Comment by bambax
2 hours ago
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.
I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend.
The value proposition I saw is: hooking up one or more LLMs via API (BYOK) to one or more popular chat apps, via self-hostable control plane. Plus some bells and whistles.
The part about chat integration is something that I wanted to have even before LLMs were a thing, because I hate modern communication apps with burning fashion. All popular IM apps in particular[0] are just user-hostile prisons whose vendors go out of their way to make interoperability and end-user automation impossible. There's too much of that, and for a decade or more I dreamed of centralizing all these independent networks for myself in a single app. I considered working on the problem a few times, but the barriers vendors put up were always too much for my patience.
So here I thought, maybe someone solved this problem. That alone would be valuable.
Having an LLM, especially BYOK, in your main IM app? That's a no-brainer to me too; I think it's a travesty this is not a default feature already. Especially these days, as a parent, I find a good chunk of my IM use involves manually copy-pasting messages and photos to some LLM to turn them into reminders and calendar invites. And that's one of many use cases I have for tight IM/LLM integration.
So here I thought maybe this project will be a quick and easy way to finally get a sane, end-user-programmable chat experience. Shame to see it might be vaporware and/or a scam.
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[0] - Excepting Telegram, which has a host of other problems - but I'd be fine living with them; unfortunately, everyone I need to communicate with uses either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger these days.
You might get a kick out of Matrix if you haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is probably still the best way to get it and the bridges you need setup. It is far from perfect but decent.
When I was a child, my mother would arrange get togethers by calling an coordinating with other mothers. In so doing, they would chat for a bit about local gossip or life events. Eventually, some of these women became lifelong friends as she aged.
My mother's mother would physically drop in unannounced to the people she wanted to talk to, and they'd have tea and chat a while to coordinate events. This was reciprocal. You are probably already wealthy, and your time can be spent however you like, consider not optimizing it anymore.
Genuinely, why are you using your limited time on this earth doing everything in your power to poison serendipity? If texting identical things bores you, you have free time and free will, make it actually personal so neither of you will be bored. Break the social taboo and call! Or share a calendar like a normal parent or neighborhood group.
If one of my friends with school age kids coordinated with me via clearly prompted text I would assume that we were not as close as I thought we were. That I'm a 'target for personal PR' rather than, you know, a person. It would diminish us both.
Thanks for the comment. Maybe I'm just not in the target group. I only use WhatsApp so I have zero interoperable needs; and I would never in a million years let an LLM access my private messages -- not willingly, anyway.