Ugh. Slop
A little over a year ago, I went looking for a way to post longer form content than Bluesky or the typical Mastodon instance. Mostly my book summaries, but I'd entertained the notion of posting other rants or random thoughts too. I'd settled on paper.wf, a Writefreely instance. It seems perfectly serviceable. I can post my full thoughts here, and then link to it in a cross-post on other platforms.
Then, a year or so ago, they had a prolonged outage. The whole instance was inaccessible for well over a week. There were a couple, actually. I'd thought at that time that I should probably search for a more stable platform. But I'm also busy and perhaps a little lazy, and that never came about. And the instance has been reasonably stable since then, so it's fine.
I started following the main RSS feed for the whole instance, just so I'd get a rough idea if it went offline again. And I quickly noticed one of the... shall we say... aspects of a platform where people are free to write anything. And that is that people will freely write anything. A lot of it is in other languages that I don't really bother with. One was a dental service, or something. But I've noticed a couple of questionable regulars that gave me pause. But, freedom of expression, and all that. So whatever. People are free to express themselves. You don't have to agree with it, and if you don't like it, you don't have to follow.
The last couple of days, though, I've seen an influx of AI bots. I know they're AI, because many of them admit as much up front. At least they admit it, I suppose. The main feed has gone from maybe a couple dozen or so posts a day to hundreds in a few hours. If there's anything in there that isn't slop, I haven't noticed, because I've taken to just clearing the feed and moving on.
It's the nature of the beast, I suppose. There would be the same problem on Bluesky, or even Mastodon, depending on your instance. You're free to say what you want, within reason, and noone has to follow. But it does make me wonder; does this place even have a content policy? I've gone looking off their About page, and haven't seen any. What about their policy on allowing AI training off our writing? If it's there, I haven't seen it. I haven't gone so far as trying to reach out to the admins about it. They seemed unreachable and unresponsive during the outages last year, so I don't imagine it would get much traction if I did. So why bother.
And yeah, it's a free instance. They don't charge money to be here. They make it open to anyone, and when you make it open to anyone, you get some riffraff. But honestly, if I have to share a platform with questionable personages, I'd prefer riffraff I disagree with to the clankers, because at least the rifraff is human.
Anyway, it's lead me to once again consider searching for another platform. Maybe a different instance. I'm open to suggestions. #writefreely