The Fediverse is huge and overwhelming to a newcomer, with many different types and each with servers to pick from. Which ones would you suggest checking out or avoiding?
The Fediverse is huge and overwhelming to a newcomer, with many different types and each with servers to pick from. Which ones would you suggest checking out or avoiding?
As far as I understand, lemmy instances are sort of a community with communities inside. It seems that each isntance has their own like minded userbase. .world has basich mix of everyone due to popularity, .ml holds strong beliefs politically, blahaj.zone is more progressive in gender identity, piefed.social is more mainstream decentralized instance. And of course there are more I didn’t mention.
I am on dbzer0 because I am into selfhosting and sailing the seas. It fits me well. Tied to one instance doesn’t stop me from engaging on other instances except the ones I blacklisted.
Check the instances and their descriptions and find something that fits you.
In addition to being a themed community of communities, instances also have different federation/defederation policy. dbzer0 is defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, for example, while being federated with Hexbear.net. There’s also the differences on how upvoting and downvoting is treated among instances, with some disabling downvotes and some disabling voting altogether.
db0 and sh. are my viiiibbbbbee
db0 is also pro-GenAI, which seems unfortunate to me.
You can do what I do and just block the genAI art comms.
No harm, no foul, I just am not interested in the content.
While I can’t say for certain, I would strongly suspect that a lot of the people in those comms are self hosting their LLMs/Image generators, if that makes you feel any better.
But uh, there are a variety of nuanced stances on LLMs and such, amongst the other m@teys I’ve talked with.
Its… not like we’re all super duper no holds barred put AI in everything advocates.
A lot of us are… quite a lot closer to ‘Butlerian Jihad NOW’, lol.
At the risk of starting an argument (sorry)… I see any use of GenAI as support and endorsement of the technology, and I see the technology as a systemic attack on creative work by real people. It’s stealing the results of hard work of people to produce derivative work with the intent of replacing those same people. Thus, while self-hosting does remove some concerns related to big corporations, I think it still empowers them by supporting the tech they deal in.
I do block dedicated GenAI communities, but it’s more widespread than that, showing up in unrelated comms, being used to generate community icons and banners.
And of course an instance isn’t homogenous with regard to its users, and I don’t condemn people for using db0, but IIRC the host of db0 is supportive of GenAI, which is what I primarily referred to, and what steers the direction the instance is taking.
I mean personally, I do as well.
But… it’s Pandora’s box.
You can’t uninvent it, basically.
We could theoretically limit or heavily regulate its further development, but again realistically, with how much money and power tech corporations have, how much influence they have over lawmakers…
… unless you’re gonna go find an ‘AI’ datacenter and put salt or sulfuric acid or something into the cooling loops, no you probably can’t really do much to effectively impede it.
I’ve also seen a bit of this, and I also find it annoying… though 99% of the time that I see something like this, its some kind of like cryptobro, when lambo, diamond hands, type person.
I don’t know that it like, stems or comes from GenAI comms on db0.
Well I don’t know precisely what db0’s (the admin) exact stance on GenAI is, but I do know that db0 the instance and community has a highly involved and active goverance model for instance rules and associations. There are fairly often major discussions and votes on a good deal of issues… as opposed to many other instances that basically just come down to the whims of the admin + a clique of powermods.
db0 themself has done more than any other instance admin I am aware of to make it so that if the community itself opposes their own personal opinion, they’ll adopt the community’s opinion and simply be an executor/facilitator of it.
I’m pretty sure some of the most popular communities on db0 use GenAI art for banner and icon - checking now, the banner art for piracy, ADHD memes, anarchism, yepowertrippingbastards appear to be GenAI (admittedly fewer than I expected), and the icon for the instance itself is suspicious.
Unfortunately though, that’s also not a problem exclusive to db0, and with the nature of federation it’s kinda inescapable when most people don’t care, unless I want to lock myself to niche communities.
I will also note, I believe db0 is hosting or participating in some kind of distributed GenAI network called The Horde, so it’s not just individual community members’ opinions, it’s an organizational endorsement of GenAI.
https://aihorde.net/
Yep, so its a bunch of volunteers, running their own local hardware, but also linking it together, to provide a kind of mutual usage network for generating images.
And yep, db0 themself is pretty involved in this.
EDIT: (As best as I can tell, I’ve not like, talked to them about it myself, or been involved in those comms.)
… but you can’t singly host a distributed network.
You can participate in it, architect it, but… the whole concept is that it is distributed, localized.
You know, like Lemmy, as opposed to Reddit or BlueSky, which are centralized.
So… this is what I met by more nuanced stances on LLMs/Neuralnet image generation.
More or less, this is like the rules that govern something like a private torrent tracker and network, but applied to GenAI.
So its an alternative way of providing distributed GenAI capabilities to those who contribute to other people also being able to have those capabilities.
As opposed to the essentially totally black box governance model of a random person getting an API token for a corporate AI network, that has massive negative externalities in that those are run on giant server farms that do things like massively run up local/regional power and water usage/costs, where you can safely presume the corpo networks are entirely harvesting all the data you send in to them.
You can be I guess 100% against the entire concept of GenAI, but see my previous point of it’s Pandora’s Box, you can’t uninvent it, its not going to go away because you don’t like it and think its bad.
… and to be clear, there are a plethora of valid reasons to be critical of it, legitimate problems.
But, a more practical and effectice way to address those things is to attempt to provide an alternate, more equitable, more transparent paradigm for its use.
Yeah, the issue is that I simply disagree, and consider the usage of models trained on data obtained without permission to be immoral, and thus unless the model is trained entirely on data supplied with consent (which is supposedly implausible), and thus people facilitating and/or promoting the usage of such to be… ethically unaligned me, and thus I don’t want to associate with them
All that said, I also don’t want to argue or try to convince you here, and want to thank you for being civil in the discussion
Absolutely fair!
Yes, we certainly can stop and not go into this any further.
Thank you as well for being polite and civil!
EDIT: One thing that we do have on db0 the instance is a kind of ‘disengage’ concept, more or less a kind of ‘safe word’ for just saying, hey, i dont wanna talk about this anymore, please stop, and i’ll stop as well.