I recently had a discussion on Mastodon that was sparked by a post of the Software Freedom Conservancy about the handling of LLM-gen-AI submissions. There are many people who are very opposed to letting LLM-generated code into their projects. This is an understandable standpoint given concerns like legality, unethical sourcing, resource usage, and concentration of power.

Apart from that, it is completely reasonable for a maintainer to set rules for submissions. A FOSS license doesn’t mean that a maintainer even has to interact with anyone. It just provides the source.

The Fediverse is growing. Spurred by the problems at Twitter and Reddit, more and more users are now venturing onto alternative platforms. Especially Mastodon, Lemmy, and KBin have experienced an explosive surge in users recently. This didn’t happen without problems, of course, but it at least shows that there might be a way not to throw all data into the gullets of large corporations.

With the ActivityPub protocol as the glue between all Fediverse projects, the formation of silos should finally come to an end. Everyone can talk to everyone: Mastodon with Pixelfed, Pleroma with PeerTube, Lemmy with KBin. The boundaries between projects are blurring, even if sometimes content from one software makes no sense in the interface of another. But this is where the problem begins.