Our first blog post about Catodon’s new chapter - please repost/boost!
In defence of our choice to use LLMs
I know AI is a sensitive subject on fedi, and I understand the arguments against it. But here’s what it’s actually done for us: First of all, the project wouldn’t exist without it. But even now that we have a dev on the team, we’re keeping it in our workflow.
In six months, it’s helped us ship features that projects with several full-time devs would need years to build:
- forums with full Lemmy compatibility
- an RSS timeline
- federated blogs
- a dedicated Direct Messages page with a chat-like interface
- New/Hot/Active sorting for forums and microblogging timelines
- a WYSIWYG editor for Pages and Blogs
- native Mastodon API support
- multi-protocol login that lets you use Catodon as a client for your Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Misskey account too.
It also recently helped us catch a vulnerability in upstream Misskey, which we reported and which has now been patched - meaning every Misskey fork will benefit.
We’ve also used it to spot 13 Misskey security patches that hadn’t been merged into Sharkey yet, which we flagged to the Sharkey team as well.
And to be clear, AI isn’t magic - we spend hours of real work on every feature, and everything is tested and reviewed before it ships. We also keep a close eye on Misskey and Sharkey upstream, so we can pull in security patches as soon as they land.
We’re not going to pretend this settles the debate about AI, and we don’t expect it to. More and more projects (including the Linux kernel) are utilizing LLMs - and there are actual, valid reasons for this. All we can do is keep being transparent about how we use these tools, and let our work speak for itself.
More software that bridges the gaps between fediverse communities is exactly what we need more of!
This basically implements my wishlist for the fediverse: fediverse identities that are seperate from the instance you use, better support for lemmy communities and a nicer, less confusing design for misskey/sharkey.
Im a bit skeptical that non-programmers using AI to make large changes and add features will work in the long term, mainly because of the massive tech debt this must create, but im very interested to see if it works. Ill try it out once they implement the client to server api, Good luck!
Yeah :)
I still believe that misskey familly have the most beautiful UI in the fediverse. :)
That’s the risk but the some dev joined and review the code. So i find it reassuring that finally developpers are here and help.