Pixelfed is slop. I just. That is the absolute last thing I needed to see today.
I haven't done my photography work in a few months because of surgical recovery, but Pixelfed has been *integral* to that work, in part as an alternative to Instagram — the whole fucking industry revolves around Instagram, and Pixelfed has one of an exceedingly small number of viable alternatives.
And now they're slop.
It is so incredibly bleak watching one OSS project after another betray every single principle, betray their users, betray *everything* to cuddle up to fascist technology.
Every single day, I wake up and find someone else who once gave me a gift has now betrayed me.
It is incredibly straining on mental health, to say the least, and it is also a giant DDoS on time and effort.
I have approximately one spoon today.
Do I spend it taking photos and/or writing fiction? Do I spend it writing a gemlog post trying to beg people to stop doing this shit? Do I rewrite the work I did last week to develop a metadata cache for Calibre-style libraries, work that's now unusable because SQLAlchemy went slop? Do I move my photography business off Pixelfed?
Notice how many of those possibilities are tasks that only need done because someone else was an asshole.
@xgranade or do you spend hours trying to fight the 10k residential IPs DDoS from today’s scrapers…
(I turned off httpd for two hours in the end.)
Not trying to be obtuse here, but:
Why does this feel like betrayal to you?
I understand the desire to not use llm-generated code (though I don't share that desire). I don't understand your use of the term 'betrayal' here though.
Not to say that your opinion is invalid! Just... I feel like I must be missing something here.
@wouter because the promise of open source is inherently that the code is a communal asset, and the slopbot is strip-mining the commons for the enrichment of fascists. get your head on straight.
🍉 
@wouter Stepping away from the evil giants and into the world of FOSS is frequently done to get away from, well, putting money and power into the evil giants.
Basically feeing into the arms of the evil giants with your FOSS projects that you have built up a user base from to "escape" this, is a bit of a betrayal.. No, not just a bit.
Many donate money to support projects that are seen as anti-big-tech, and it sucks when these projects start feeding into what bigtech wants you to do.
@xgranade
Am I correct in stating that it's more an anti-big tech position, then? That makes more sense to me.
I don't think it's entirely an accurate position, as it would imply that (a) only big tech can run LLMs, and (b) all of FLOSS is anti-big tech, both of which I believe are accurate statements, but I can better understand that position of that's what it is.
@xgranade
@wouter Pixelfed was built as an alternative to Instagram, an escape from the grip of Meta, no, not all of FOSS is anti-big-tech, there are FOSS project that plays directly into the slop fest from day one, but Pixelfed was an escape.
They are also one of the ones to have fallen into this more than most of the larger FOSS projects.
You don't need to understand every ones position on this. We are getting fed up and many are too tired to explain over and over.
It doesn't matter that "big tech are not the only ones that can...", when projects use their LLM's, opens to use their LLM's, and become ad-board for their LLM's so investors toss more money at them.
The "run at home" LLM's are not exactly much to get excited about.
Anyway, I will not respond further. It's getting so tiresome.
@xgranade
> You don't need to understand every ones position on this.
True, but I genuinely wanted to, and because you and others kindly took the time, I do believe I understand the position better now; or if not, then at least it no longer feels logically inconsistent to me. Thank you for that.
@xgranade
> It doesn't matter that "big tech are not the only ones that can...", when projects use their LLM's (...)
Absolutely. I am 100% with you that free software should not be beholden to big tech. Unfortunately "open source" was always a ploy to get big tech to embrace free software, and so depending on why you are here, you might not care as much. ("You" as in the hypothetical open source developer, not you personally)
@xgranade
> The "run at home" LLM's are not exactly much to get excited about.
Certainly true several months ago, and probably true today (more so from an ideological than a technical pov).
I feel the way out of this mess though is through this. If we "run at home" LLMs are competitive with hosted ones, then when the bubble bursts and big tech must hike their prices, not even the people most convinced will want to use them anymore.
@xgranade
(This is, occasionally, also why I'm trying to convince the powers that be at $DAYJOB to look into self-hosting rather than relying on hosted LLMs: so I can experiment with the available models and potentially also work on making them more attractive than the hosted ones)
@xgranade
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 0
@wouter @xgranade Generative AI as it exists under capitalism is a fascist project. This point is not up for debate.
"Free/Libre Open-Source Software" should, at least in theory, promote freedom and liberty.
Using genAI in FLOSS software is basically a massive middle finger to the organizing principles.
So a lot of people who got involved in FLOSS because of those organizing principles are feeling pretty spicy about the folks who seem to care more about racking up Whuffie than they do about the seeming contradiction of making the freedom-promoting software all dependent on fascist tooling.