From the admin side, we see the following

• lots of accounts trying to register with the same LLM generated text, or nonsensical spam in the registration application. Those get blocked
• some accounts that immediately make it obvious that they are a spam bot by posting unrelated advertise-y content as their first post. Those get banned quickly, and usually the home instance prunes the account within a day

The recent “DM me” spammers and the accounts that post on [email protected] are a good example of the second category.

It’s pretty rare for a bot to be active for much longer than that. Usually some eagle eyed user will spot it and report it up the chain.

Welcome!

We have some guides / infographics for new users, which you might find helpful. These two pages in particular:

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/detailed-overview

An instance is the site where you make an account. If we extend the analogy to email, then gmail.com is one instance while hotmail.com is another instance. If you make an account on Gmail, you can’t use that login on Hotmail but you can still see content from people on Hotmail.

Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are all software. It’s hard to extend this analogy out, but imagine if Google released the code for Gmail freely so that anyone could easily set up an email website that had the same appearance and functionality as Gmail. That is what is happening here.

So in the same way, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and many other Fediverse instances are running the “Lemmy” software and that’s why they look and feel very similar. Where they differ comes down to the people running a particular instance, since they will have different rules for what you can do. You can find that information in the sidebar.

Now all of the Fediverse platforms use a common and agreed upon language to talk to each other. Because Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin software all use this language and follow a similar format, you can easily share content between all of them. That is what the second guide page talks about. They all have communities, posts, and comments, and work in a similar way.

Usually people make one account on a forum/threaded instance (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin), and one account on a microblogging instance (Mastodon). This is because the format of microblogging (ex. Twitter) is pretty different from that of forums (ex. Reddit), although it is technically possible to cross post in between them.

IMO demonitizing the AI music is the important part. It lets them skip the debate around the AI while removing the incentive for the slop uploads

They didn’t specifically say if they will let users have a toggle to hide it all, that’s one of my concerns with this

Out of the different mainstream sports, soccer/football is one that’s pretty popular in the global south. There are lots of teams coming from Africa and South America, and it’s pretty popular in South Asia too

FIFA corruption aside anyway

I can confirm that I’m confused for the same reason

My other thought would be that they’re doing a tiny violin

Could this be solved by having two renderers, and only using the proprietary Adobe one needed?

So what do you do when the pedantic gold standard of epubcheck says your book is fine, when it works without issue on Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Thorium and everywhere else and yet Kobo says it’s “corrupted”?

I dug into this matter and found out that Kobo uses RMSDK, “Reader Mobile Software Development Kit”, Adobe’s proprietary ebook rendering engine.

Once the stylesheet was identified as the source of my woes, I could finally drill down to find which specific line was causing the issue. After creating a dozen more variations with different subsets of my stylesheet I eventually identified the culprit. It was this line:

.copyright img {
    max-width: min(150px, 30vw);
}

Once I changed it to the more old fashioned max-width: 150px; ADE opened it just fine.

But what is the problem here? The above code is perfectly valid CSS level 4, it’s just not supported by RMSDK, because its CSS parser is frozen in approximately 2013 — no flexbox, no grid, no math functions, no custom properties. Just good old float, bad font handling, and silent crashes when it sees anything it doesn’t recognize.

It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book. No clear error message, no fallback. Just a massive fail.

What kind of info?

If you are scraping the project sites and having an LLM put together guides, they will likely go out of date over time and likely contain vital errors already. It would be much better if you simply direct users to where they can read the current up to date information.

How would this be better or more helpful than selfh.st? It is more reputable and more likely to stick around

Some sources are still better than others.

Grazing is like snacking throughout the day or many smaller meals

Intermittent fasting is better explained here, but it comes down to “fasting for part(s)” of the day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

Oh I see, that makes sense :)

Maybe these communities then:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

You could also post about the community in [email protected]

This sounds good to me, thank you for putting in the time for this!

I didn’t know about your project, it looks cool! I think you could share it outside of your community some more, maybe you can crosspost them to [email protected]?

I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn’t address the recent issues.

The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

The ones that get downvotes are usually:

• from new accounts
• the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
• the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
• the software is made to look “professional”, whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

I’m not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don’t believe the story that they all use where they “had this problem and now want to share their solution”. I’m concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it’s the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn’t already).

Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It’s also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don’t think it’s fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it’s very common to have that now.

Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

• To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It’s not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won’t go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
• To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to “projects that have a future” and “projects that don’t have a future”. People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that’s at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.

In the workplace, there are still a lot of domain specific programs that don’t have Linux support. Companies don’t have much of an incentive to port that stuff over. As for the people who just need a web browser, they probably would use Linux just fine if they could buy a computer at BestBuy that comes with Linux preinstalled

Compare that to LLM programs, where it’s a matter of “download this app instead of that one, because this one is free and that one costs $25 a month”

Having an option vs not having an option

Also Linux and Windows are pretty different in use cases and capabilities. Meanwhile, local AI models have a very similar user experience. If hardware was cheaper and people could run better LLMs locally, they wouldn’t pay monthly for it.

Is ambitiousslab@feddit.uk also the author of the blog?

A blurb about the article is nice and helps to convince people to click on the article, but it isn’t necessary. From what I can tell, ambitiousslab seems to be sharing things that they find interesting and doesn’t follow the pattern of the usual bot spam we deal with

If only we could target them better. As it is, we kill off lots of passive and allied bacteria when attacking the harmful ones.

I left another comment explaining it better, but in short

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

Our gut bacteria is vital so are we eating so they can process it for us or are we eating to feed them?

Commensalism :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensalism

Lots of these bacteria probably exist without us. We can’t exist without them but we do make a very nice house where they can live.

While some bacteria definitely can, there are others that are so adapted to building colonies inside of us that they can’t really survive outside of a mammal or human host. You can carefully create the lab environments to allow for it, but that is against the spirit of the question. My gut says ( ;) ) that anaerobic bacteria that evolved for mucosal colonization are likely to fit into this group.

Meanwhile it is possible to survive without much of a microbiome, but you end up having trouble with digestion and you are susceptible to infections since the surfaces don’t have any residents and are “available”. Newborns have low microbiome diversity and build it up rapidly after birth, and people on sustained antibiotic treatments tend to lose a lot of their microbiome.

So they keep us around.

Here is another fun one, the symbiogenesis theory.

The mitochondria was likely an independent prokaryote (bacteria) that was taken into eukaryotic (plants / animals / etc) cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

Even now, the mitochondria has its own genetic material and replicates somewhat independently. So if you went in and removed all of the mitochondria from a cell, it wouldn’t be able to make a new one. That is also why your mitochondria will match the mitochondria from your mother, since the egg cells come with mitochondria while the sperm cells don’t.