This post is written on https://normals.me/ and delivered to !fediverse@lemmy.world over #ActivityPub, so if you are reading it the basic plumbing works. Now let me explain what is this.
Normals is a forum with communities, threads, and questions with an accepted answer. It is a single instance, not software you can host, and the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons. The federation module will be published separately with implementation notes (FEP-67ff).
What federates today Every community is a Group actor following the Lemmy model (FEP-1b12). Follow @selfhosted@normals.me or any other community from Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin or Mastodon.
Posts and comments go both ways. Replies from your instance appear in the thread on Normals, replies from Normals go back to the origin.
Remote content is labelled with its origin, links back to it, and is never copied. Media loads from the source.
Signed fetches, so it works with instances that require authorized fetch. NodeInfo 2.1 is up.
Policies, in case they matter to you, it has no ads, and no paid reach, and of course no AI training on posts. AI crawlers blocked by default, public mod log with reasons, and no automated removals. Numbers at https://normals.me/transparency so please take a look.
If something from your instance shows up wrong here, or something from here shows up wrong on yours, reply with the URL and I’ll fix it. Andy Piper mentioned NodeBB uses the same group model, if anyone runs a NodeBB instance I’d like to test against it, if possible.
I hope we all have fun. Cheers!
Hi, I got a couple questions that aren’t answered on your transparency page yet.
Do you really need to ask? 😅
Please read the comment above.
Do I use AI to do everything? No, as a software engineer with over 15 years of experience in the industry, you can’t let AI do all the work any developer knows that at this point? It messes things up all the time, ignores design patterns, ignores best practices, writes code stupidly cloning functions already exists, ignores SOLID, ignores security vulnerabilities, and so on. But I did use it to run unit tests, integration tests, perform performance and speed tests, and even to hack my own app.
The communities are random, there’s no fixed order in them. Besides, they’re mirrored of other existing communities. As you can see, they come from other sources like Mastodon based on the hashtags.
Regarding the plus feature, it’s a way for users to decorate their profiles. I planned as source of income to maintain the project, otherwise, the project wouldn’t exist, unfortunately I would need to pay for the serves to host the app, the DB backups, the infrastructure, pipelines, buckets, well if you are developer you might understand how a platform actually works. But nothing is implemented yet, nor will it be in the near future regarding the plus.
It is a real shame that people think that this is vibecoded, without prior experience working as a developer and I am saying this because it more than enough to hit F12 and check the network tab, and the weird thing for me is that people judge because how it looks, but this is what the CSS Framework https://tailwindcss.com/ offers. However I appreciate your comment and I hope I answered your questions.
For me, some of the paragraphs in this post here sound like llm.
1st is the classic “It’s not X, it’s Y” (or “It’s X, not Y” here I suppose). 2nd sounds like a headline AI likes to use, and also fails formatting like it was copy-pasted from llm output.
There’s probably more, I got the impression before those parts. My guess would have been some sections are ai some human. Is this accurate?
Either way I’d either not do that (use ai text in promotion nor unmarked), or (unfortunate as it is) try to avoid ai tropes.
we can’t see your source code but the copy on your transparency page sounds like LLM voice:
If you say you wrote some of the code by hand, cool, i don’t doubt it. But it’s still giving slop.
Also, charging money for a “plus” account on a centralized closed-source activitypub implementation is…
Lastly, it’s difficult to reconcile these two statements:
[…]
If you think choosing tailwind forces you into a certain style of website, you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
And you clearly haven’t just used AI for tests. I wonder if the source is closed because you know how obviously AI generated it would look if it was open source?
Why does your comment smell of elitism?
Yeah, it would be better if the code was FOSS. But at least it was released, the author seems to know the important parts of AP integration and is asking for constructive feedback. This is one million times better than developers who keep their purely organic, 100% fair trade software projects in a virtual shelf for fear of being criticized.
Is it elitism to call out vibe coding now? What a world.
Not to mention that their understanding of what tailwind is seems patchy at best, despite claiming that they have 15 years of experience.
The elitism is in thinking that using AI for some parts of the application (the frontend) nullifies the whole project.
It does if they’re minimizing and lying about it
I very much doubt the AI use is confined to the frontend. But I don’t see why the frontend is fine to vibe code while other stuff is not?
Using AI as a tool is fine. It can be very useful for programming. But “vibe coding” is using it to an extreme degree where the AI is producing almost the whole thing, with a very small amount of guidance or design from the user. That’s what I would object to. Such a thing has very little value, anyone can vibe code such a thing.
We can only be sure if/when they open the backend code.
Many reasons:
Most of that is fair except
That I definitely disagree with. UI and UX is important.
Still doesn’t make that vibe coded frontend worth anything.
Tailwind it’s a utility first framework with no pre built components, I think you are the one that does not know what are you saying, you build whatever you want and can fully customize the theme that’s literally the point of it, and it’s in the official docs.
On the AI and closed source speculation, the auth, signatures, permissions, input handling is standard and went through an OWASP review before launch I said it before. I said I used AI for unit tests, integration tests, performance work, and even to attack my own app. I did not say I let it write the product. After 15+ years writing software, most of us already know AI still ignores SOLID, duplicates existing functions, and introduces security issues if you hand it the whole job. But you’re free to dislike the design or the decision to keep the anti-abuse parts private. The transparency page is public if you want the actual policies and review status instead of the theory.
Again, if you don’t like the UI or think this is all robots, you can always join X, Reddit, or any other platform that steals your data and helps big corporations, or you can develop your own and invite me, but for that you need to be developer first. I thought people were different in the Fediverse.
People have high standards on the fediverse, sorry your project is not getting the positive reaction you wanted.
Its strange how hostile people are being. And people are assuming everything is vibecoded at this point.
Even if it was completely vibecoded, who cares? It’s another funnel to bring people into the Fediverse. You don’t need to use it yourself, just be glad that there’s more ways to get people in here. It’s a different design with different UX, there’s always the chance that this will hook people who didn’t enjoy Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin/etc. The more the merrier.
Because vibe-coded projects are almost never maintained. Usually they’re abandoned after a very short time.
If that happens then maybe its users will switch to Lemmy or PieFed when they realize it’s the same network
I’m in the same position, I mean, I worked really hard to get MVP done, and I’m just a full stack developer, with 15 years of experience in the industry, and they say it’s vibecoded because the UI looks well done haha. That’s amazing, but in certain way I see it funny to be honest. It feels more like people those haters tried, failed and they have nothing better but attack XD.
I told one of them, ok, try to create one and see how it goes. An AI cannot do what it has been done here that’s why it is so ridiculous when they say it is vibecoded.
the ui looks extremely generic, like everything llms spit out. and no, i’ve not tried to create my own fediverse software. you don’t have to be a director to critique a movie.
The UI looks generic because it follows modern design patterns. Lemmy would look Generic 10 years ago.
lemmy does look generic. it looks like a generic bootstrap application. but it’s generic in a readable way, without the glassy gradients and lighting effects everywhere. it feels like we’re back in the dreamweaver days where you had to load a bunch of gifs just to get that cool drop shadow you wanted.