OP here. Sorry you had that experience. I recently started doing it. Prior to the AI images, I got a lot of complaints about a “wall of text”, so I was looking for a way to break it up, but also not invested enough to spend much time on it. AI images gives me a sort of 2-for-1, in that I get decent visuals, as well as accurate alt text. idk, maybe i should back off a bit. Suggestions welcome.
If I may be a bit of a curmudgeon for a moment: I've read some number of posts like this recently that had AI-generated art embedded to "break it up", and I've found that the effect is skimskimsquint at AI imageskimsquint at AI imagescroll to end
Partly this is because a fun game with AI images is to identify the weird things they do. They have an interesting effect where they look sooooort of okay if you don't actually look at them. In your post for instance, the first image has a wild not-actually-a-pteranodon at left, second image has twins at bottom-right but also is that a caveman partying with antlers on his head in the background?, third image -- what contraption is that wooly mammoth pulling, actually?
And, once the novelty of playing "Find Ten Things Wrong With This Picture" wears off, then the images are exactly equivalent to embedded stock photography from Shutterstock or whatever. Oh look, it's shiny happy people at computers in the middle of an otherwise interesting essay on the transformer architectures of large language models.
(I enjoyed the rest of the content of your post. Amazing how effectively these tools are becoming productivity multipliers for the people experimenting with them.)
The text seemed nicely broken up by the headings already, but maybe adding some syntax-colored code snippets (where relevant) would be another way to add some color to the visuals.
Well, that sent me down a rabbit hole of what the difference is, and apparently mastodons are part of the Mammut family while mammoths are part of the Elephant family. Biologists messed up there.
I like the concept of "social media delivers a dumb feed, then my device groups and organizes them." In line with what is written in the conclusion, I would love to use a client like this that also does curation (by floating topics to the top once it starts seeing which topics you click on most) and then allowing interrogation/tuning of these recommendations. Why use openai instead of a local model though? (I'd imagine mistral-8x7-instruct would do well with the summarization task)
Each device being sent the firehose does not scale. You need another service to at least do the candidate generation from the firehose to get a reasonable rate for your device to handle.
I have a system that filters RSS feeds like this, out of 7000 articles it might pick 300 to show me, it takes just a few minutes to build and validate a model on a rather powerful PC so so far performance is not a problem.
If I were wanting to offer this kind of service to other people I know I could get an economy of scale just ingesting RSS feeds once, I think a lot of users might be happier sampling items from the firehose instead of curating a feed list, and I'd probably give up on the pure content-based filtering and include some collaborative filtering because people would perceive that it learns faster.
That is exactly what is happening here. The Mastodon server is handling the firehose, and creating sub-streams for each user based on followed accounts and tags.
OP here. Yeah, it’s also extremely low-risk. The sensitive part of the algorithm is the embeddings. This part is just making the group human readable.
The reason I didn’t do mistral the first time is because I’m lazy. I gave myself 3-4 hours to get a first pass done, and getting a local model running seemed unnecessarily difficult. It would be a great addition though.
Is unlimited user-end filtration and sorting seen as compatible with the spirit of Mastodon? Members of the Mastodon founding generation have sometimes expressed a wish for that founding generation to always remain visible and prominent, even as the user base expands. Part of it is that the founding generation is heavily trans, and they don’t want their identities and voices to be drowned out by wider cis society.
Is the spirit of Mastodon that the site, rather than the user, decides what the user sees? That wouldn't make them much better than the commercial platforms. I absolutely want users to be in control of their feed, so I welcome projects like these.
(I'm not actually on Mastodon but on Friendica, but I follow a lot of people on Mastodon.)
I'd like to see a client with a set of features to enable manual feed curation. I think it's possible with maybe just two missing features:
1. Mark as read: the ability to mark posts, threads, or followed users as read. Your feed only shows unread stuff. Threads would become unread if they get new posts in them.
2. Prioritization of Following: You can sort your Following list in any order and unread messages and threads are presented in that order.
I use essentially this method with my work Slack, which has a "sorted like your sidebar" option for the Unreads. I have a bunch of folders for different priority channels and individuals, with my immediate team, reports, and boss and the topics I work on at the top, various company wide stuff at the bottom, and a some of grades in between containing channels for my department and partners. As soon as I set it up this way it improved my Slack productivity and I started wishing I could sort Mastodon and Twitter this way.
Very interesting, IMHO one of Mastodon's biggest advantage is not the reverse-order timeline, but the ability to build your own timeline view, pick your own algorithms. There are already a few frontend-based solutions. This one is another, and quite interesting.
I only wish the (vastly underfunded) Mastodon team would see this as an opportunity to provide server-computed timelines to prevent clients from fetching too much information just to get their own summary.
Nothing really stopping a mastodon client from hacking that together. Was thinking about this over the last couple weeks as well, even being able to specify a weight account you follow would be huge.
Incentives are much harder but smart contracts can handle the tech part.
Going this route you quickly have "quantum AI app store" and your system of government is a 12GB download. Can't even say if it's a good idea compared to e.g. anarcho-primitivism.
The mastodon client I really want is my web browser. I want my web browser to be able to go to a mastodon web server and see HTML of posts (and responses! so no, /embed is not a solution) with actual text. This traditional form of interface was removed in most mastodon implementations from version 3 and on for some reason. Requiring execution of complex code, either in the browser as javascript, or on your computer as a native client, is not cool. At least for twitter there's nitter but there's no easy way to read mastodon posts/threads.
Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and share them, you have control over sorting, etc.
I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential. You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show.
I think this type of user control is exactly what social media needs. The power placed in the hands of users.
The most promising thing about Bluesky is that engagement seems surprisingly high. Posts from the larger accounts I follow get maybe 2000 likes on Twitter, 1000 on Bluesky, and 10 on Mastodon.
I really hope they manage to federate themselves with the larger ecosystem in one way or another, it's annoying that they've chosen to not use ActivityPub.
Thank you! At first glance, Bluesky seems great. I like X and don't care about Musk or problematic speech, but Bluesky is showing me accounts I like, whereas it's hard to convince Twitter to show me content I want to see.
Maybe it's just that Bluesky's current userbase is stronger, pre eternal September. Anyway, I really appreciated your generosity.
I promise to be diligent about posting, so as to honor your invite. I will behave. Unlike on X, where I'll continue being completely insane lol.
For federated systems like this why are there clients and servers... shouldn't they all be using a single system that stores all that user content locally and uses federation to communicate to others? I don't get why you'd want an account on someone else's server when you can be running your own.
I'm not suggesting people run their own servers, I'm suggesting that the software shouldn't use the client/server split. That it would be better to run peer to peer using the federation protocol keeping the user 'account' local. At least that's the model I'm keeping an eye out for... IMO the federated server model is to close to the currently dominant centralized model to make the effort of moving to it worthwhile.
Slightly off topic: I like that the SQLite database file is called “fossil”, because fossil is both relevant to mastodons and is the name of the source code management system for SQLite. That’s a fun intersection there.
