Snoopy@Snoopy@piefed.social

Blog post: Reintroducing Catodon (after 6 months of active development)

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.

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panos :catodon:@panos@catodon.rocks

Replying to @⁨hauke@lemmy.world⁩

Thank you! Nothing wrong with using other platforms if they cover you. One thing that Catodon does is that it covers both microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey etc) and forums/communities (Lemmy, Piefed etc). Other platforms do that, but not many. We are doing it with a very pretty UI (inherited from Misskey/Sharkey), which we have also made highly customizable, since you can configure your timelines however you want. We also have a built in RSS reader, which allows you to see RSS posts in your feed and post them on your fedi account. These are just a few, off the top of my head. Most of all we do it because we like doing it =)

Snoopy@Snoopy@piefed.social

Replying to an earlier post

Dunno what should be my take on coding with AI. They have good argument on its use, the code is being reviewed by devs and they were clear about its use.

I’m against AI for its environnemental disaster, cash bubble, capitalism, ram shortage…but there, it helped him with this projet revival.

So for now, i ask everyone to let go the part on AI.

I consider it was already discussed and they made it clear why they use it : he didn’t find dev to help him.

On Piefed, Lemmy…we lacks contributors. Imagine the project lemmy stop, what would you do ?

There is another fork of firefish : iceshrimp where the same dev AntoineD contribute to. It is being rewritten in .NET. But it takes time and lot ressources.

I hope more contributors can give a hand.