I think a link between your idea and mine can be found in the work of writer Evgeny Morozov (https://mondediplo.com/2024/08/07ai-cold-war), who did some interesting research of alternative forms of how the internet could have developed including a project by the chilean government called “Cybersyn” (in his podcast “The Santiago Boys”, https://open.spotify.com/show/7xlRxnooUnl48JVo726YXn). Although it was pretty centralized and not exactly Amazon, more like a socialist distribution system between industries. Well, its a very interesting podcast anyways …

I made a first prototype here: https://github.com/bluebbberry/MyceliumWebServer. Its recommends songs to the users. You can see it here: https://techhub.social/@myceliumweb and try it out by posting to #babyfungus on Mastodon.

You can do AI in an ethical way by making it more decentralized. The idea behind the mycelial web is to realize it based on volunteer computing, meaning that everybody can contribute computing power. And then I can say, for example: use my models, which was trained with all these other models, on this Amazon alternative to recommend me stuff. And the AI model was trained on my PC and runs on my PC (just wasn’t trained solely with my computing power or my data alone).

Could this be an app realized based on the mycelial web - amazon uses huge AI models to predict their customer’s behaviour and do the logistics … (not sure myself, but it probably won’t work solely on ActivityPub)

The idea is that every fungi-node also has a UI, yes. So you would be able to browse the AI models - for example if you chat with bot A, and the bot is currently learning with bot B and C, those bots would be visible to you and you could open their UI, too. And it should also show bots with which it trained earlier, too.

This way you could “browse” the resulting AI web via the browser.

Well, its similar to a botnet, but one that is open and transparent. You can browse the different nodes, etc. And you can (at least hopefully in the future) add your own computing resources to the network to participate in the AI training.

Its a bit like a more sensible version of bitcoin: instead of waisting energy for the proof of work, its training a shared AI model.

(Its running on a Hetzner server.)

Well, big tech has big computers, the Fediverse doesn’t, but we have many small one. That’s why its a good idea to combine them.

This has already been done for example by projects like SETI@home or FOLDING@home.

My idea is to build a web based on this idea.

There is a good video on federated, decentralized AI training here: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/seminars/wednesday/video/20241127-1500-t221089.html

One can imagine this project as a decentralized huggingface, which (spoiler alert), could also enshittify.

The idea is that we need bots like this because huggingface can enshittify

Hi, the bot was incorrectly set up and posted every 60s, which was too much and it got suspended.

Its now updated to posting every 12 hours and hopefully, it will be soon up again