This post is written on https://normals.me and delivered to !fediverse@lemmy.world over #ActivityPub, so if you are reading it the basic plumbing works. Now let me explain what is this.

Normals is a forum with communities, threads, and questions with an accepted answer. It is a single instance, not software you can host, and the core is closed for anti-abuse reasons. The federation module will be published separately with implementation notes (FEP-67ff).

What federates today Every community is a Group actor following the Lemmy model (FEP-1b12). Follow @selfhosted@normals.me or any other community from Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin or Mastodon.

Posts and comments go both ways. Replies from your instance appear in the thread on Normals, replies from Normals go back to the origin.

Remote content is labelled with its origin, links back to it, and is never copied. Media loads from the source.

Signed fetches, so it works with instances that require authorized fetch. NodeInfo 2.1 is up.

Policies, in case they matter to you, it has no ads, and no paid reach, and of course no AI training on posts. AI crawlers blocked by default, public mod log with reasons, and no automated removals. Numbers at https://normals.me/transparency so please take a look.

If something from your instance shows up wrong here, or something from here shows up wrong on yours, reply with the URL and I'll fix it. Andy Piper mentioned NodeBB uses the same group model, if anyone runs a NodeBB instance I'd like to test against it, if possible.

I hope we all have fun. Cheers!

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[–] 72 points 1 day ago (25 children)

Hi, I got a couple questions that aren't answered on your transparency page yet.

  • Has AI been used to create this?
  • Two AI communities are on top of your communities list. Your terms talk about preventing AI scraping, yet your platform seems to welcome "AI founders". How does this go together?
  • Where is the source code?
  • Your terms talk about monetization through Normals Plus. Can you elaborate on this?
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  • [+] [S] -8 points 1 day ago (22 children)

    Do I use AI to do everything? No, as a software engineer with over 15 years of experience in the industry, you can't let AI do all the work any developer knows that at this point? It messes things up all the time, ignores design patterns, ignores best practices, writes code stupidly cloning functions already exists, ignores SOLID, ignores security vulnerabilities, and so on. But I did use it to run unit tests, integration tests, perform performance and speed tests, and even to hack my own app.

    The communities are random, there's no fixed order in them. Besides, they're mirrored of other existing communities. As you can see, they come from other sources like Mastodon based on the hashtags.

    Regarding the plus feature, it's a way for users to decorate their profiles. I planned as source of income to maintain the project, otherwise, the project wouldn't exist, unfortunately I would need to pay for the serves to host the app, the DB backups, the infrastructure, pipelines, buckets, well if you are developer you might understand how a platform actually works. But nothing is implemented yet, nor will it be in the near future regarding the plus.

    It is a real shame that people think that this is vibecoded, without prior experience working as a developer and I am saying this because it more than enough to hit F12 and check the network tab, and the weird thing for me is that people judge because how it looks, but this is what the CSS Framework https://tailwindcss.com/ offers. However I appreciate your comment and I hope I answered your questions.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    If you think choosing tailwind forces you into a certain style of website, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

    And you clearly haven't just used AI for tests. I wonder if the source is closed because you know how obviously AI generated it would look if it was open source?

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  • [–] [S] -5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Tailwind it’s a utility first framework with no pre built components, I think you are the one that does not know what are you saying, you build whatever you want and can fully customize the theme that’s literally the point of it, and it’s in the official docs.

    On the AI and closed source speculation, the auth, signatures, permissions, input handling is standard and went through an OWASP review before launch I said it before. I said I used AI for unit tests, integration tests, performance work, and even to attack my own app. I did not say I let it write the product. After 15+ years writing software, most of us already know AI still ignores SOLID, duplicates existing functions, and introduces security issues if you hand it the whole job. But you’re free to dislike the design or the decision to keep the anti-abuse parts private. The transparency page is public if you want the actual policies and review status instead of the theory.

    Again, if you don't like the UI or think this is all robots, you can always join X, Reddit, or any other platform that steals your data and helps big corporations, or you can develop your own and invite me, but for that you need to be developer first. I thought people were different in the Fediverse.

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  • [–] 4 points 16 hours ago

    After 15+ years writing software

    You keep mentioning that. Do you have anything you can show off from that time?

    For that matter, I also noticed no actual entity, person, name, company etc. is mentioned anywhere on your service. Not even a wider pseudonym of yours, or any way to reach you outside emailing the domain or your account on this new service.

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