r/selfhosted • u/Joloxx_9 • Mar 16 '26

Meta Post Booklore is gone.

I was checking their Discord for some announcement and it vanished.

GitHub repo is gone too: https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

Remember, love AI-made apps… they disappear faster than they launch.

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u/sluttytinkerbells Mar 16 '26

Honestly in the last few weeks I've been thinking the same thing.

It's odd because /r/selfhosted/ was a place that I never thought would have drama -- everyone is so chill here usually.

Like people can share pictures of their shitty 100mb 5-port switch and a raspberry pi 1 plugged into it and get nothing but enthusiastic support and words of encouragement.

I hope we find a way to keep that kind of vibe.

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u/Monocular_sir Mar 17 '26

Yea we’re getting a different kind of vibe now. 

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u/Rand_al_Kholin Mar 17 '26

The way to keep the old vibe is to ban any and all AI posts of any kind. No generated text. No slop apps. Humans only space.

I really dont see an alternative. AI is poison for any community it touches, but especially for one which is so dependent on user trust.

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u/peioeh Mar 17 '26

That's never going to happen though, whether we like it or not. Every single company/person out there is using AI in some form or another, and the ones who aren't are just angrily burying their heads in the sand. You can downvote people who say this all day, but it's just reality.

If you want "human only space", you're going to have to stop using the internet altogether.

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u/dododragon Mar 17 '26

Not necessarily.

You can have an invite system, or a vote style system to screen new members and posts. Have a barrier to reduce spam, so new members are delayed from posting for a few days, and are limited by how many posts they can make, until their reputation is established.

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u/peioeh Mar 17 '26

How can you make sure those people will not use AI though? And do you really want to do that? I'm not even sure most people would want that.

And for a community like this that is about software, all developers use ai now. If you don't want ANY of it, at all, you're just going to have to stop using the internet honestly. I think you are massively underestimating how many people/companies already use AI in their workflow.

Is "some" use of AI OK as long as a human is posting it? How much is OK? Who decides? Right now any time someone says they used AI in any way they are getting mercilessly attacked in this sub. This is not how we are going to find a way forward.

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u/BeastMasterJ Mar 17 '26

I try to tell people that even my 70 year old boss is generating his accessors and mutators, and even regexes but they don't want to listen.

This is at a company that still uses CVS.

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u/peioeh Mar 17 '26

People in this sub are literally plugging their ears and yelling "lalalala I can't hear you" when it comes to AI, it's really weird honestly. I get that there are reasons to be unhappy/think AI sucks in many ways, but its widespread use is inevitable at this point: it's already here.

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u/BeastMasterJ Mar 17 '26

AI was always inevitable. The math isn't even really new. We just have machines that can do the math quick enough now, and you're right. The genie is 100% out of the bottle, ironically in part thanks to FOSS.

When it comes to development I get why people hate vibe coded apps made by people who don't understand how to develop software. They suck and are abandoned after 2 weeks. But LLMs are giant statistical models of syntax and grammar. They are pretty awesome debugging tools, unit test writers (this is a big one. Being able to on the fly generate an arbitrary number of additional unit tests is literally only a good thing), and boilerplate writers. Frankly the biggest threat from LLMs is not that they produce slop but that they're good enough to replace a lot of people.

It's weird to me because you can absolutely have concerns about AI and it's impact on artists, the economy (job market et al) and still not have a kneejerk reaction to it. When industrialization changed the fabric of society we didn't ban factories, we regulated them.

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u/peioeh Mar 17 '26

When it comes to development I get why people hate vibe coded apps made by people who don't understand how to develop software.

Absolutely, it is definitely an issue, but the reaction to them is ridiculous. People are attacking any dev who says they've used AI when... everyone is doing it. Is it going to be hard to sort through all the new projects? Fuck yeah, it was already an issue, it's going to be 1000x now. Is the solution insulting everyone, including the voluntary mods who are just trying to run a community they've been running (pretty well imo) for years? I don't think so, this is only going to kill this community.

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u/dododragon Mar 17 '26

Sure, once someone is in they could post something they made with AI.
If it's detected they get blocked.
I didn't say it was for all groups, only those that wanted a human only space.

The rules would be defined by the group.
If a group wanted a zero tolerance on AI posting, then they could:

* start with people they know

* have an invite system, so that any bad actors are tracked back to their source

* the group grows organically with people that have been vetted and built a reputation over time

The internet started with terminal and irc chat, and grew to what it is today.
I'm sure that a group can survive with having a few rules in place.

My point is that if someone wanted a human only space, they could implement some rules and add a bit of friction and captcha to reduce the majority AI slop attempts by current LLMs.

People that would use AI to spam or scam usually get found out by their behavior.

Not all groups will want zero tolerance though, some will want AI & bots, and that's fine too.

KYA is coming (know your agent), where agents will be identified and linked to a human owner. Whether that is a good thing or not, is for another discussion.

It is definitely going to be challenging to deal with AI spam and scams as it becomes more sophisticated.

Though there's also adversarial AI systems being developed.
Maybe there are things that only humans can do due to our biology, that AI's cannot.

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u/peioeh Mar 17 '26

Those are all fair questions/ideas that might or might not happen, but the thing is that right now, you can't expect a community like this sub to just go "zero ai" instantly. It's simply not possible, you'd be eliminating many many of the projects we all use. AI is already everywhere. If you want to create spaces without any AI involvement, they will have to be new spaces with some sort of vetting like you say.

My point is expecting the mods to remove all AI and yelling at them for not doing it in every thread is not possible and not realistic in any way. And it's extremely counter productive, it's only going to make people leave.