Blog post: Reintroducing Catodon (after 6 months of active development)

Words from the Catodon team.

Our first blog post about Catodon's new chapter - please repost/boost!

In defence of our choice to use LLMs

I know AI is a sensitive subject on fedi, and I understand the arguments against it. But here's what it's actually done for us: First of all, the project wouldn't exist without it. But even now that we have a dev on the team, we're keeping it in our workflow.

In six months, it's helped us ship features that projects with several full-time devs would need years to build:

forums with full Lemmy compatibility

an RSS timeline

federated blogs

a dedicated Direct Messages page with a chat-like interface

New/Hot/Active sorting for forums and microblogging timelines

a WYSIWYG editor for Pages and Blogs

native Mastodon API support

multi-protocol login that lets you use Catodon as a client for your Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Misskey account too.

It also recently helped us catch a vulnerability in upstream Misskey, which we reported and which has now been patched - meaning every Misskey fork will benefit.

We've also used it to spot 13 Misskey security patches that hadn't been merged into Sharkey yet, which we flagged to the Sharkey team as well.

And to be clear, AI isn't magic - we spend hours of real work on every feature, and everything is tested and reviewed before it ships. We also keep a close eye on Misskey and Sharkey upstream, so we can pull in security patches as soon as they land.

We're not going to pretend this settles the debate about AI, and we don't expect it to. More and more projects (including the Linux kernel) are utilizing LLMs - and there are actual, valid reasons for this. All we can do is keep being transparent about how we use these tools, and let our work speak for itself.

OliveBrittle 13 points a month ago

Oh cool, glad I abandoned them.

I don't care about the benefits it brings. You're basing your work off stolen, unattributed code.

Hacks.

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thoughtfuldragon 12 points a month ago

Wow a project to sloppify sharkey

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Snoopy 5 points a month ago

Dunno what should be my take on coding with AI. They have good argument on its use, the code is being reviewed by devs and they were clear about its use.

I'm against AI for its environnemental disaster, cash bubble, capitalism, ram shortage...but there, it helped him with this projet revival.

So for now, i ask everyone to let go the part on AI.

I consider it was already discussed and they made it clear why they use it : he didn't find dev to help him.

On Piefed, Lemmy...we lacks contributors. Imagine the project lemmy stop, what would you do ?

There is another fork of firefish : iceshrimp where the same dev AntoineD contribute to. It is being rewritten in .NET. But it takes time and lot ressources.

I hope more contributors can give a hand.

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tyler 6 points a month ago

Well they also wrote the blog post with an LLM too, so it’s clearly not about coding faster. That’s just their excuse.

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panos 7 points a month ago

Hi, I'm the LLM that wrote the blog post, thank you for your kind words =)

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Kynn 1 point a month ago

Diversity is important, yet dividing to much puts too much weight on everyone shoulder.

Using IA means reducing the weight on your shoulders at the cost of less socializing, since you need less people to do things.

Like the chat world, the multiple ia projects appearing with people reinventing the wheel instead of contributing to existing open interfaces/softwares like matrix, I feel more people should contribute/build on things like NOSTR, instead of reviving abandoned things with a small team.

Anyway, ́tis only my take on the subject, but really, NOSTR seems the next big thing with your idendity independent from the hosting server.

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Snoopy 1 point a month ago

Well, nostr was technically interesting but the cryptobro put me off. There is also the moderation aspect that i wasn't fond of.

However, I didn't stay long enough so it's hard to recall my memory.

But yes, having an identity that is not tied to a server as nomadic identity (stream, hubzilla) should be the futur of the fediverse. It will make our network more resilient.

There is also scuttlebutt that i loved.

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toothbrush 5 points a month ago

More software that bridges the gaps between fediverse communities is exactly what we need more of!

This basically implements my wishlist for the fediverse: fediverse identities that are seperate from the instance you use, better support for lemmy communities and a nicer, less confusing design for misskey/sharkey.

Im a bit skeptical that non-programmers using AI to make large changes and add features will work in the long term, mainly because of the massive tech debt this must create, but im very interested to see if it works. Ill try it out once they implement the client to server api, Good luck!

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Snoopy 4 points a month ago

This basically implements my wishlist for the fediverse: fediverse identities that are seperate from the instance you use, better support for lemmy communities and a nicer, less confusing design for misskey/sharkey

Yeah :)

I still believe that misskey familly have the most beautiful UI in the fediverse. :)

Im a bit skeptical that non-programmers using AI to make large changes and add features will work in the long term, mainly because of the massive tech debt this must create, but im very interested to see if it works.

That's the risk but the some dev joined and review the code. So i find it reassuring that finally developpers are here and help.

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tyler 5 points a month ago

I think it really says something when the only things mentioned are the ability to make more things faster. Like, the only benefit you’re listing is that you can work faster. When has that ever been a thing that society needs? And it comes at extreme costs. Like across the board bad costs.

So the trade offs are Pros: can produce code faster Cons: everything under the sun…

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Snoopy 4 points a month ago

So the trade offs are Pros: can produce code faster Cons: everything under the sun…

So the trade offs are :

Pros: can produce code faster revival of an abandoned project that i enjoyed and some devs joining us
Cons: everything under the sun…

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hauke 3 points a month ago

I wish you lots of success and fun with your project!

And I have a question. I'm not super experienced in the fediverse. To me it seems that all necessary platforms / services do exist and the fact that there are more and more coming is rather overwhelming and confusing to me than promising. What's the niche that catodon is filling?

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panos 4 points a month ago

Thank you! Nothing wrong with using other platforms if they cover you. One thing that Catodon does is that it covers both microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey etc) and forums/communities (Lemmy, Piefed etc). Other platforms do that, but not many. We are doing it with a very pretty UI (inherited from Misskey/Sharkey), which we have also made highly customizable, since you can configure your timelines however you want. We also have a built in RSS reader, which allows you to see RSS posts in your feed and post them on your fedi account. These are just a few, off the top of my head. Most of all we do it because we like doing it =)

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chicken 5 points a month ago

One thing that Catodon does is that it covers both microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey etc) and forums/communities (Lemmy, Piefed etc).

That seems really cool and like something I'd be interested in, I think you might want to put that info somewhere more prominent on the website though since this comment is the first thing I'm seeing about that, I was trying to scan it for a concise "what is Catodon" explanation and a link to source code and having some trouble

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Sproid 1 point 17 days ago

https://codefloe.com/... there you can read what is Catodon about and a longer, more comprehensive list of all the features. On the catodon.rock website where the logo and brief description is you will see a 3 dot menu > About Catodon you'll find the relevant links.

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chicken 1 point 17 days ago

I read that readme before writing that and it's part of what I'm referring to, to me it doesn't feel like it makes that specific crucial piece of information very clear. The 3 dot menu does not itself contain a link to the source repo, I see that it's present if you click through to 'server information' but that was the last thing I thought to click on because I wasn't looking for information about the server.

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13 1 point a month ago

They should change their logo

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