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Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

It should also worry investors open-source AI is only months behind the big tech leaders. I looked into AI voice cloning lately. There’s a few really pricey options. Like $25 a month for a couple of hours voice cloning.

However, there’s already an open-source version of what they’re selling.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I wonder when this is going to seriously affect world oil demand? People used to think “Peak Oil” would be when supply was constrained, it turns out it will be when demand is constrained.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

A common dystopian narrative around AI is that Big Tech will own all the gains, yet reality doesn’t match up to that. What we’re seeing instead, is that freely available open source AI isn’t far behind the leading contenders.

What will it mean for the future? Who knows. But I feel reassured when it comes to AI power is being more decentralized.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I’m one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - futurology.today ) It’s been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.

This is despite the fact we’ve permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

reddit.com/…/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_…

It’s hard to know exactly how many people see them from the stats Reddit gives Mods. Reddit gives a figure within the post for views, which stands at about 160,000 for the post I mentioned. That includes the times people have been served the title in their feed & and the times people clicked on it (sadly Reddit doesn’t differentiate further).

The fediverse site has been going for 6 weeks and has about 620 subscribers. My guestimate from looking at addresses in comments is that maybe 100-150 are reddit migrants. So roughly speaking 1 in 1000 r/futurology people who saw something about our fediverse site were motivated to join.

A sobering thought for people who think the fediverse is about to crush reddit.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

and why would they? … they are pretty happy with what they have now.

Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who’ve setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.

My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn’t too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.

But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it’s expressing.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Yes, its hard to understand. On the other hand our results on cloudflare look way too good to be true. They say the fediverse site had 180K unique visitors in its first month and almost 3 million of what it calls “total requests”.

It’s hard to figure out what this means in terms of how many people on the fediverse are seeing the content, both from our site, and where its coming up in federated instances.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I’m an AI optimist in general, but I have a depressing feeling the likes of Meta will model these AIs to relentlessly deliver attention to content above all else. Will there by an angry Karen chatbot endlessly screeching about ‘wokeness’? It won’t be like Facebook if there isn’t.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Part of me hates the privacy implications of this, despite Google’s promises. AI intimately integrating with your personal data seems the way of the future. I have to admit the FOMO is real here! Especially as I use Google Docs a lot, it’s one of my main tools for work.

EDIT/UPDATE I’ve just had a look at the TOS for this, and its a big no from me. It wants to use your conversations with Bard as part of future training data. Needless to say those conversations include the results its pulled from interrogating your email and documents. Yikes! No thanks.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon’s list of things to ruin, and he’ll get around to it eventually.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy.

Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.

Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.

Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Maybe I’m missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there’s zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.

Lemmy for Mastodon - A new account dedicated to promoting the Lemmy communities and instances that make the most sense in your Mastodon feed (mastodon.social)

This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573...

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I’d love to have more Mastodon stuff in my lemmy feed. Shame its virtually impossible as far as I can see. Do you have any idea when lemmy devs might change this?

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I help moderate one of the larger subreddits (r/futurology) & its striking how much the recent issues have demoralized people. We track inactive Mods monthly, where there used to be 5 or so a month, for the last two months its 25 or so, which is the majority of the mods on that subreddit.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I don’t know that they’ve gone anywhere else, although it did prompt some of us to create a fediverse instance for the subreddit.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Yeah, that is a good solution. I’ve used the icon option to style just the main community. All the rest with a duller/smaller option delineates status.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

pipedvideobot.

Thanks for that info, it very useful. I’ve been wondering about bots, we’d talked about writing one to cross-post the subreddit’s content to the fediverse site.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

keep an eye out for opportunities.

I’m hoping opportunities will happen organically, e.g. users will be cross-posting & cross-linking.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

I hope the Lemmy devs sort out email verification soon. We had so many problems we switched it off at futurology.today & went with limiting new sign-ups to a set amount per hour to combat bots instead.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

What exactly was the issue with your verification system?

Numerous issues the site dev couldn’t fully understand after hours of investigating. We’ve switched off email verification until the Lemmy devs fix this in an update. Additionally 2FA is often broken too & awaiting a fix.

ani.social/post/46684

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

We beta tested it for a while & went live today.

reddit.com/…/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_…

It will be interesting to see how it does. r/futurology has 19 million subscribers, but I don’t know what that means for the lemmy site.

GossiTheDog, to starfield
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

A fun Mastodon thing I don’t think people realise - you can interact with Reddit style services like Lemmy without leaving Mastodon as it’s part of the Fediverse.

Eg I follow the @starfield community by following that user, new posts automatically appear in Mastodon feed, I can upvote by favouriting, and I view and reply to comments in the thread.

I’ve never signed up for Lemmy, here’s me posting from Ivory app via Mastodon.

image/png

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Shame nothing works the other way around yet. The only option Lemmy seems to give is to DM a mastodon account & even that doesn’t seem to work (at least it didn’t for me).

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

In fairness, I can see why the accusation of being spammy is justified. But to address the issue of scamminess - Although we don’t mention the site address yet, here’s it being talked about by the Mod Team on r/futurology

reddit.com/…/do_you_have_some_time_to_take_a_look…

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Thank you. This is very helpful. Someone else questioned why we are even using email verification as they said few other instances are using it.

We’d assumed it was important from the perspective of bots, trolling, spam, etc But it seems to be at the root of the problems we’ve been having.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

incoming reddit users could be a huge benefit (familiarity) And maybe add those options (a. & old.) on the side panel with a link for tutorials how to use Lemmy and its apps

Yes, I’ve been thinking about how to make it as simple as possible to understand for reddit users. Where we explained it here, is an attempt to reduce things to the simplest language - reddit.com/…/do_you_have_some_time_to_take_a_look…

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

You’ve reminded me there’s an error there (confusion with nomenclature) that I’ll go & fix.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Thanks for this, I’m passing it on to the developer. We’ve been assuming email verification is important to combat bots/trolls. I’ll bring up the observation it isn’t widely used. It often seems to be something to do with problems we’ve been having.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Thanks. It seems email verification is what is causing most of the problems.

Lugh,
@Lugh@futurology.today avatar

Thanks, hadn’t thought of that, we’ll look at it.

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