Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005

As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.

That’s why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.

Well … as I’m not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.

At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.

Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    41·
    15 hours ago

    Big oof on using LLM code for a fediverse project. That’s not going to do any favors finding motivated devs to chip in, especially with all the social, ethical, and potential copyright issues they bring.

    such as these:

    1. Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

    2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

    3. I’m wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

    4. All currently existing LLMs are unethically trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLMs have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

    5. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

    6. It is not clear if LLMs can be “just a tool”.

    I personally think that the external costs of AI use far outweigh any potential benefit they can bring, but if soneone ultimately decides they are going to continue using them regatdless, I would hope they consider at least using a self-hosted LLM, or using something like AI horde instead, which has volunteers hosting AI, and avoids directly benefitting the fascist corporations such as openAI, anthropic, ect.