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!
Posted on Normals.me · View the original post
I think its funny when someone doesn’t disclose it’s an ai project they get hella upvotes
Closed source and clearly completely vibe coded? Just look at the site, it reeks of AI. Even this post has so much AI-speech.
Yea, no thanks.
if the core is closed for the stated reason, does that mean you are unsure about the safety of the system?
Lots of people are getting pissed at it being closed source. I get that it isn’t the norm. But, there are closed-source paid software on the Fediverse. This isn’t anything new. Also, there’s ways to disagree and share opinions without being hostile - we are not children here nor teenagers lacking a fully developed brain
As a counterpoint, sloppy projects are being shared all over and it’s basically spam at this point. Even /r/rust had to disallow code projects, because there was simply way too much slop being posted all the time.
People share projects because back in the day, a project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code with a cool website and a lot of features were evidence of a lot of hard work, a lot of design decisions and a lot of tradeoffs.
Vibe coding has made that a bad metric. These things no longer mean that any actual work has been dedicated to this project. Anyone could use an afternoon prompting an agent to build the same thing. There is no value in sharing such a thing. At best, it’s worthless and at worst, it’s borderline a scam, an attempt at disguising a project as something it isn’t.
Please no. Fediverse, open standards, open source, free software, no bullshit.
I don’t believe all software should be open source. In that you’re wrong. I think @baldur did a great job here.
i think you’re wrong and a bad person for having that opinion
WTF? Why I am a bad person?
Polish law requires the operator of a web service to include the following information on it:
- Full legal/registered business name
- Registered address
- Identification numbers (such as NIP, REGON, or KRS entry for Polish businesses)
- Direct contact details (email/phone)
Failing to provide this means your TOS and Privacy Policy are unenforceable.
Thanks, noted. Operator details will be added once the business registration is done.
Hi, I got a couple questions that aren’t answered on your transparency page yet.
- Has AI been used to create this?
- Two AI communities are on top of your communities list. Your terms talk about preventing AI scraping, yet your platform seems to welcome “AI founders”. How does this go together?
- Where is the source code?
- Your terms talk about monetization through Normals Plus. Can you elaborate on this?
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.
It is a real shame that people think that this is vibecoded
we can’t see your source code but the copy on your transparency page sounds like LLM voice:
- “Your feed is people and communities, not advertising.”
- “This is a promise we keep in good faith, not a technical guarantee.”
- “Analytics let people see how their posts, profiles and communities are doing. This is everything they record, and nothing else.”
- “Eight promises:” […]
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:
as a software engineer with over 15 years of experience
[…]
the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons
Its strange how hostile people are being. And people are assuming everything is vibecoded at this point.
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.
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.
Using AI is bad in general. Plain stop.
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.
Hello from RetroLemmy! Always fun to see a new platform join in
Yay! Thank you, I appreciate the comment! It seems to work!
Also hi from Retrofed! Welcome to federation.
