT could help with generating and summarizing articles, others remained wary.

The concern is that machine-generated content has to be balanced with a lot of human review and would overwhelm lesser-known wikis with bad content. While AI generators are useful for writing believable, human-like text, they are also prone to including erroneous information, and even citing sources and academic papers which don’t exist. This often results in text summaries which seem accurate, but on closer inspection are revealed to be completely fabricated.

FFS, please do not let Wikipedia start being filled with AI-generated rubbish 🤯

Interesting article that compares and contrasts the three major decentralised alternatives to Twitter at the moment, as the writer sees it (but I basically agree anyway): the Fediverse, Bluesky and Nostr. It doesn’t mention the major drawback of Nostr, namely that it’s completely overrun by crypto bros and far-right wankers, but otherwise it’s good. I also tend to agree that the more I actually read about Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol, the more optimism I have for it – I don’t love the look of Bluesky as it is right now, but I’m increasingly thinking the protocol has promise.

The article also says this about algorithms on Mastodon:

Another “limitation” to Mastodon is its cultural norm against “algorithms.” I think this is somewhat misguided. I get why people don’t like the algorithms on centralized social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but when done right, algorithms are super useful in making it easier for you to find more signal over noise. The problem has been who controls the algorithm and what are they tweaking it to do.

With Mastodon there are some 3rd party algorithms, and some of them are really useful. But a few others were shouted down, and shut down, by people who believe that there should never be any algorithms in Mastodon at all, and that’s unfortunate. In the early days, I would talk about some of the cooler Mastodon algorithms I’d been finding, but after a few them then were yelled at by a bunch of Mastodon users, I’ve generally decided it’s not worth promoting those useful tools, for fear that people yell at them to shut them down.

Considering that post I made back in November about how user-controlled algorithms on Mastodon could be useful, I’m like, well damn, why didn’t I know about this. It is true that a lot of Fedi users have this reflexive hostility to anything algorithmic (much like they do to Bluesky, actually 😂) but I definitely agree with this article’s author, that they have a place, and the real problem is who controls the algorithm.

Though it is common for governments to spy abroad, Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet, including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

For billions of internet users outside the US, the lack of privacy mirrors the alleged threat that US officials say TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses to Americans.

There is a new trend among websites where they want my email address before I’m allowed to read their free content. While I sympathize with the struggles of the media business, I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and way easier than logging in.

I think I came at this article from a slightly different place from some people, because I was having a conversation yesterday about how can writers keep our work from getting scraped and republished elsewhere or used to “train” an AI model. And the answer, as far as I can see it, is to make sure our work is not on the “open web”. Either put up a login wall (not necessarily a paywall), or put it in some kind of all-Javascript dynamic web app where viewing the source code (that which computers can parse) gives you a whole bunch of obfuscated gibberish.

I’m thinking about fiction here, not the writers who produce the neverending stream of articles that get linked to and passed around on social media. Honestly, articles on most topics are a dime a dozen, so it’s very easy to go “nah I’ll just go elsewhere” when presented with an obstacle like a login wall. They are really annoying in that context. For fiction, though, I’m not so sure. If I’m willing to buy ebooks from Amazon, a login wall or having to read in a Javascript web app is not so great a hardship, comparatively.

Here’s the part of this article that everyone’s quoting, with good reason:

The Fediverse is, by design, thousands of servers in many languages. They are cheap to run, at least for small groups, and relatively easy to administer. You can chat among your server kin—or blog, or podcast, or share images and videos—and connect with servers in the outside world. The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get? Who will create the chore chart?

The true beauty of Mastodon and similar services is that they are designed to collapse. If you want to quit a server, you can take all your followers and follows with you. If a server shuts off, you can find another. It’s not one guy. It accepts that as we centralize and debate we melt down, and so it comes with a giant sticker that reads: Babel built in!

How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.

Some handy new shortcuts one can use to post interactions (likes, replies, reposts, bookmarks), note posts, or photo posts via Micropub to an IndieWeb site. Since I just got Indiekit back up and running again yesterday, these might prove useful for me! 😊