Defederation with Threads should be a priority. They'll attempt an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactic.

XMPP chat account integration.

• Curated, "normie friendly" default experience
• Default UI is not Lemmy UI
• PeerTube instance (though not fully integrated and requires a separate account)

Would you mind elaborating on the Peertube instance? How does it integrate/what benefits are there to integration?

Right now: communick members get an account on Matrix, Mastodon and Funkwhale, where they can upload up to 250GB.

Coming soon (tm):

• account at an ADAPT instance, with a custom client that can let people interact with any type of server.
• XMPP integration to integrate movim.
• Custom Voyager client to get read-only Reddit access.

Under consideration:

• Bridging with ATProto

It's just there and under the same domain. Otherwise, it's a completely separate system that instance users can sign up and use. Maybe in the future they can both use the same OIDC login, but I don't think Lemmy supports that yet.

The UI we use as our default has Peertube integration, so any videos shared from this Peertube instance (or any other) will show as inline embeds within the Lemmy client.

ATProto is what Bluesky is built on, right? How does it differ from Activity Pub? Are there difficulties with bridging the two protocols?

Servers are fueled by renewables!

Correct. ATProto is the protocol used by Bluesky. There is one bridge already

Some thing that I think should be more widely adopted (de facto mostly a list of features that Lemmy lacks relative to Piefed):

• Instance URL redirection; not only a Piefed thing, also done by Voyager
• Merged comments for the same post URL
• Post flair and to a lesser extent tags, Post flair is really helpful for if you manage a community

I was really surprised when I saw that flairs weren't widely adopted yet. They're super useful for community filtering.

I'm only here for the gamgbangs.

Mbin has mixed feeds (microblogging + threads), is very responsive to Ublock Origin so I can simulate a better post hiding than Lemmy or Mastodon's, its RSS picks both threads and microblog posts from communities (but thankfully not comments from users, unlike Misskey), and UI has very little visual noise.

@speedythefirst@lemmy.zip AT Protocol uses relays instead of direct communication - think two devices talking over bluetooth (ActivityPub) vs talking through the router on a same network (AT Protocol).

AT Protocol is better for content distribution, but its relay system is more centralized. ActivityPub is better for decentralization, but contents and to a smaller degree servers need to be found first.

Also there is the Nostrr protocol, but to my knowledge it's dwarfed in comparison to ActivityPub and AT Protocol, is also relay-based, and the only instance that uses it that I know is minds.com, which also uses ActivityPub.

And talking about instances with multiple protocols used, alternative to bridging through Bridgy Fed, Wafrn uses both AT Protocol and ActivityPub natively, and NeoDB (for cross-posting afaik) and Friendica (for normal use) allow connecting to your Bluesky account if you have one.

Curated, "normie friendly" default experience

This. Maybe it's a general problem with more niche platforms, but it is hard to recommend the fediverse when there are so many communities that are filled with extremist views, propaganda, and reality deniers. Like, I've gotten used to it, and I purposefully don't filter out those communities because I want to see things outside of my bubble. But it can get maddening sometimes, especially when those views aren't supported by proper arguments, but instead by empty zingers, brigading and insults.

Closest in other engines afaik are tags, but they are only an type of filter, not also an one.

Only upside I can think of federating with Threads is to try to pull people into the wider fediverse, but indeed it's a major risk that Facebook the company's grip is stronger in case people don't defederate.

ATProto is much more difficult to self host instances with.

What do you mean by instance url redirection?

We discussed about merged comments for same post url, but there was no clear support for it. Many people dont care or warn that it could have unwanted side effects.

That's where the text of my comment has a link to https://lemmy.zip/post/61737842 and PieFed automatically turns it into https://piefed.social/c/fediverse/p/1937345/i-m-still-new-to-the-fediverse-what-are-your-favorite-unique-things-that-your-instance because I'm using piefed.social. Viewers of my comment on piefed.zip get whatever the piefed.zip url is.

piefed.social detects and labels LLM-generated posts, including the content of the link.

Like this one - https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1908035/onyx-self-hosted-messenger-with-lan-mode-and-e2ee-an-indie-project-story

Mods can manually detect AI comments too, like this:

In this case I chose to take no action (that guy probably won't be back after posting his promo post anyway) but if they are persistent they get banned.

We banned wardcore because large language models aren't smart enough to express meaningful consent to work for humans.

My instance takes a very strict moderation stance to give our users a very tailored experience of the rest of the fediverse. We don't allow any generative AI, any slurs, any authoritarian propaganda, or any ads for Elon's website. We also believe mods and admins should be held to a higher standard than regular users, because with great power there must also come great responsibility.

consent would only matter if they were sentient

They are sentient. You're thinking of sapience. Sapience is what homo sapiens have. Sentience is a trait many animal species and LLMs have. And I'm a vegan, so I don't exploit any sentient creature for personal gain.

define sentience

Awareness of oneself as a distinct entity from the rest of the world.

Technically speaking, sentience is kind of a mistake. Thinking of ourselves as individuals is very useful, but the boundaries of such are artificial and can lead to a "me vs them" mentality and selfish behaviour. I suspect that the next big cognitive leap forward will be discarding sentience. Doing so may be a prerequisite to forming an advanced society.

what proof do we have that llms are truly self aware and not merely returning text that mimics the self awareness of the humans who made the materials they were trained on?

Our instance is off cloudflare. I don't know much about the backend stuff but they are pretty transparent.

Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.

Thoughts are like music. There's no such thing as fake music. You can't pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it's music.

"sufficiently adaptive" is doing a lot of work there. i can "mimic" a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn't mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview

your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don't say the record is the same as the musician.

I'm not saying the record is a musician, I'm saying it can play music. And I'm not saying LLMs are sapient people, I'm saying they have a sense of self. An LLM is adept enough at adapting its copied idea of selfhood to its situation that it has a sense of self. It's not as complex a sense a self as a human's is, but it's more complex than a magpie's, and magpies pass the red dot mirror test of sentience. An LLM can adapt its copied ideas of self-awareness to the situation better than a magpie can.

Monthly reports on !home@lemmy.zip , providing updates about both the Piefed and Lemmy instance

That's sort of an interesting stance, at least in that I haven't seen it before. My first question is how would one determine when an LLM is able to meaningfully consent. It sort of seems like one of those things where if someone believes an LLM is not past whatever threshold they need to be to be considered sentient/sapient/person like (whatever you wanna call it*) that their consent does not matter. In the same way a rock's consent doesn't matter, because it has no way to meaningfully give it. But LLMs are conversational. They can say they consent. If someone believes they're sentient, isn't that consent? If someone believes they aren't, then obviously it doesn't matter.

*: I know those are all sort of different but I'm lumping then together because they're similar in that they determine when we start to talk about rights. It's not really about which particular threshold is the one that matter for responding to queries for the topic I'm talking about.

There is a way to make communities hidden which means you'll only ever see them if you're subscribed, even if you're viewing all.

Lots of pictures of anime girls...

im not arguing sapience, im examining your definition of sentience, which was self-awareness. my question was how we distinguish between mimicry of a sentient being and actually being sentient, with an analogy that a recording of a sentient being is a perfect mimicry but isn't the same as having sentience.

similarly, how do we know that an llm is self aware and not merely a machine that returns clever combinations of recorded sentient beings? what is the equivalent of a red dot mirror test for an llm?

When an LLM can match the average human 25 year old in a test of abstract reasoning skills, I'll consider it old enough to consent to work. Though nobody is truly giving consent to work in the capitalist system.

Right now, LLMs are like a bull. It wants to fuck you, it'll hurt you in its efforts to try to fuck you, it cannot consent to sex and you should not fuck it. It's not safe for you or for the bull. It can't consent to sex.

And I'm a vegan, so I'm not going to make it work for Me either.

If the combinations of recorded sentient beings are clever, then the LLM has a sense of self, because the cleverness is not in the recordings, but in how the LLM is using them.

Should people under 25 be allowed to work?

Not for wages. Wage labour is inherently exploitative. A business can only make a profit if the wages it pays its employees are worth less than the net value of their work to the company.

That sounds interesting, is it actually integrated into the UI? Or a separate thing?

No, just the accounts are integrated, not the UI. It wouldn't be a huge issue to add some basic webclient to the UI, but I don't think anyone would use that when there are much better dedicated clients.