The most important thing for everyone to remember is that if you don’t fully own the thing such that you can install and run it without asking permission, or if it isn’t simply free and open source, then it can go away at any time.

Honestly, if you’re running public facing services, you should run the latest everything you can. There’s a risk that stuff breaks, but at least you’re not having to worry about patched exploits.

I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

https://localai.io/

I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U

The interoperability of different software really is amazing. One of the best parts of the fediverse imo.

Everyone has their friend group and nobody else is allowed in unless we say so.

No, I’m using lotide, another link aggregator altogether. It’s a lot leaner, especially on the front end.

vpzom, the dev of lotide pointed me to this fep from gnusocial that talks about the problem and proposes something similar to my first suggestion:

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/2100/fep-2100.md

I’ve tried aether, and I presently run a nostr node and satellite instance, but I’ve found both of those solutions have a problem due to relying on the local client. Many networks are locked down, so I find many places I can’t really participate in nostr or aether on the go (the latter is desktop only anyway), while I can hop into any of my activitypub related instances.

I know of one project to create a nostr client that I believe will handle the communications stuff at the server end, but we’ll have to see – you never know if projects actually get off the ground, or if they’re actually worth using until they get up and running for real.

(and lotide doesn’t implement editing at all, despite ActivityPub supporting it so my options are delete and repost or leave it)

I should have said threadiverse in the title. Oh well.

Man, the other day my phone didn’t have internet and popped up and old copy of my lotide. It was a painful reminder of how much more fun it used to be on the threadiverse. Sad that all the fun instances shut down and we end up trapped here with a bunch of boring redditors.

Wolfballs and exploding-heads didn’t show up as a response to lemmy instances, they showed up in response to big tech censorship, which we have a lot of evidence was being heavily manipulated. As I said in my initial post, wolfballs was created and shut down before most of the big lemmy instances today even started, and exploding-heads was started before most lemmy instances existed.

I’m not saying that the US government did the DDOS attacks. I doubt the US government was the cause of shutting down wolfballs or exploding-heads except insofar as the establishment powers that be took advantage of idiots being tribal to push their pet policies to the exclusion of any others (which too many people fell for and continue to fall for hook line and sinker). Another form of attack is the omnipresent risk of cancelation hanging over anyone’s head who isn’t in line with the current orthodoxy.

I’m not letting you guys win because I think these replies are attacks, but because lemmy has become so ideologically homogenous in part because reddit became so ideologically homogenous. What’s the point? I already know what you’re going to say because it’s one big groupthink that at one point I was myself a part of (along with most of society), so there’s no benefit to it. I’m seeking truth, and there’s nothing new to be found in arguing with people after I’ve been saturated in their unconvincing arguments for years. So you win, yep, stupid me.

Censorship is the institution, system, or practice of censoring. To censor is to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.

The Establishment is the part of a particular group that has power or control.

If the most powerful government on earth contacts the largest and most powerful companies on earth in order to categorically suppress or delete certain viewpoints or certain speakers, then by definition that is “‘the establishment’ censoring you”. The fact that you agree with the censorship doesn’t make it not censorship, and framing it in a moralistic way doesn’t make it not censorship. Being moralistic didn’t make it not censorship when the right was doing it.

Exploding-heads as I understand it was facing DDOS attacks near the end (or at least they thought it was), that’s one of the things that prompted the admin to shut it down, it wasn’t worth the effort to try to keep the site up and running under such an onslaught.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’d even try. You know what? You win. Everything is fine and censorship doesn’t exist and the only truth is that which the government and major corporations tell you, and the government and major corporations are actually the anti-establishment fighting against the big bad individuals who believe things they’re not supposed to.

They went to nostr or other parts of the fediverse because the lemmyverse is toxic and they were constantly facing attacks of various types. Same thing that happened to wolfballs before it.

Some of the users might lurk on other servers, but I have my doubts. The point was to have a place they could be free to talk about things the establishment were censoring. Most of the colonizers from Reddit don’t realize those servers existed long before most of what are considered the big Lemmy servers today even existed.

If the goal was just to troll redditors, there’s always reddit.

By that standard it seems to me like most of the internet should be shut down, particularly establishment outlets that are more than happy to tell you who to hate.

Perhaps ironically, lemmy. I had the database catastrophically fail early on, and ever since then federation has been broken with most major instances. I kind of prefer lotide anyway, much more minimalistic, less of a focus on upvotes and downvotes, and the code base is simply enough that I’ve been able to hop into it and make changes.

If you do end up using postgresql, over time the database could end up getting fragmented and that can lead to increased latency, so routine pg_repacks imo are a worthwhile thing to schedule.

Unfortunately, it’s the paradox of liberty that to be free you need to also give freedom to people you don’t like who will do things you don’t like.

In spite of that, libre is an ideal worth pursuing. Otherwise everyone might as well just go right back to big tech now.

It’s always nice when authoritarians can paint whoever they disagree with as the great Satan to justify their authoritarianism. It only happens every single time.

Ideally, a distributed fediverse wouldn’t need much in terms of donations because it’s a bunch of small instances instead of a few huge ones.