flori_ava_star:~:cursor_blinking: :made-with-estrogen: :verifiedlesbian: (@star)

is it just me or does "Loqa Chat" smell like gigantic vibe coding

They joined GitHub 2 weeks ago and now claim to have a ready, e2ee discord replacement. But they do not open-source it. They also only joined Reddit 11 days ago. Just 8 days ago, they asked on Reddit "how to do federation" and now, JUST A LITTLE OVER A WEEK LATER, they claim to have full federation done and implemented using a "custom protocol".

What the fuck. I need answers. Can we get some eyes on this

EDIT: see quote

@star seen a couple prior posts about this, all come to the same conclusion, it's most likely a slop grift

loqa.chat/encryption/ This is a borderline hilarious "whitepaper" filled with words that do not mean anything

Their whitepaper claims they have solved MLS federation and explains it in like, 30 words. they also say that you can use all existing discord bots written in js or python just by importing their own module instead of the discord api library.

This would be like, the work of AT LEAST 10 full-time employed individuals, working 2-3 years on this. I would love to see how they built and shipped this all in 2 weeks. Maybe I am just doing something terribly wrong with polyproto, because I am taking orders of magnitude longer

@alexia @star

you're not alone in thinking this:

@creaturr @alexia oh thanks for that pointer!! :D

@star LLMs love to toss around the character "—". It is everywhere on this website

(Which I, as a typography nerd, think is a bit of a tragedy)

@freya You're absolutely right! The character"—"—frequently used by LLMs—is found numerous times on that website. It is not just suspicious—it's questionable!

@freya sorry sdfjkgsiodfg

@star internal screaming

@star I might just die of laughter if they start making any claims relating to porting Lavalink music bots to their platform

@star @freya me reading the average wccftech article

@star @freya its rather silly how llms will generate sentences like "it's not just foo, it's bar" where foo and bar are effectively synonymous and so the statement means nothing

@freya @star god forbid people use em dash? Out of all of the "this is how to detect LLM" "tips", this one is genuinely the worst one

@tragivictoria
I use them very commonly -- In LaTeX. But they're commonly annoying to input, so frequent use is weird.
@freya @star

@star Wanna know what's hilarious? This isn't the ONLY crappy vibecoded slop Discord clone. Two servers on Fluxer (an existing, AND FUNCTIONAL Discord replacement with in-the-works federation) randomly announced something called ApexSync, and notably, despite saying they'd be "better than Fluxer", didn't even HAVE a whitepaper- and when i myself pressed them for even basic information they had absolutely no information to present on product design principles, demographic information, no problems it solves, how it addresses Fluxer's incredibly competent response to the UX needs of ex-Discord users, nothing.

All they could tell me was that it's "only been funded for two days" (to which my response was "These are questions you answer before server funding is a twinkle in your eye") and saying they couldn't work because i was busy being ragebaiting them, which, aside from the first few messages, i wasnt even remotely uncalm. I just kept repeating the same few questions

Mere days later the entire project died because apparently the "developer" had taken advantage of the person they received funding from

Seeing your post i realised, i think people are aware that the Discord Clone Scam™️ is a viable strategy after Fluxer managed to sell nearly 30,000$ worth of limited-run early-supporter funding badges in just days after blowing up

@buncube @star Fluxer itself was also vibe coded and accepts vibe-coded submissions.

blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/

@kylieneko @star

you can claim not to believe what's mentioned there, but your comment is simply untrue at least in regards to the contents of the blog itself.

it literally says a majority of work was done prior to widespread LLM usage, and while i'm still conflicted on its use in the current context, to say it was "vibe coded" is literally untrue when they go in-depth into the separate technologies building the program and the practices in reviewing and preventing erroneous and broken code and ensuring that implementation matches pre-existing patterns.

I'm no developer, but there's a big difference between someone announcing a platform with intent to launch in a week on 150$USD funding with features not even Fluxer has, and being able to thoroughly document stringent and specified processes with regards to interacting with AI-assisted code.

I agree that i don't like it, and frankly, i'd have preferred it take "three times as long" as he puts it- but it didn't.

And at the end of the day, i still have the choice between Fluxer, which has dedicated its design to a decentralized self-hostable design and a lack of corporate power or venture capital funding, using AI code as a consumer of said products... and Discord, who utilizes its centralized power to actively advertise for AI products as a BUSINESS PARTNER through its Quests and other designs, despite how many features are locked behind the paywall that is mandatory due to the centralized design of discord.

Discord is orders of magnitude more guilty than the Fluxer dev is, and if you still don't like him for it, guess what. Soon you can self-host and literally afford him and his instance zero data and zero funding. Pretty good deal.

@kylieneko @buncube it doesn't say it was vibe coded, it says "it was 90% built before llms were a hype and now i mostly use it for rubber duck debugging" or something, which isn't quite the same, because "vibe coded" to me implies that a significant portion of the code was generated by an llm

@star Why tf do they have a timer on their homepage...

@WolvericCatkin @star timer until their vibecoded crypto constructions collapse catastrophically

@WolvericCatkin @star (i just noticed that this is a beautiful alliteration)

@star the only people who put out "whitepapers" for their software projects are cryptocurrency morons. this shit reeks

as someone whose day job involves accurately detecting and failing students who use AI, this is almost definitely generated by a recent-generation Claude. alas, this is almost definitely a crapified version of Fosscord/Spacebar, a program product that actually does work

@star

I don't trust anything with that amount of gradients

@star where there's smoke, there's fire.

@star see quoted

@zaki ahhhhhhhhhhh!!! thanks so much :D