I haven’t been able to improve the Stable Horde a lot lately. I was planning to do a lot of work during the week leading to Christmas, but unfortunately the universe had another idea and not only infected me with the nastiest cold I’ve had for decades, but my whole family as well, including the visiting Grandma!
So instead of adding necessary new features, I’ve been instead flattened at bed, trying to muster enough concentration to do some basic updates and answer questions.
Nevertheless, there’s a few improvements added, mostly through the work of some members of the community.
First is the addition of the CodeFormer face-fixing post-processor which seems massively better than the GFPGAN model. Now all clients can request that an image be bassed through CodeFormer for an immediately improvement in faces. Soon I plan to allow this to run in isolation as well
The other new thing is improvements on the workers themselves, allowing them to pickup and perform jobs more efficiently.
The other big news I have is that wrote and unleashed the first Reddit bot for stable Diffusion. That was initially created as an entry for the Ben’s Bites Hackathon since I couldn’t submit the Stable Horde itself (I didn’t win btw), but it was quite an eventful release. My initial release got caught by the automated reddit anti-spam filter, shadow-banning my account and banning my subreddit. Then I refactored the bot to use my own R2 CDN and released it with a new account while asking for a reddit review on my original account. Fortunately my bot account and subreddit got unbanned and I finally released it a third time properly, and it’s been up ever since!
The way the bot is created you can request images from it all over reddit, and it will post the images in its own subreddit for everyone to see and vote on.
There’s also been a lot of new models and styles onboarded, which are also used by my reddit and mastodon bots.
The next plan now is to allow image interrogation on the stable horde, as well as direct image post-processing (without stable diffusiion), so as to allow even people with low-powered machines to be able to contribute for kudos.