Yes! It’s who you ask when you aren’t sure what the idea, concept, or term is. Once you are armed with that information, use a proper search engine.

It helps to understand what ChatGPT is, and what it isn’t.

ChatGPT does not understand anything you say. And it only does one word (technically part of a word, but to keep it simple) at a time.

What it’s doing is it is guessing the most likely next word based on the words that have come before it. If you think of you phone’s keyboard, it probably has word suggestions for what to say next. ChatGPT is like hitting the recommended word over and over until it has an answer. It’s spouting words based on how likely the word is to come next. That is all.

It uses advanced machine learning to do that, but whether it counts as AI is for the reader to decide. But it’s certainly not planning out a thoughtful answer for you.

And that’s not even taking into account that the training data largely comes from the internet, the place where people continuously make shit up.

I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people

One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.

The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.

Some of us have been waiting for some time for more “average” redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.

The Apollo dev comment on this. They have a subscription model already, but would need to more than double the cost just to meet the cost of the API.

They worked it out as $2.50 per month for the average user. But I’d be willing to bet that you’d have less users using it more if it cost that much, so it would need to be higher. And then you add taxes. And even then it’s all going to reddit, the dev gets nothing.

This is based on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

You don’t have to host a node if you don’t want to.

But if you do, you may find it’s surprisingly easy to set one up with very little technical knowledge. Docker has benefits in containerizing, yes, but it also makes things easy (which is why it’s so popular).

In most cases you just install Linux, run through the docker install process (many VPS providers can do these first two parts for you), download a pre-made docker-compose.yml file from whichever service you are trying to run, then run “docker compose up -d” and it just works.

Running more services on the same machine, adding a reverse proxy, etc, require a bit more work. But once you have those set up it’s simple to integrate further services running in docker.

But let me reiterate my first point - just because others are asking you to do something, doesn’t mean you have to do it :)

80/20 rule.

When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.

The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.

If you’re in the 20% that isn’t covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it’s just not where the effort should be focused.

So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?

You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).

Facebook are really keen to be the ones with the userbase for what they see as the future. It’s hard to think of facebook being unseated as the go-to platform for connecting with friends (probably easier for us to imagine, but still pretty hard). Facebook is king simply because they were the first to reach a critical mass.

They were losing money hand over first in the VR space just to try to be the top player with the biggest userbase in the VR space. I’m not sure if this is still true with the hiked price for the Quest 2. I haven’t really paid attention to the VR space for a few years but from the Steam hardware survey it seems ownership is holding steady at around 2%, so mass adoption seems a while away and I doubt the Quest 3 will change that.

Definitely not. The twitter board didn’t want to sell, the only reason they did is because Elon made them an offer so big they had no choice but to accept it. If it wasn’t massively higher than market value then they wouldn’t have sold.