this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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are you being intentionally obtuse? the code to do everything involved with this issue. the code that would be a very simple demonstrative "oh, okay, so that's what's happening" read with literally no ambiguity, as is extremely usual to do in open source. that code. where is it?
This is an internal tool that a mod developed and an admin was trying out. You realize that at this point I could just post any fucking code I want to prove whatever I want, right? So you understand this doesn't prove anything? So why not just believe me when I tell you that all the script was doing was downloading a user's public post history via the API?
I anyway asked the developer to share the code with me, as again, it wasn't an official instance tooling.
why are you going to bat for someone using unofficial tooling that proved to be extremely unpopular because it was used in a manner that looked like abuse to most observers and qualifies as abuse for instances like ours? it feels kind of rich to come here angry when other people are asking you to stop. maybe you can just take our word for it that we don’t want an LLM anywhere in the moderation process, even as a post summarizer? you don’t have to understand why if you don’t want to.
and yeah you absolutely can lie about this crap. it kind of makes it worse that you and your mod felt they didn’t have to. we really don’t want any of this normalized on any level.
I am not defending them. Trust me I am plenty annoyed that I have to deal with the fallout and the constant disinfo it opened us up on. But at the end of the day, we're humans and people are new at moderating and new to social media, and don't always understand how visuals come across and how easy it is for people to pick up the pitchforks, and I'd rather make this a learning moment than a purging moment.
I will absolutely accept the shit that comes our way because people didn't think how their actions would look (again, this doesn't mean that LLM for moderation is good but being seen using is bad. The former is bad too.) But I don't like being blamed for bringing the frigging LLM apocalypse to the fediverse, you know what I mean?
For the record: I'm not angry at people telling us to stop. I am angry because we never even started and I keep saying this and it feels like people are just not listening and keep repeating the same disinfo and I have to keep saying "People, this is not true, this is not at all what happened" again and again.
absolutely! please show me you’ve learned from this moment by taking a stance against the use of LLMs anywhere in the moderation process and making it part of your instance’s policies going forward.
I think that would just be performative at this point, but I'll discuss with the team.
perform away! please keep in mind that Lemmy and ActivityPub are communities, and the only proof of intent we have is through action. a change in policy might feel performative, but it gives me something I can boost as a positive example and a sign that things will be better going forward.
We're probably long overdue with an official meta post in our instance about this whole shitshow that we can link on the next time this disinfo is pushed.