📢 Last Friday, we launched a completely revamped version of Murmel - a v2.0 of sorts. It is a complete rewrite, and not just a an incremental update. We took this path, because we learned a lot of valuable lessons on the way, and the hardest one was that v1.0 would not scale teh way we wanted it.
Thus, v2.0. The bigest upgarde is that you now Mastodon AND Bluesky support, and up to 3 feed feeds to include in your digest.
@murmel_social The concept is cool, but the alt text of the image confused me: why put the description of the product in an image's alt text instead of the post itself? Also, it is deceitful in saying there is "no algorithm", there is clearly an algorithm, that you kind of describe too: take the articles on your timeline, sort them by breadth then amplification. Looking at your other posts, I see that the algorithm is a bit more complex and opaque than that: it also uses "an AI" (no idea what kind) to determine the quality of the articles. This can pose some other concerns: many people don't want their content to be absorbed as training data by AI providers, and use different techniques like robots.txt exclusions for them, if you use an online AI tool that sends data to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google do you try to respect that? Overall, I think your project would benefit a lot from better communication around your algorithm. Algorithms aren't bad, opaque ones that benefit the corporation instead of the users are.
@Varpie@murmel_social I admit, we could do way better with our communication. And yeah, to say that there is no algorithm would be as silly as saying that ordering posts in chronological order isn't an algorithm in and of itself. Everything is an algorithm - some are just pure noise, others are there to squeeze engagement and clicks. Honestly, both lead to doomscrolling.
I want ppl to get as much info out of a single screen as possible, so that they can then close it and go on with their day.
@Varpie@murmel_social If that implies using a "sneaky algorithm," but one that actually helps you - so be it.
As for our use of “AI” - it's an old classification algo we developed a decade ago. It helps us identify and mark interesting longreads amidst all the doomsday bullshit that gets spread on social. Nothing ever gets sent to Anthropic / OpenAI etc. Even we rent our own GPU machines, so we don't sell our souls to those. It's expensive as hell, but keeps our sanity.
@Varpie@murmel_social I hope, this addresses some of your concerns. Sorry, if I am being too blunt at times, but I am getting sick of people accusing our software of sending their precious social media rants to Palantir or some other s*** 🤪
@preslavrachev@murmel_social It's all good stuff, but it's the kind of things that should be more visible in the front page of your project. Maybe adding a FAQ section, or something like that. Honestly I think there is a lot of good applications for machine learning, and what you're doing is one of them, I just get instantly suspicious when I see a generic "AI", instead of for instance ML classification system.
