Recently there's been quite a bit of outrage because the developer of Piefed publicly called out the Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla (FAF) for supposedly using LLM for automating instance moderation. and even though many of our admins the larger lemmy community took great lengths to debunk that post, it has become the disinfo that keeps on giving (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68749575, https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/116518887925988112, https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68222242 and more)

After clarifying our position for yet another time, someone suggested we should make an official post and an instance policy to "give me something I can boost as a positive example and a sign that things will be better going forward." and given that this storm-in-a-teacup doesn't seem to be abating as people are all too happy to bring it up again and again to malign the FAF; We're making this post to once and for all clarify this situation.

History

We're not going to rehash the whole drama and the many hit pieces against the FAF in the past two weeks, but I need to post the exact situation as it happened, without speculations and assumptions that people are all too happy to jump to.

• One of our mods develops a tool to download a user's public posting history through the lemmy API, to be used for evaluating them during moderation and shares it with some people in the admin team as something in progress. This tool does not feed anything to LLMs, it simply downloads the comments locally in a text file for easier review than going via the lemmy GUI.
• Someone is reported to our instance admins for blatant zionism and genocide apologia.
• An admin uses the tool to download the accused person's comment history for evaluation
• A quick evaluation (without LLM) confirms that this is a person that needs to be instance-banned. The moderation decision has now been locked-in at this point.
• At the same time, that admin was curious to discover if LLMs can used to summarize people's positions so that people can quickly follow-up with mod actions, without having to evaluate everyone's posts manually and reduce the workload of admins writing long justifications)
• As an experiment, the admin pass the user's comment history through a locally-run open-weights LLM (Qwen) to see the summarized output. It happens to match their own decision.
• The admin decides the leave the LLM summary in a pastebin along with that user's posting history for reference. As an inside joke, they decide to claim the post was summarized by OpenAI, as they expected only our community would care about this and our stance on corporate-LLMs is well-known at this point.
• The admin bans that person, providing a link to that pastebin as justification.
• The admin decides not to continue using LLMs anyway for summaries, for many valid reasons. As evidence see the lack of other pastebins with LLM summaries.

~2 weeks pass...

• The piefed developer is banned by a different mod in our instance for "zionism". (I put this in quotes as this is one mod's opinion, and not necessarily our instance's position.)
• The piefed developer apparently starts going through our instance modlogs for banned zionists and parses all their justifications
• The piefed developer discovers that modlog justification from 2 weeks before with the LLM summary.
• The piefed developer ask quickly in the common lemmy admin channel about it, at which point our instance admin in question, clarifies that the LLM was not used in the decision-making.
• The piefed developer does not officially reach to anyone else from our admin team, despite the fact that we've reached out before and asked them to contact us in advance for inter-instance matters to avoid escalations.
• The piefed developer make the public call-out I linked above as a piece of investigative journalism. The piefed developer does not provide the comments from our team which conflict with their narrative. The piefed developer not ask us for an official statement.
• The piefed developer to this day has not amended their public call-out from the comments multiple of our admins and lemmy users leave under their post, conflicting with the narrative.

If you feel I've misrepresented any steps of this history, please let us know and I'll be happy to adjust.

Given that, we acknowledge that even though we didn't use LLMs in moderations, we allowed it to appear as if we did, and that's on us. We will of course not do the same mistake again (appear as to be using LLMs for moderation)

The FAF's stance on LLM moderation

We are aware that our instance is seen as "LLM-friendly" due to our nuanced take on LLMs but that does not mean that we, as an instance, ever considered using LLMs for moderating our instance. So we want to make it absolutely crystal clear how we stand on the matter.

As an official policy:

• We have never used LLMs to guide our moderation decisions. This includes using LLM summaries which we would then validate, as well as LLM summaries which we use to confirm our existing decisions. LLMs are just not in our moderation loop whatsoever.
• We have never passed instance data to corporate LLMs.
• We have not used any automated moderation tooling which utilizes LLMs. The closest we have is the FOSS anti-CSAM filter I've developed and shared for years now, which relies strictly on locally-hosted machine-vision models.
• We have never officially considered using LLMs for moderation, nor do we plan to.
• As a team we're steadfastly against LLM for moderation due to its inherent biases.
• If any of the above changes, we will publicly inform the FAF community.

We hope this can finally put this matter to rest.

AI-haters are making themselves irrelevant so why care. Using local LLMs for various tasks they're well suited for is just being smart.

Finally, this whole drama was nonsense

The piefed developer can get fucked. This one person has caused nothing but chaos in the Lemmy community. I've seen similar posts to this one, having to do with different topics, where admins and mods have to put out some stupid statement to counter some dogshit decision or opinion from this person.

A few examples:

• https://lemmy.today/post/52558180
• https://quokk.au/c/fediverse/p/887450/piefed-flagship-instance-shadowbanning-instances-from-discoverability-other-questionable-upd

Ai is cool I just hate llms and people saying they can do everything that's not even happening here it just sounds like a zio saying shit they do that even worse than llms except llms aren't as enthusiastic about rape and sometimes say true things just by chance which Zionists are and don't

Concerns can be debated, lashing out is for toddlers

That's why it's so important to check your own biases, be rational and skeptical. I mean the people reading Rimu's post.

It's incredibly easy to be convinced by some manifactured argument; if you want, you can present almost any kind of evidence both as supporting a conclusion or disproving it, just depending on how you word it or what you leave out.

Everyone has an agenda. Including this post :D

The problem is stupid people think the programs are alive and sentient, when in reality they don't 'understand' anything, they just compute the most likely next word. I'd rather not live a world dominated by that mentality, it lacks care.

The biggest issue besides the llm is

a tool to download a user’s public posting history through the lemmy API

I think this needs to be very clearly explained to users in general. In the name of public education.

Your posting history is public, and can and will be used against you. At this point in time, anything posted on the internet is essentially permanent public history. It's in a database somewhere that can be leaked or scraped.

This is not a lemmy or dbzer0 problem.

Even your messages are technically public.

There is nothing stopping a bad actor from scraping every thing said on the Fediverse. I’m sure it won’t be long until the CIA is harvesting everything you do here to prosecute people for being antifa or something.

The CIA is for external affairs. Pretty sure they would use the FBI for that.

Everything we know about how human brains work shows that we're also just pattern matching machines in a loop.

It's always a good idea to study a subject before calling others stupid.

I'm not saying they don't have any purpose, but it might be a good idea to question whether you would like a cold calculating machine to interact with, instead of something made with human care.

I think perhaps this world has dehumanized everyone so much that they would prefer interaction with cold sycophants instead of a meat problem

Gotta love the irony of someone who baked proactive censorship of sites and automatic censorship of posters directly into his software complaining about somebody else's modding decisions...

LLMs are tools. Like ... compilers. Your post comes off very strange with that in mind.

Thanks for the clarification.

To add a few of my personal remarks: I think as an instance / admin (team) you bear some kind of responsibility for your users and mods. I mean you provide a stage to them. And federate that out to other instances. It's a bit unfortunate if mods use instances for experiments that are against instance rules, or they use it to call people names... I mean if your staff knows this is going on, you kinda need to step in. You can't say our staff is against it. But we gladly let our mods do it. ...So I appreciate the clarification.

And with the public data... Well, technically almost everything is public data on the Fediverse. So people could make a point for arbitrary positions. It's more a unwritten social agreement how we don't sell user data to Google or use it for nefarious purposes. I think we're more or less trying to do what's right to do. Not just look at the designation of an activity. The majority of users here probably didn't mean to consent to abuse. That's why we're here, and not on Reddit.

The Anti-CSAM filter is great work. That's a very welcome use of machine learning. At least in my opinion.

breathe man

Note, we don't play like that. It's not my instance. it's our instance, our FAF. I don't have any more power than any other admin

I agree, the problem isn't the people who approach them like tools, it's the people who approach them like people, or confidants, or gods. I'm aware that isn't everyone, but some append consciousness to something akin to advanced autocorrect like their phone has.

We can merry-go-round the philosophy of whether humans are tools, or consciousness is an algorithm, but it is missing the point I fear, that this stuff doesn't comprehend, it says it does, it's a simulacrum of understanding, wrapped up in humanlike speech, not something that cares about anything

Hmmh. I mean I don't exactly know the hierarchies on dbzer0 regarding those kinds of smaller/quicker decisions. Guess what I wanted to say is more or less: If you have instance rules, or a collective stance/policy on things, you better enforce them. Or they're meaningless. I just replied to this post because you summed it up. Other than that, whatever floats your boat.

I've never really cared much if my C-compiler "understands" assembler - just that it produces good results ;)

I used a local LLM yesterday to reverse engineer Winbond's NAND ECC algorithm*. That wouldn't be possible with any other tool since the LLM spent the time "reasoning" around algorithms. I don't really care much about the definition of "reasoning" - just that the job got done.

I feel the AI haters try very hard to claim that the LLMs can't do anything new. That just ... isn't so. LLMs are a new kind of tool and they have plenty of viable uses.

*) https://blog.troed.se/posts/winbond_nand_ecc/

🤣 take note future mudslingers: anarchists keep their receipts.

I left lemmy because I didn't like the devs among other reasons now the piefed devs are being weirdos too.

Eh, I don't use it much, but when looking for answers to questions that don't seem to be answered in old forum posts, it's been pretty helpful in sorting out tech issues.

And I think what they mean by 'can't do anything new', is that it is built from what already exists, but that's true of all tech really. I think the bigger issue isn't that it's not creative, but that at a certain point, what it will be building off is its own output. Humans have the same issue in reproduction, if we only inbreed, we cause issues in our schematics, as it were.

And here I've done it to myself, attributing living elements to a tool. I try to be mindful of these things, but just imagine how many aren't.

I'd say Anarchy is a hierarchy. A flat one. But we can also stick with hierarchies being vertical, and Anarchy is not part of that.

And I've been in real-world groups of people with flat hierarchies. It's fairly easy in those: It's EVERYBODY's responsibility in that case. If you're doing an illegal anarchist rave in the woods and you see someone spike the drinks... Or the person who sells nasty adulterated drugs shows up... You know that guy but they found some new innocent people... Well... You better do something about it, whoever you are. Or everyone who knew, watched and let it happen is to be blamed. Because there is no other host you could shift blame to. It's now become your moral obligation.

Who is the FAF?

You realize most of the instances aren't in the US, right?

Freely Analyzing Frankfurters

It's the fediverse anarchist flotilla. lemmy.dbzer0.com and anarchist.nexus, with quokk.au as an ally, as far as I understand it. Small collective of allied fediverse instances.

Something else that needs to be part of general user education is that user votes are also public information on Lemmy, Piefed, and the wider fediverse due to federation functionality.

The best way to get full access to fediverse data (including e.g. voting) is to run your own instance. So what instances, do we think, are operated by bad actors, irrespective of their identity or nature❓🤔

Or to get more conspiratorial, a bad actor would need one or more big instances to collect that info without sticking out. So which big instances, do we think, would be willing to give, or sell, a "bad actor" full access❓😉
(This of course assumes that none of the big instances were created by bad actors).

In any case, if you're posting overton wrongthink™, and not doing it (pseudo-)anonymously, then you're doing it wrong. I mean, you're in a network/platform that goes as far as encouraging you to use multiple accounts, so what's stopping you from doing it right?!

The CIA is for external affairs.

When has that ever stopped them?

Using local LLMs for various tasks

But is the data local?

AIbros always swear that it's just one more datapoint bro, just one more datasource, just the one touch to the model. But they won't ever pay the dues to the people they extract from.

It is incredible to me that in 2026 people do not understand that a webpage you (anyone) can view without logging in to anything... is public.

I just don't get it.

How long have people been trying to say 'The Internet Is Forever'?

... Yeah, apparently there does need to be some actual education effort of some kind as to the fundamental basics of how lemmy / the internet works.

A local LLM is local... it is capable of running on the hardware that you have, without any internet connection.

I have been running a local LLM on my Steam Deck for about a year now, within a sandboxed environment.

If you have the LLM on your PC, run it locally, feed it a bunch of data you also have locally... its basically like using a text editor to open a text file that is on your computer, or an offline single player game loading up a local save file.

AI Bros tend to be the ones massively jamming through networked, non local LLMs, that live in server databases somewhere, that you pay them per the amount of input you send to them, output they send to you.

A local LLM, well you can download them for free, and then turn off the internet, and use them, if you know how.

... I can literally run my Steam Deck LLM anywhere, and I can keep it powered indedinitely with a solar panel and battery/transformer, like you see typically used as a kind of emergency back up or camping power solution.

There are differences between the actual tech of LLMs themselves, and how people with much more money than sense are currently reshaping society with them.

You can go the AI Bro route and turn them into subscription services... or you can have the entire thing within your home and totally under your own control, your own functional ownership.

Human brains do not play by the same fundamental rules as software and hardware do.

They can be reasonably simplified down to the same rules, in a fair number of contexts and scopes... but they're very far from 'the same thing'.

Unless you're talking about simulating a brain down to the atom inside a computer, or literally growing/fabricating biological machine hybrids... no, "AI", specifically LLMs do not well and wholly act like human brains.

Both of those are current avenues of research into AI... they have been for decades... but LLMs really are just fancy autocompletes, an enormous mess of matrix comparisons, basically.

Human brains, biological brains have many more layers of processes going on than just looping pattern machines, they are far more complex and have many entirely distinct functional mechanisms at play.

Consider Phineas Gage.

Shoot a railroad spike through your local PC running an LLM, tell me how the LLM 'performs' after that.

What is the LLM equivalent of neuroplasticity?

Epigenetics?

All the actual mechanisms that things like psychiatric drugs operate by?

Could you find any body of neuroscientists that endorses that claim?

Nerds + Drama now and forever :(

It really gets exhausting.

We run on a structure where all admins are given an equal voice and large decisions are discussed internally before being made. Because of this the grand majority of small actions are made by a single admin with larger actions taken by any combination of admins.

People want to pretend as if data being used for LLM training is somehow the exception to the rule, when the reality is that the modern internet is built on data aggregation.

If you want to protect your publicly available social media activity from being used by any for-profit third party, then you might as well just start a private message board with your local friends that isn't advertised on the public web. Everything you do on the fediverse is logged and shared across hundreds - if not thousands- of servers, including private ones that are aggregating data for profit. That's kind of the entire point of it.

I'm honestly not even sure what to tell someone who takes issue with open sourced LLM's trained on publicly available data on the open web. Like - fuck Wikipedia too, I guess?

Ironically the piefed devs are everything people said the Lemmy devs are. People were saying that Lemmy's developers were going to push opinionated and dangerous changes to the software, and piefed has done all that and more. Their lead developer is more opinionated than dessalines and nutomic combined.

Gonna hate me for this but llms like gemma are great for classification tasks and moderation by llm might be less biased than a human one never knows. But at the moment that doesn't seem to be the case and still

I feel there is a low common denominator of trolling and hostility where automatic AI powered moderation with no human intervention is fully justified and can't really be argued against. Like those brand new troll accounts that have been hammering ours and other instances.

I recommend Susan Blackmore's "Consciousness: An Introduction", and of course Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher and Bach" and the followup "I am a strange Loop".

I didn't say human brains function like LLMs. I said that everything we know about how human brains work indicates we're also just pattern matching machines in a loop.

The point is that the fact that LLMs are "next token predictors" doesn't in itself say anything about what the emergent effects of that can be.

Yes, the whole field.

Talking about shifting goalposts... I'm far more interested in an opinion on the longer paragraph I wrote. Arguing about words regularly doesn't get you anywhere.

Find one conference group endorsing this then. Because I think you're making this up, I think you have basically zero familiarity with research into the underlying mechanisms of human cognition and neurobiology.

I don't really care much for what you think - I already sourced two well known experts on the subject in another post in this thread.

And yet from neither can you provide a citation of "human cognition is just pattern matching in a loop"

The difference between you and me is that I've studied the subject. You have not. It's not on me to teach you the contents of the literature.

Go be annoying somewhere else.