Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.

I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!

@scottjenson so, I find this discussion disappointing for a few reasons.

The biggest one is this: all three platforms that @carnage4life calls out are connected via ActivityPub. They are on one inter-network.

In theory, he should not need three different accounts, with three different follower groups. He should have one account, and all 103k followers (minus duplicates!) could be part of the same conversation, on whatever server platform they use.

In practice, few people do this today.

@scottjenson

As technologists we need to do more to smooth those junctures and make them less of a barrier. I hope in a few years when @carnage4life looks at his network, it feels more integrated and less separated.

@scottjenson @carnage4life on the topic of AI, I find the abusive conversations on the Fediverse pretty dispiriting. People I like and respect have worked themselves into the position that use of AI is an inexcusable sin, and that anyone who uses AI merits harassment and abuse. Given that 85% of developers use or plan to use AI (Stack Overflow poll), that means a huge number of tech people getting brigaded by our anti-AI squad.

@scottjenson @carnage4life I've tried to mitigate that a bit by sharing my own experience with AI as a development tool. I know there are other people on the Fediverse who talk about how and when they use AI, with or without misgivings.

https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116206693774408287

Evan Prodromou (@[email protected])

I use Claude and Thaura for search in my daily life. I use Claude as a rubber duck for coding. I also let it review my code for errors or make recommendations. On occasion, I'll let CoPilot or Claude add a few lines of code directly. I don't "vibe code". I enjoy both uses. I don't feel guilty about either.

CoSocial

@scottjenson @carnage4life I've been privately sharing this link to a post by @MozillaAI , an Open Source non-profit announcing an Open Source AI project to make development with AI safer, more efficient, and less costly. They got brigaded in a pretty threatening way, and people I know and respect jumped in to join the dogpile.

https://mastodon.social/@MozillaAI/116279201448628866

@evan @scottjenson @MozillaAI Mastodon as a community is quite hostile to AI and anything that isn’t a criticism of AI is viewed with skepticism at best and typically with hostility as the default.

It’s unfortunate because, as in your Mozilla example, there is still time to shape how AI is used in our industry. It’s better to engage and try to influence it versus stick your head in the sand and have the change thrusted upon you.

@carnage4life @evan Strongly agree. The current AI companies have done much to be criticized but the tech itself, especially the open source and local versions (which this community should love) is actually a positive force here. We need to have discussions to understand the differences.
@scottjenson @carnage4life @evan I think step 1 is not calling all of it AI, an extremely broad vague term makes it very hard to have a nuanced discussion. If Mozilla uses a local ML model to detect which field on the page is which type to autofill better, that's very different from a remote LLM chat bot.
@Aurimas One part is not different: knowing how and from which data were these model trained. Claiming "it's fine it's a local ML model" is far from making the solution an ethical one.
@fabrice hence the need for precise terms
@Aurimas well guess who's always forgetting the training costs?

@scottjenson I think nobody has to love any tech, and expecting that is expecting to jump over an impossible bar. That being said, nobody should be disrespectful towards another, and that's just basic decency.

@carnage4life @evan