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.
I think I know what you mean. Is this a better description:
Catodon is an open source platform for building federated communities. In other words is a software that helps you build a social network that connects with other communities, in what is commonly know as the Fediverse.
For reference the User Interface or layout is similar to other social networks platforms like Mastodon but with added functionality and a much nicer UI. By default the experience is Microbloggin but it also has functionality of Forums, Blog, RSS, Direct Messages page with chat-style threads, and many more features. The User Experience is focused on making it easier to use, easier to understand, and comfortable for daily use.
Yes, it seems like an improvement, but still doesn’t make explicit that it is a way to access the Threadiverse and Microblogging sides of the Fediverse from the same application