Valour: Another Discord Alternative

[Slumber]

A few days ago Vesper told me about this site and I'm going to be giving it a try and sharing my thoughts in this thread, I think!

https://valour.gg/

Having "Community first" as a motto is easy, but I'd love to see if that's actually true... Still, would love an instant messaging platform that I like to use more than Discord.

[Tinc]

I'm curious how it's going! I recall you mentioning it was getting overloaded with new users, and wonder if that's stabilizing out?

[Slumber]

I made an account and didn't even set up a site, LOL! I'll probably have time next week, though. I need to manage my time better between all my projects...hmm...

[Slumber]

Okay well I just took the time to watch the video of the guy who started it and honestly I'm sold. He seems solid, the way he talks is logical, he seems kind, he knows what he wants, he has a community he's running on it. I don't see any reason not to at least try it. And I'm very excited by the kinds of things it's capable of doing. I think it could be a worthwhile addition to the forums as a community space, at least.

[Slumber]

Okay I will say looking at his YouTube channel he loves to use genAI imagery which annoys me...but I'm willing to forgive it for now if there's no AI focus on the platform itself.

EDIT: Ugh, okay but the site explaining Valour is also so unfinished. I tried clicking on all of the links in the footer and some flat out don't lead anywhere. The documentation link even loads a page that goes no where. Now I have to wonder if the site was made with AI, and if that means so is the platform. It's open source so someone with coding knowledge should be able to tell, at least.

[Tinc]

The broken links and weirdly unfinished stuff does sound like a hallucinating genAI output...

I haven't dug into genAI code generation at all, nor have I had to read any, so I can't say from my experience *but* from what I've been reading about it on Fedi, programmers have had a hard time telling "genAI garbage" from "human-made garbage" and combing through genAI-generated code that has been submitted to them has been a huge cognitive load.

Maybe it can be easier if the task is "tell if this is genAI or not" vs "this patch got submitted and I need to figure out how to fix it"

[Tinc]

Okay, never mind. I went to do some cursory investigation to see what their contribution guidelines are and this took me 2 seconds

AGENTS.md in the repo has guidelines for AI Agents working on their codebase (basically like a README. I was actually looking for a CONTRIBUTING dot md, which is typical in open-source projects for *human* contributors to know the process for submitting code).

[Tinc]

I am watching the video now to give it a good shake, and I agree--I think he's hitting a lot of good points and has a lot of good thoughts and directions for the project.

This is really tough...

[Slumber]

Okay, never mind. I went to do some cursory investigation to see what their contribution guidelines are and this took me 2 seconds

AGENTS.md in the repo has guidelines for AI Agents working on their codebase (basically like a README. I was actually looking for a CONTRIBUTING dot md, which is typical in open-source projects for *human* contributors to know the process for submitting code).

Ugh, then that's enough for me. No matter how well meaning, making a platform off of AI is untrustworthy. Assuming the AI bubble doesn't pop and the tech is around forever, it will certainly not be as easily available forever. I am positive they will start raising the prices on their tech and making it harder and harder for people to access and use. The elites are never happy to share something that is actually valuable. Which means that one day the people making this platform with AI will no longer have access to the tools to continue building and maintaining it. And then no human person or team will be able to pick up the project. It's dead before it even gets to live.