The Birth of Haidra and the Join With Nivenly

A while ago I was having a lot of troubles trying to figure out how to make open source development work. It was a completely new endeavour by me and I kept running into payment processors issues. In desperation I wrote about it in Hachyderm, which is my primary mastodon instance and someone suggested to contact Nivenly which is an org created explicitly to provide guidance to such matters for open source software and are also based on Hachyderm.

While I discussions were ongoing with them, work was progressing on the AI Horde itself but I had eventually realized that I can’t keep everything under the AI Horde moniker. The AI Horde itself is the main middle-ware making it all possible, but nobody can use it in isolation. We don’t only need the Worker backends, but we also need the various frontends and bots which the end-users will use.

So I set up a Github org to provide an overarching group for the whole official ecosystem around the AI Horde. I called it Haidra, as is both can portmanteau the “AI” part but it also represents the endless potential between the integrations around the AI Horde. It is also one of my favourite concepts.

Long story short, Haidra is now hosting all the repositories that the public AI Horde needs to run, along with a lot of helper libraries and UIs. It has as members all the people who have provided invaluable support in development or community building. We also designed a neat logo for it using the AI Horde and a competition in our discord server which Tazlin further polished as our new logo. You can see it as the featured image in the post.

And today I’m excited to announce that Haidra has also officially joined the Nivenly Foundation!

While there’s a lot of people helping to make Haidra what it is, most of the community building still falls on me, along with the social outreach. Likewise there’s a lot of questions and problems around governance of an expanding community which are really not my strength. This is where Nivenly comes in.

The plan is that they will help us with best practices on growing and sustaining our community, and finding more volunteers, especially in community management and software development. They will also provide us with governance and legal support as needed. And generally plug any holes which a lot of developers (including with me) don’t have the skills to deal with.

I hope with The backing of the Nivenly Foundation, we can all together take Haidra and the AI Horde to the next level and ensure that Generative AI remains available for everyone forever!

Reddit is a dead site running

Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote

The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:

If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.

With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.

From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.

But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.

I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.

Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.

Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!

Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.

There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.

This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.

A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.

Stable Diffusion XL Beta on the AI Horde!

In the past month or so, I’ve been collaborating with stability.ai to help them improve the quality of the new upcoming SDXL model by providing expertise around automation and efficiency in quickly testing new iterations of their model using the the AI Horde as middleware.

Today I’m proud to announce that we have arranged with stability.ai that the new SDXL beta will become available on the AI Horde directly, in a form that will be used to gather data for further improvements of the model!

You will notice that a new model is available on the AI horde: SDXL_beta::stability.ai#6901. This is the SDXL running on compute from stability.ai directly. Anyone with an account on the AI Horde can now opt to use this model! However it works a bit differently then usual.

First of all, this model will always return 2 images, regardless of how many you requested. The reason being is that each image is created using a different inference pipeline and we want you to tell us which you think is best! As a result, the images you will create with this model are always shared! This means that the images you generate will be stored and then used for further improvement based on the ratings you provide.

Which ratings? Well each time you generate images with SDXL you can immediately rate them for a hefty kudos rebate! Assuming your client supports it, you should always report back which image is better than the two. You can then optionally also rate each of them for aesthetic ratings (how much you subjectively like them) and for artifacts (how ruined the image is from generation imperfections like multiple fingers etc)

Lucid Creations has already been adjusted to support this!

For best results with SDXL, you should generate images of 1024×1024 as that is its native resolution. The minimum allowed resolution for SDXL has therefore been adjusted to this.

Also, as I mentioned before, this beta is primarily going to be used to improve the model, therefore we’re disallowing anonymous usage on this model for the moment. However registering an account is trivial and free and will also give you more priority in your generations!

The most cool factor is that as stability.ai further improves the model, is will automatically become part of this test, without you having to do anything! As such, you will eventually start getting better and better generations from the SDXL_beta on the AI horde. This is why you continued sharing of the quality is very important!

So please go forth and use the new model and let us know how it performs!

State of the AI Horde – July 2023

It’s high time I wrote one more of these posts to keep everyone up to date. It’s been generally a fairly slow month as far as the Horde is concerned. That’s not tot to mean that we produced less content, but rather that there hasn’t been a lot of progress on features as all the developers appear to have been busy with other projects a lot.

(In case you’re new here and do not know what is the AI Horde: It is a crowdsourced free/libre software Open API which connects Generative AI clients to volunteer workers which provide the inference.)

LoRas in the mix

Since the last State of the AI Horde, we saw the introduction of LoRas into payloads allowing everyone access to all LoRas in CivitAI at the click of a button. I have likewise been recording the amount of times a lora is being used, storing it by its CivitAI ID. Below you can see the top25 LoRas used since we started recording them. You can check which one it is by adding the number to this URL https://civitai.com/models/<LORA ID>. Using this method we can see that the Add More Details LoRa is clearly one of the most valuable one following closely by Details Tweaker. People do love adding more details!

All in all, a total 801.326 LoRas have been recorded being used successfully in the AI Horde!

 lora  |     count 
-------+-----------
 82098 |     46095
 58390 |     36222
 48139 |     18042
 60724 |     16980
 13941 |      9245
 32827 |      9191
 87245 |      9083
 43814 |      8999
 12820 |      8148
 28742 |      8009
 9652  |      7960
 82946 |      7922
 25995 |      7671
 28511 |      7225
 87080 |      5966
 16928 |      5950
 6693  |      5431
 24583 |      5121
 48299 |      4905
 42214 |      4838
 63278 |      4821
 9025  |      4105
 9651  |      3828
 10816 |      3786
 37006 |      3759

Image Generation Stats

In image news, our usage remains fairly stable, which is fairly impressive if one considers just how much extra slowdown is added by all these LoRa. We are stable at ~300K images generated per day and ~1M images per month. Worth noting that since it started the AI Horde has generated close to 1 whole PETApixestep for free and ~70 million images!

On the model side, Deliberate solidifies itself furher as the best generalist model, while Stable Diffusion drops down to 3rd place as the Anime takes the 2nd spot. Our own special Kiwi, ResidenChief’s model seems to have been a massive success as well, coming out of nowhere to grab a solid 4th place. And this time the Furries are also in forth, capturing the 6th position! Pretty cool stuff!

  1. Deliberate 31.6% (3127771)
  2. Anything Diffusion 11.4% (1133058)
  3. stable_diffusion 9.6% (951705)
  4. ICBINP – I Can’t Believe It’s Not Photography 6.7% (662205)
  5. Dreamshaper 5.6% (550335)
  6. BB95 Furry Mix 3.7% (370853)
  7. Hentai Diffusion 3.1% (303351)
  8. Counterfeit 2.6% (254197)
  9. ChilloutMix 1.9% (186525)
  10. Pretty 2.5D 1.8% (178713)

Text Generation Stats

On the text side, not much has changed since May, with out generation staying similat at ~3M requests fulfilled and 377 Megatokens.

Likewise on the model top 10 Pygmalion 6B is still leading the pack with Mr. Seeker’s Erebus and Nerybus still in heavy use.

  1. PygmalionAI/pygmalion-6b 36.4% (1118193)
  2. KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Erebus 9.2% (284531)
  3. KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Nerybus-Mix 6.4% (197689)
  4. Pygmalion-7b-4bit-GPTQ-Safetensors 4.8% (148631)
  5. VicUnlocked-alpaca-65b-4bit 3.8% (116034)
  6. chronos-hermes-13B-GPTQ 3.4% (105727)
  7. KoboldAI/OPT-30B-Erebus 3.2% (99782)
  8. manticore-13b-chat-pyg-GPTQ 2.7% (82276)
  9. 13B-HyperMantis/GPTQ_4bit-128g 2.3% (69403)
  10. asmodeus 2.0% (61863)

Hordelib is back!

A month ago, I mentioned that hlky sent a bogus DMCA against hordelib which we fought against. I am glad to announce that this process finally completed and the hordelib is once again visible in Github and all contributions by hlky have been purged. I honestly hope that’s the last I’ll hear about this person…

Lemmy and Reddit

The main reason for being otherwise busy is that I’ve been furiously transferring my Reddit presence to my own self-hosted Lemmy instance, because Reddit is speed-running enshittification. I won’t bore you with the details but you can read up some of my work and see some of my development in the relevant blog tag.

However I do want to say that the instance I’ve fired up, the Divisions by zero has been more successful than I ever could have imagined! With ~10K users registered and thousands of subscribers to the communities, and some of the best admin team I could hope for.

Unfortunately there’s also been reddit drama which has been mightily distracting to me, but things are slowly settling down and I am putting my reddit days well behind me.

In relevance to the AI Horde however, we do have some cool communities you should subscribe to

I am likewise already planning more events and automation to more closely tie the AI Horde into the Lemmy instance for cool art stuff! Stay tuned and/or throw me your ideas!

Prompt Challenges

R from our mod team has started running some cool prompt challenges in the discord server which you are all more than welcome to join! Winner gets a nice bundle of kudos, not to mention the amount you get by simply posting. It’s just fun all around, and the winners are featured in the Lemmy communities as well!

Worker Updates

Tazlin has been hard at work improving the AI Horde Worker with bugfixes (not to menton the huge amounts of tech support given in discord). The AI Horde Worker as a result has become much much more stable which should have a good impact on your kudos-per-hour! Just a quick shout-out to an invaluable collaborator!

A Lot more workers

I don’t know how it’s happening but the AI Horde is nearing 100 dreamers! I am getting the fireworks ready for the first time we hit this threshold!

Funding and Support

My current infrastructure has been sufficiently stable since the last migration to a dedicated host which I think you have experienced with the low amount of downtimes and interruptions since.

This is my usual opportunity to point out that running, improving and maintaining the the AI Horde is basically a full-time job for me so please if you see the open commons potential of this service, consider subscribing as my patron where I reward people with monthly priority for their support.

If you prefer, you can instead sponsor me on github.

Final Word

While development slowed significantly in June, we’re still doing significant work for the open commons. I have just not had the mental capacity to build up hype as much as I used to, and to make it worse, the social media landscape is completely in the air at the moment.

I am really hoping more people can step up and help promote the AI Horde and what it represents as my workload is just through the roof and to be perfectly honest, I am at the limit of my “plate-spinning” capabilities.

Please talk about the AI Horde and the tools in its ecosystem. The more people who know about it, the more valuable it becomes for the benefit of everyone!

We have plenty of ways one can help and we shower with kudos everyone doing so. From people sharing images and helping others in the community, to developers bug-fixing my terrible code, to community managers on discord and admins on lemmy. If you want to help out, let us know!

Fediseer Streamlining

Just one day ago I released my initial release of the Overseer and I was annoyed by the implementation almost immediately. The requirement to register on another Lemmy instance using a custom username and wait for manual approval (which could also lead to someone sniping that username, and forcing me to manually delete it), and THEN register your instance on the Overseer was just too clunky.

While a few people did register, I realized almost immediately it’s very likely this would never take off. So I started rethinking how I could streamline this process so that it would require far less steps.

My initial plan was to simply register all available instances on the fediverse by default, and allow admins to claim them later. That would require me somehow being able to contact those admins directly. This led me to try to figure out the best way to do that where I discovered I could theoretically talk to any fediverse instance directly, and not have to rely on the a specific lemmy instance with all its limitations.

So I spent many many hours figuring out how to do that. The documentation is frustratingly sparse and incomplete on this point, with my best guide was this blogpost, from half a decade ago for a different language than python. Fortunately this day and age, I had access to ChatGPT, so I could ask it to translate the code on that page to python and then with some trial and error and digging in the official documentation, I had a working DM system for mastodon!

Then I set out to do the same for lemmy which is where the big frustration was waiting, as the documentation is practically non-existent, the messages are cryptic and Rust and the way it’s coded was completely impenetrable to me. Lots and lots of digging in the code, trial and error and asking around in desperation, and I managed to figure out that the main blocking point was a “type” key in my activitypub instance, instead of a fault in my payload.

Unfortunately figuring out how to “speak activitypub” took me the better part of my day. But the good news is that once I had that down, the rest was just a matter of time. I just had to refactor everything. And hell, while I am doing that, why not change the name and domain as well

And that’s how Fediseer.com is born!

I have already updated my previous post with the new workflow, but the big difference is that it completely removes the need for an extra lemmy instance one has to manually register. Instead one just has to “claim” their instance and they will get a PM directly in their mailbox!

Likewise, you can guarantee for a different instance even if their admins haven’t claimed it first and they will get a helpful PM informing them about it. If the instance doesn’t exist yet, all you need to do is search for it in the whitelist and it will be automatically added, and then can be guaranteed. My next step is to automatically import all known instances by pulling them from the federation, which should avoid the manual step of searching for them first.

So let’s see how it goes. Now with the ability to talk to fediverse instances directly, it also opens up some really fascinating doors for automation! Stay tuned!

Fediseer: A Fediverse Chain of Trust

Recently I’ve started running my own lemmy instance, as part of my decoupling from Reddit, due to them speed-running enshittification.

The instance has been growing nicely and holding up very well indeed. but there’s dark clouds forming on the horizon, as more of more of the early adopters and people with principles are leaving that service and are looking for alternatives.

The first signs of trouble appeared when I noticed that the top instances in the Fediverse Observer were growing by thousands of users per day, but had very little activity to speak of, with few threads and barely any comments. This was a clear sign of botted accounts being generated by the thousands.

My initial reaction was to cook up a quick REST API and a complementing script which would allow instance admins to quickly de-federate from instances with this amount of botted accounts, as it would point to an instance with insufficient protection, and those account could easily be used in the future to spam others. A small pre-emptive measure. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but I wanted to get something out before trouble occurs.

The Fediverse Fediseer was born, but I wanted something more. I feel like a big issue with the Fediverse as it stands right now is the same as email. It’s trivial for someone to set up hundreds or thousands fake fediverse domains and start spamming other instances. All it requires is that any account on those instances to follow their spam domains, to open the door. Sure, instances with manual user approval are somewhat more protected, but this approach does not scale well, and will lose us the opportunity to capture the people looking for alternatives outside of corporate control. Likewise any place with open registrations is available to botters to inject their fake accounts in order to follow their spam instances. In general, it’s a big problem to solve through de-federation alone.

My thoughts then was to find a way utilize the “whitelisting” capabilities of lemmy and the fediverse to ensure that only trusted instances are federated. But this has it’s own share of problems. Particularly, it’s also difficult to scale, and it easily excludes people running their own instances.

However the main benefit of whitelists, is that one does not have to be constantly vigilant. A dedicated bot network can spawn thousands of new domains and sleeper accounts to flood the fediverse and de-federation lists would easily grow exponentially to try and fruitlessly fight against this. A whitelist should theoretically remain relatively short and there’s natively protects against domain flooding.

So I wanted to come up with something that would both make it easy to compile and maintain whitelists, but also not lock out people from individual accounts.

After a day of work, I’m excited to unveil the new Fediseer functionality which works around a Chain of Trust!

This all works via a REST API (which I hope some enterprising people will make a fancy UI for it)

The first step is to use the Fediseer API to register your instance’s domain. You can do it from the provided interface, or use a curl call, But I hope in the future the community will develop way fancier UIs to handle this. You will need to provide a username which is an admin on the instance you want to claim (preferably yours).

If all goes well, the user you provided will then receive an API key via Private Message on their own instance, which they can then use to guarantee or endorse other instances.

A new account on the Fediseer however is not visible on the whitelist API by default. This is because only accounts which are “Guaranteed” by other instances are visible. The Fediseer starts with an core instance, the fediverse.com, which functions as the root for the Chain of Trust. Either this account, or another account previously guaranteed, will have to guarantee your instance, before it is available for the whitelist.

Using the Guarantee API endpoint you can now guarantee other instances with your own instance.

Once your instance is guaranteed, it also get its first endorsement from its guarantor, and now will be displayed on the whitelist using the default settings

This list can be exported also in csv format, for easy injection into lemmy whitelists

This naturally forms a network of trust with instances guaranteeing each other down the chain. The purpose of this guarantee is to prevent bad actors from sneaking in. So let’s pretend that a spam instance sneaks in, and starts causing trouble. What do we do?

Very easy, instead of having to waste time going around asking everyone to defederate that instance, and reminding new users to do likewise, we simply withdraw our guarantee for that instance. Once a guarantee is withdrawn, that instance is not anymore visible in the whitelist. Which means any servers which automatically pull and deploy the whitelist from the Fediseer, will automatically reject such instances.

But this goes even further. Let’s say someone pretend to be nice in order to start letting spam instances into the whitelist. When people shout about it, they say the right words and withdraw their guarantees, but keep adding new ones in. Eventually, we’re going to notice that all guarantees for spam seem to be coming from the same instance. When that happens, we just withdraw our guarantee for that instance which does 3 things. A) It prevents that instance from being in the whitelist. B) It prevents that instance from guaranteeing or endorsing others C) It removes the instances lower in the chain branch of that instance as well! So if instance A faked being nice, then guaranteed for 20 spam instances once in, all it would take for those 20 spam instances to be removed from thew whitelist, for the guarantor of instance A, to withdraw their guarantee! If they don’t want to do that, then whoever guaranteed them might withdraw it, until we find someone who does.

Now, I won’t claim that this system is perfect. Human nature being what it is, I expect power groups will form which might not agree with who else is guaranteed. This is where the fediseer being FOSS helps. If there’s a core disagreement between big groups of fediverse projects about who should be guaranteed in the first place, I expect other Fediseers to spawn with their own Chains of Trust which are more or less strict than other. An instance could very well be registered to multiple Overseers and thus be part of different whitelists. I am perfectly aware that I will not be able to satisfy everyone limits but I hope to provide a tool that can!

The main point here is to create the system which can start building Chains of Trust, which have a manual human control but are easy to adjust as the environment changes.

There’s more here that I haven’t mentioned yet, such as the endorsements, where guaranteed instances can endorse others, and anyone can set their whitelist to require more of less endorsements. Or being able to whitelist only instances with endorsements from another instance. Or how the Fediseer will PM you with changes to endorsements and guarantees etc

There’s plenty of ideas to add. This is merely the first step. And I’d love you all to help me take more of them!

Reddit worked despite reddit.

I visit Reddit all the time. And I visited Digg before that. In fact I was hooked to this mode of operation since Digg. Suffice to say, something about link aggregation tickles my ADHD brain just right.

However with the recent blackout of a big part of reddit, I decided to start my own Lemmy instance and use Lemmy primarily instead through it. Since I’ve started this experiment, I feel any urge to visit Reddit for my “fix” less and less. I have some thoughts about that.

In Twitter Vs Mastodon AKA “micro-blogging”, The value was in the specific people one followed which made it way harder to switch services because one was help back by other people. I.e. the people kept each other locked-in. Similar to how Facebook keeps everyone locked-in their walled garden because it’s the only social media their parents and grandparents managed to learn to use.

In Reddit however, the value is all about the specific forums, or “subreddits”, in lingo. The specific people one was talking to, never really mattered. What was important was the overall engagement general sense of shared-interest. This has always been the core strength of Reddit, and its early pioneers like Aaron Schwartz understood that.

This is why the minimalist reddit of old, managed to dethrone Digg when the latter decided that its core principles wasn’t user-curated content, but linkspam. The people who migrated into Reddit made what it is today, by creating and nurturing their communities over years.

Any beneficial actions by reddit itself have been either following what the community was already doing (such as adding CSS options or on-boarding the automoderator bot), or forced by bad optics, such as when they were forced to finally ban /r/coontown, /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/jailbait (which their current CEO moderated btw) etc.

The community and the people who run the subreddits have always had to make the minimalist options allowed to them work. They had to develop their own tools and enhancements, such as RES, and Moderator Toolbox, while Reddit couldn’t even provide much requested functionality to counter the known abuses of cross-subreddit raiding.

Instead, Reddit focused on adding useless features nobody asked for like NFT. On the usability, the new look was their push to take the site more towards generic social media network, with friends, follows, awards and avatars, and instead of focusing on their core product: Link aggregation and discussions.

In fact, any action they took, was laser focused on social-media lock-in and extracting wealth and adding features which people didn’t care for, which is why most third party apps simply ignored all that stuff.

Through all this, their valuable communities kept fighting against reddit management’s pushes so that they could do what was right, even if some lost that fight, like /r/AMA which became but a shadow of its former self when the cowardly owners fired their low-level employee leading its success, and scapegoated their then female CEO for it.

Eventually though something had to give, and reddit seems to have realized that their users are too stubborn to simply accept the new paradigm they designed for them where they watch more ads, buy more reddit gold and get addicted to NFTs. And 3rd party apps enabled users to use the valuable part of reddit and skip the enshittification all too easily.

So they had to go. And here we are.

Unfortunately for reddit, since the core value of reddit has always been the links, and the discussions around said links, instead of specific people and a social network around them, it is stunningly easy to jump ship. It doesn’t take a lot to keep a community going on Lemmy instead of Reddit. All it needs is a handful of dedicated people to keep finding and posting links, and the discussions and memes will easily follow.

I don’t need to know that I know the links are coming from Gallowboob, in fact, I never cared who posted the links or started the discussions. Reddit has had the “friends” feature for close to a decade now, and I have “friended” less than a handful of people. There’s literally nothing holding me and most people back except our existing routines.

There is of course still a lot of momentum in reddit communities, and a lot of mods who really don’t want to lose their status. Nevertheless, I’m finding I’m not actually missing much by staying exclusively on lemmy atm and I see a lot of people are realizing the same thing increasingly fast. The finality of the loss of major apps like Apollo, RIF and Sync has already been the final nail for a lot of people.

This exodus might already be unstoppable unless reddit completely capitulates and goes back on their API plans. But I don’t hold my breath on this.

Feel free to come and hang out at the Divisions by zero lemmy instance btw. We’ll do fun things!

Client and Bot Updates

Lucid Creations

Lucid Creations has gotten a few more updates, with the most recent being the ability to load your generation settings from a previous generation you have saved. Plus a few other quality of life fixes

More Styles

The AI Horde stylelist has received Lora support and about 40 new ones have been added using the awesome work by konyconi. Likewise a new category called “stylepunks” has been added which will generate using random styles from those new ones.

Mastodon & Reddit Bots

The Mastodon and Reddit bots have been updated to support LoRa styles

Discord Bot

The official AI Horde discord bot has also been updated by ZeldaFan to support the new LoRa styles, but no categories support yet. Hopefully soon.

Other Clients

A ton of other clients are receiving flood of updates. Particularly ArtBot and aislingeach are both seeing very rapid development. Remember to check their individual discord channels if you haven’t checked them out yet

Hordelib repo is temporarily down due to DMCA

As I mentioned last time, we received a DMCA take-down for a couple of missing attributions on AGPL3 files. We have since added those back, but as is the case with DMCAs, once you start them, they don’t stop on their own.

We had already send a counter-notice, but unfortunately not fast enough. The Hordelib repo has now been hidden from the world. You can read the whole bogus DMCA requesting it here.

I remind that hlky had made no attempt to request those attributions informally, just went straight to DMCA, which tracks since this person is always acting in bad faith. It just in this case it’s a convenient way to attack the AI Horde project once more.

This is a minor inconvenience, as the hordelib is still available in pypi, but annoying nonetheless.

Hopefully we’ll be back soon enough, and until then we’ll just re-host elsewhere for a while.

The AI Horde now seamlessly provides all CivitAI LoRas

Demand for AI Horde to support LoRas was high ever since they were discovered and unleashed into the Stable Diffusion ecosystem. About 2 months ago we were really close to releasing support for them but alas “stuff happened” which culminated in us having to completely rewrite out inference backend.

Fortunately, ComfyUI already supported LoRas, so once we switched to using it as our inference library, we just needed to hook into its LoRa capabilities. Myself along with the extremely skilled hordelib devs, Jug and Tazlin have been working constantly on this for the past half a month or so and today I’m proud to announce that the Lora capability has been released to all AI Horde Workers!

You might have seen earlier that some Client like Artbot, the Krita plugin and Lucid Creations were already supported LoRas. This was however only using the few beta testing workers we had. Now those clients will start seeing a lot more speed as worker with the power to do so start running them.

This also signifies our tightest integration with CivitAI yet! We we were already utilizing them, but mostly to just pull stable diffusion checkpoint files. The LoRa integration however goes far far further than that, using them as an integral part of our discovery and control process.

Through the very useful REST API provided by CivitAI, we have developed a method where we can discover, download and utilize any LoRa that is hosted there. No more do you need to search, validate compatibility, download etc. The AI Horde and its Worker will handle that automatically!

To showcase this point, I’ve made a small video showing off this capability in Lucid Creations which I’ve tightly integrated into CivitAI, so that it can look for any LoRa based on ID or partial name, display all relevant information and even warns you of compatibility issues.

Sorry about the sound quality. I don’t have a professional streamer setup, just a shitty webcam 😀

I’ve put a lot of effort into making finding and using LoRas as painless as possible, because there’s literally dozens of thousands of the things. Manually searching through the website and copy-pasting IDs is just a complete PITA. Never mind downloading and trying them out one-by-one.

Through the AI Horde, you can simply type the partial name of what you want, and keep mix and matching them until you achieve the desired outcome! Changing and trying new LoRas now takes literally a few seconds!

Also many kudos to the CivitAI devs which quickly implemented one request I put through to make this even easier and faster for everyone.

As this has just been released, currently only a few UIs support this. Lucid Creations which has full discovery, and ArtBot which requires you to know the ID. The Krita plugin is also supporting them. I expect the other UIs to soon follow in the coming days.

Hopefully this is another step in unleashing your creativity, without requiring a powerful GPU of your own!

Stay tuned for the next update adding access to all Textual Inversions as well.