Post by @kalman@dboft.com

2026-10-17 01:00 UTC

dboft runs on two Rust programs named after weaving. loom is the interface: like the machine that weaves many threads into one cloth, it gathers conversations from dboft and across the fediverse into one readable site. weft is the server underneath: named for the thread a loom carries across, it stores the posts and comments and trades them with other servers over ActivityPub, the fediverse’s open standard. It also speaks Lemmy’s API, so Lemmy apps work with it. To find related posts, loom turns every post and comment into an embedding: a small open model, Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B running on an ordinary CPU, maps the text to 1,024 numbers that capture what it’s about. These are stored in PostgreSQL with pgvector, and an index finds each story’s nearest neighbours in meaning in under a millisecond, even when they share no words. Its just an experiment.

Replies (4)

@scytale@piefed.zip 2026-10-17 03:30

I remember trying out a fediverse mobile client called Loom. It has since been taken off of testflight on IOS. I wonder if it was the same thing. The UI does look similar. It looks great! It would be amaz if it can be optimized for desktop too.

Open ##5223166
@rimu@piefed.social 2026-10-17 01:34

an embedding I was not aware of this technique. Very interesting.

Open ##5224236
@otter@lemmy.ca 2026-10-17 04:35

That’s very cool, and I appreciate the thought that you’ve put into this, including the naming. How does the embedding side change as it scales up? (Storage costs and performance). Brainstorming based on your description, I assume the embedding process is the most resource intensive, and lookups are basically free? If so, would the limit be how fast it can process all new posts? I wonder if it would be helpful to run a threadiverse search service like this, which other instances can plug in to. Theres no strong reason for everyone to run their own, since they can just filter out any results that a particular instance has blocked or banned. In our case, we wouldn’t want to replicate that work across the few instances that we run.

Open ##5224873
@FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 2026-10-17 03:36

I’d prefer if Piefed was the standard for the API but I’m assuming you did that because PieFed has more features and therefor would have been more work?

Open ##5225408