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@Snoopy@piefed.social
2026-10-02 07:35 UTC
epsilon.social a fork of mastodon that use AI for moderation process
I don’t know what to think about it.
First, they completly hide the fact that it is based on Mastodon in their main page. You have to check their source code where they explain technical detail about their fork.
Then, they openly admit that they use AI for moderation and probably Claude. I should warmly thank them for their transparency :
Human moderation
Moderation happens before publishing: every post is first checked by AI. Sensitive content, cases where the AI is unsure, and anything flagged go through human review.
If it is “human moderation” , then every post shouldn’t be checked by the AI, isn’t it ? We know and hear everytime that “we lack people”, “we just execute some script that make our life easier”. But, AI, no thank you.
We recently have a post from an user that used AI for reviving a dead project, Castodon, that he loved. He finally found some dev help. But, for me that’s another scale from analysing every post we made by an AI.
And i build a para-social relationship with you, good or bad. Sometime i post, sometime i intervene, sometime i protect myself, sometime i talk about myself. I’m an user that do moderation and animate communities in the fediverse. That maybe the huge difference between creating a community and using a tool for mass moderation process.
Another problem remain, and that’s the exact same reason we blocked Threads (Meta) : if we interact with epsilon.social users, our com will be probably analysed by the AI.
According to their privacy page, they claim that 3 principles governe their project :
They don’t sell nor rent any personal data
They don’t use tracking ads based on our profil behaviour
They don’t use your data to train AI
They will probably apply it for the time being. How long ? How many time have we seen term change on a service provider ?
The good side, for european citizen, is that they are on an european tech stack and GDPR compliant. That’s a good thinking for european sovereinety. But the question is : Can you trust it ? It is directly feed to AI anyway. We will never know where our data will go, except some promise.
The code source mention that they use mistral for moderation process.
Honnestly, i can’t trust them.
At this point, I would rather trust my own server, some friend or my local association that endorse free software for years. I think, as we did for Threads (meta, facebook…) the safest option is to defederate or block their domain epsilon.social
Replies (6)
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@Snoopy@piefed.social Booo!
Open ##4910364
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Interesting. I wonder what the motivation behind this project is. I suppose a small Mistral model could be run without much expense. But still, how is this development being funded?
Any public facing website will be scraped. That’s just the nature of the modern internet. I don’t think you need to worry about blocking their domain.
Overall i agree, too opaque for me to trust. Probably wouldn’t make an account there. But i don’t see an issue interacting with the users of that instance.
Open ##4910682
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Hmmh. The commits look like it’s vibe-coded. And I always like to question people’s sanity or knowledge of AI once they forego things like classifiers and decide to ask an LLM instead.
Open ##4910708
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@Snoopy@piefed.social Considering, that there are known cases of actually storing the users' data by models, I wonder how epsilon is going to ensure this:
They don’t sell nor rent any personal data
and this:
They don’t use your data to train AI
That smells like defederation to me.
#fediverse #fedimeta
Open ##4937844
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Moderation happens before publishing: every post is first checked by AI. Sensitive content, cases where the AI is unsure, and anything flagged go through human review.
Ben, in terms of that part, I suspect that pretty much already is or will be the model for most social media services, large and small.
Open ##4937891
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Is it actually federated?
If so, I’d say that’s a good thing, and that this problem will fix itself. I it becomes problematic, other instances will just defederate.
Open ##4937928