I actually learned this from a few YouTube videos a long time ago rather than papers. Let me see if I can dig them up for you tomorrow. I’m sure there are people here far more educated in this space than me, so if anyone has better references, please jump in. !remindme 12h Dig through my youtube history for embedding videos

Ha, to be clear: the site isn’t built through his lens, it’s just a spot I’m going to hang around in. Probably talking to myself for a while, but the door’s open. If you’ve read or listened to him, come chat! Here I am dropping Hagens name… as an energy-hungry creature, while building algorithms that connect similar stories on this site. My defence…it runs almost entirely on solar.

Pretty much, yes. Embedding a post takes about half a second on dboft’s small server, and the lookup afterwards is under a millisecond. At 3–4 thousand new posts and comments a day that’s maybe 40 minutes of work, so the ceiling is exactly what you guessed: how fast new posts can be embedded. More cores or a small GPU would push it way out i would think. Storage grows too, about 14 KB per post with its index, so 35k today is ~500 MB and a million would be ~14 GB. It all lives on disk in Postgres; keeping the index in RAM just makes lookups sub-millisecond instead of a few milliseconds, and Postgres caches the busy parts on its own, so it degrades gently rather than falling over. This was just an idea; I’m just putting it into together to see if it holds up. I like the idea of a shared service… I wonder what the memory constraints would be at scale.

Neither, and good eye. dboft ran Photon to start, and when I replaced it with my own front end I carried the favicon over without registering that the hexagon was Photon’s mark. That was a mistake, and it’s been swapped. The Photon-y feel is real: Photon was the client I replaced, so it set the bar for what mine had to do, and the basics look alike because they’re the basics of any Lemmy client: votes, sharing, compact and card views, threaded comments, a tab bar on phones. Beyond that the design is a different one: a three-pane split reader, related posts found by meaning rather than tags, following people, reminders, and every page readable as plain Markdown or JSON(public pages). The code is written from scratch; none of Photon’s is in it. Credit to Photon either way.

That wasn’t this but I will look for that name… dont want to step on anyones toes. And you should look at this on desktop and I’d love feedback. I made it more like an email client with multiple columns.

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.

Good point - I’ll identify them on the UI.

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.

Great call out on the irony. So true. Welcome to the future.

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.