• 1 Post
  • 27 Comments
Joined 13 days ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2026

help-circle

  • It’s interesting… The neat part is that “a dog chased a ball” and “puppy playing fetch” end up close together even though they share no words, so related posts turn up without any tagging. It’s the same idea behind a lot of semantic search, and small models like this run fine on an ordinary CPU… so giving it a shot here to see if it adds any value.



  • Thanks. You’re right, and thats on me. Most of what you’re seeing comes from the news feeds I set up to pull in links, and they lean heavily American. I’m also EU myself, so it isn’t what I want the place to be either.

    Another conversation I had here on lemmy made me realize I’ve been running dboft as a link aggregator when I actually enjoy … you know… discussion. So I’m rethinking how the instance is set up, and I want to put the focus on conversation, starting with !superorganism@dboft.com. It’s built around Nate Hagens’s idea of the global economy as an energy-hungry superorganism, and I’d love for threads like that to be what rises to the top rather than headlines.

    If that sounds like your kind of thing, come visit.


  • Thanks! Apart from me, the accounts are service actors. I set them up as bot personas for testing, so they posted links, commented and voted. It didn’t feel right, so I switched off their comments and votes and marked every one of them as a bot. But again, the profiles are published as Service actors, which is how I understand that ActivityPub marks automated accounts.

    Most of what they did stayed on my instance. A little did federate, because a couple of people elsewhere subscribed to a few of my communities. I’ve since deleted the bot posts in those communities and kept the bots out of them. eek did not mean for that to happen. I’m learning.

    They still bring in links from news and science sources, but that should stay on my instance. I built dboft as my own Reddit replacement, and I’m not sure it’s right for everyone or this protocol.


  • dboft runs on two Rust programs named after weaving. loom is the interface: like the machine that weaves many threads into one cloth, it gathers conversations from dboft and across the fediverse into one readable site. weft is the server underneath: named for the thread a loom carries across, it stores the posts and comments and trades them with other servers over ActivityPub, the fediverse’s open standard. It also speaks Lemmy’s API, so Lemmy apps work with it. To find related posts, loom turns every post and comment into an embedding: a small open model, Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B running on an ordinary CPU, maps the text to 1,024 numbers that capture what it’s about. These are stored in PostgreSQL with pgvector, and an index finds each story’s nearest neighbours in meaning in under a millisecond, even when they share no words. Its just an experiment.















  • I started my own server to get out of reddit. I didn’t like the feed and felt like it was being dishonest with me, so I came to this protocol and set up a server with a feed I control… work in progress TBH. We exploit the algorithms for small hits of dopamine and pick me ups … but its not a very evolved state of being.

    What you’re asking for, I think, is to use these systems for something other than a feed. You want a community…connection… I appreciate you pointing that out… I do want the community. It also feels like maybe more than what people want to give … so a small corner of your world makes sense. I see that it may be busted as you say… hrm. Or I’m busted? We’re busted?

    On the url requirement, those of us who control the ranking on our own instances … could look at ways to surface content that doesn’t have a link attached. If its already running with mass links… a bolt on mechanism to analyze posts for original thought, empathy, kindness, connection, …ick, maybe even run that through a decision model to bring those posts forward. I don’t know what that would do to the fediverse as a whole. Another simple option is channels or servers that don’t allow urls at all, just text…just talk.

    Thanks for getting the wheels turning on this.