I see the Social Web Foundation, one of the organisations which works on the #Fediverse 's underlying technology, ActivityPub, is chasing the slop tsunami. I started looking into who is behind those organisations and what they do but after I found ex-microsoft CEOs, web3 people and orgs set up to work on bluesky's underlying tech, I just gave up looking. I didn't want to see any more.
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2026/02/06/ai-and-the-new-social/
@wordsmith I went into their about page looking for Evan’s name and I was not disappointed. I mean I was, but not like that.
Thank you for your vote of confidence in me. I’ll do my best to be transparent and good faith in everything I do.
I should add that the end-to-end-encryption project I’m doing is funded by the SWF. And so far I’ve had only good interactions with everyone there.
I don’t know anything about this AI initiative. But there are good reasons for us to set guardrails on *how* this tech intersects our network, and I’d give the SWF the benefit of the doubt until more info comes out.
@benpate @wordsmith @futzle Thanks so much! That's very thoughtful.
Mallory Knodel is going to this event to talk about AI and distributed social networks. There are some obvious benefits -- naive Bayesian techniques have been used for decades for spam filtering, for example -- but some obvious downsides, like washing out human content with AI-generated images and text.
@benpate @wordsmith @futzle I think there are some things we can do on the Fediverse today to deal with these issues. One is to add a flag to AI-generated text, images, or videos, so people who don't want to see them can easily filter them out. Another might be having machine-readable ways to tell if an instance uses AI techniques for moderation and filtering.
