I think a link between your idea and mine can be found in the work of writer Evgeny Morozov (https://mondediplo.com/2024/08/07ai-cold-war), who did some interesting research of alternative forms of how the internet could have developed including a project by the chilean government called “Cybersyn” (in his podcast “The Santiago Boys”, https://open.spotify.com/show/7xlRxnooUnl48JVo726YXn). Although it was pretty centralized and not exactly Amazon, more like a socialist distribution system between industries. Well, its a very interesting podcast anyways …

I made a first prototype here: https://github.com/bluebbberry/MyceliumWebServer. Its recommends songs to the users. You can see it here: https://techhub.social/@myceliumweb and try it out by posting to #babyfungus on Mastodon.

You can do AI in an ethical way by making it more decentralized. The idea behind the mycelial web is to realize it based on volunteer computing, meaning that everybody can contribute computing power. And then I can say, for example: use my models, which was trained with all these other models, on this Amazon alternative to recommend me stuff. And the AI model was trained on my PC and runs on my PC (just wasn’t trained solely with my computing power or my data alone).

Could this be an app realized based on the mycelial web - amazon uses huge AI models to predict their customer’s behaviour and do the logistics … (not sure myself, but it probably won’t work solely on ActivityPub)

The idea is that every fungi-node also has a UI, yes. So you would be able to browse the AI models - for example if you chat with bot A, and the bot is currently learning with bot B and C, those bots would be visible to you and you could open their UI, too. And it should also show bots with which it trained earlier, too.

This way you could “browse” the resulting AI web via the browser.

Well, its similar to a botnet, but one that is open and transparent. You can browse the different nodes, etc. And you can (at least hopefully in the future) add your own computing resources to the network to participate in the AI training.

Its a bit like a more sensible version of bitcoin: instead of waisting energy for the proof of work, its training a shared AI model.

(Its running on a Hetzner server.)

Well, big tech has big computers, the Fediverse doesn’t, but we have many small one. That’s why its a good idea to combine them.

This has already been done for example by projects like SETI@home or FOLDING@home.

My idea is to build a web based on this idea.

There is a good video on federated, decentralized AI training here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/seminars/wednesday/video/20241127-1500-t221089.html

One can imagine this project as a decentralized huggingface, which (spoiler alert), could also enshittify.

The idea is that we need bots like this because huggingface can enshittify

Hi, the bot was incorrectly set up and posted every 60s, which was too much and it got suspended.

Its now updated to posting every 12 hours and hopefully, it will be soon up again

No, not yet …

So its basically just a mastodon bot, a knowledge graph and an AI-model, who all work together.

The mastodon bot makes the functionality available to users (they can ask for song recommendations), the AI model is obviously trained and the knowledge graph is used to save the model and for collaborative communication between AI agents.

I’m not 100% sure whether it will be counter-productive or not, but maybe AI on the Fediverse could be a good thing. Like it could push the Fediverse forward (all big social networks nowadays have their own llms, ours should be federated of course). I think combining these three aspects (social web, semantic web/knowledge graphs and autonoumos agents) could be a cool thing. I have noticed how the narratives in the three departments are similar to one another (social web enthusiasts speak about walled gardens, data/knowledge enthusiasts about data silos and AI enthusiasts about big, centralized AI).

The following three resources point to how similar the approaches are:

• https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/seminars/wednesday/video/20241127-1500-t221089.html
• https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/dot-social-evan-prodromou/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy5eKqM8-OA

But how to combine them? Maybe as a fungus?

Yeah, I know, thats a big problem of the idea. The answers would need to be really good and the querying simpler.

Well, custom posting can mean all kinds of stuff. Text altering is just one thing. You can also give commands to the “bot” through hashtags. For example, one of the bots postpones the post for a certain amount of minutes via the first hashtag.

For example: “#5 this will be send in 5 minutes”

Currently not. But it will be added

So basically, Bluesky made custom feeds their rhing, I thought custom posts would be a nifty idea

The article became better as it went along. At the end I really wanted to increase my own FLOSS skills.

I think what the Fediverse mainly needs is more people with IT skills and money and infrastructure to host this stuff. Mastodon still doesn’t appeal to mainstream users, Lemmy is still having federation issues and missing central features. It will all still take years. Another thing is the problem of hosting all of this stuff, if it should scale.

I also used to write articles like this here, and I’m not completely against them if they don’t actually call for any ridiculous actions against big tech in a “revolution” (not a big butlerian jihad fan; make code not memes). At the end I guess I feel to be on the same page as her: I want to increase my own coding skills to effectively contribute something to the Fediverse (meaning without getting burned out in the process).

Decentralisation doesn’t necessarily come with decentralized technical infrastructure, but its the basis for it. I’m still betting on ActivityPub. Sure social insentives are important, but the most openess will win. Also, Wordpress, Flipboard, Threads already joined ActivityPub, so the ecosystem already is kind of attractive in that direction.

Yeah, that’s really awesome

Piefed solves this with topics kind of neatly. You keep the unique communities but they are all in one place

I actually don’t remember what taught me about Lemmy and Kbin’s existence.

For me it was a german podcast about social media called “Haken dran”. For a short time, they had a community on feddit.de, where the hosts also occassionally visited and sometimes they would mention “feddit” in their podcast, which got me on the hook.

Sadly, the podcast by now moved its community to discord.

Anyways, I do think metions in podcasts, YouTube videos, etc., matter. It raises awareness beyond the big companies fucking things up … though I think the most effective thing to grow the Fediverse is to code better software.

Its kind of hard to say because I don’t think X is giving out reliable numbers about their own monthly active users, so. …