Comment by Zambyte

2 days ago

My pleroma instance (alternative AP server) collapsed on itself, running out of storage mid upgrade, about two years ago. I didn't have the bandwidth to allocate to getting it back up and running, as I didn't have backups, and it wasn't an easy fix.Last weekend I pointed my (fully local!) agent at it, and it was able to get it back up and running.

Now that I have it up and running, my feed is entirely people just hating on LLMs. I have a hard time finding technical content that I enjoy on there these days.

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).

  • Of course, I am happy to listen to people who feel strongly against AI as well, and being pro-AI is by no means a signal that someone will have anything interesting to say. My gripe with it is that AI hate seems to be a massive portion of what people (I see) talk about on there. I would love to see people talk about non- technical things, or technical things that don't involve AI, or things that do involve AI.

    It's likely just my bubble on there, but man it's relentless. I don't want to just hear everything about what you hate. I want to hear what you love!

    • I think it might just be the space in general, I've found my feed to be very full of anti-AI content too despite not seeking it out.

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.

  • I spend a lot more time on ATproto than on ActivityPub these days, amd yeah I agree with that. I find I prefer ATproto for non-technical content, and just don't really use microblogging for technology content anymore.

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.