Comment by SwellJoe

That's true, and it is a rift in the fediverse...some very anti-LLM voices are quite loud there. But, there are people there with a nuanced view of them, as well.

And, I would rather talk to an AI Luddite that's extraordinarily technically competent without AI assistance than someone who vibe-coded a startup with no idea how it works, and the former is far more common on the fediverse than the latter. I think it's unfortunate there's such a strong emotional component to talking about LLMs, as it's the most interesting technical innovation since the internet, but I understand it and I'm sympathetic to it (the AI companies have done a good job giving people reasons to hate and/or fear them).

I found success in starting our from an LLM positive poster and fanning out from their follows and building a follower graph. From there I fetch a few hundred of their posts and used an LLM to classify the posts as negative, mixed, or positive. I used this to winnow a set of follows. For now I just poll and generate a timeline HTML. This has yielded decent results.

But the problem with all of these Twitter clones is the political schism of Musk's acquisition has largely polarized the offshoots. You aren't just on alt-Twitter, you're on a specific polarized chunk of it.

You have to purge old non-local content cached on your server or it just fills up your disk over time. You can do it directly in the SQL database or there's a maintenance script that does it.

I'm on mas.to, which is, I believe, the second largest after mastodon.social. I picked it because it's got the shortest URL, but it has been quietly reliable and up to date. Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.

I follow many people who use infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and they seem to be nerd-oriented instances. But it doesn't matter all that much, since you can follow and interact across the whole federation. I'd say just pick one that's reasonably large and old enough to have proven it is run by people who know how to run a reliable service and are in it for the long haul. It's possible to move to a new instance with only a little inconvenience, so don't agonize too much over it.

What motivates someone to make a new account just for this kind of mundane and inappropriately rude comment? Why should anyone answer you?

I wasn't talking to you, four minute old account.

you’re correct. unfortunately the type of people on hacker news these days are more interested in feeling self righteous than actually being correct. i think when Twitter was taken over it really shook a lot of them, so they seek refuge anywhere they can. open debate is what they fear the most, so the best route for them to avoid any risk of severe cognitive dissonance is to close off discussion and make “i’m correct and you’re wrong” the starting point. and yes to be specific i’m mostly talking about leftists