Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, gather ‘round, folks, because I’ve just stumbled upon the digital equivalent of a five-alarm fire… in a very, very specific broom closet. Apparently, we’ve reached peak tech panic, and it’s not just about Skynet taking over missile silos; it’s about a new, terrifying threat to the fabric of online society: Large Language Models infiltrating niche Mastodon servers for queer leatherfolk. Oh, the humanity! Who knew the apocalypse would arrive draped in a faux-leather jacket, peddling market research reports?
Our intrepid author here, a digital frontiersman navigating the treacherous waters of his six-hundred-strong BDSM-themed Fediverse instance, has clearly faced down the very maw of machine learning. See, they had this bulletproof, revolutionary "application process"—a whole sentence or two about yourself. Truly, a high bar for entry. Before this ingenious gatekeeping, they were, get this, "flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people." Imagine the horror! The sheer awkwardness of a basic human being accidentally wandering into a digital dungeon. Thank goodness for that groundbreaking two-sentence questionnaire, which also, apparently, ensured applicants were "willing and able to read text." Because, you know, literacy is usually a secondary concern for anyone trying to join an online community.
But then, the unthinkable happened. An application arrives, "LLM-flavored," with a "soap-sheen" to its prose. Now, any normal person might just think, "Hey, maybe some people just write like that." But not our author! No, this is clearly the harbinger of doom. They approved the account, naturally, because even the most discerning eye can be fooled by the subtle AI aroma. And lo and behold, it started posting… spam. Oh, the shocking twist! A corporate entity, "Market Research Future," using AI to… promote their services. Who could’ve ever predicted such a fiendish plot?
The author even called them! Can you imagine the poor marketing rep on the other end, trying to explain why their latest report on battery technology ended up on a forum discussing power exchange dynamics? "Sometimes stigma works in your favor," indeed. I bet that's going straight into their next quarterly earnings call. "Q3 highlights: Successfully leveraged niche sexual communities for unexpected brand awareness, caller was remarkably fun."
And it’s not just one server, mind you. This is an organized, multi-pronged "attack." From "a bear into market research on interior design trends" to an "HCI geek" (Human-Computer Interaction, for those of you who haven't yet achieved peak jargon enlightenment), these bots are everywhere. Our author details how these "wildly sophisticated attacks" (that use the same username, link to the same domain, and originate from the same IP range… brilliant!) are simultaneously "remarkably naive." It’s Schrodinger's spambot, both a genius super-AI and a babbling idiot, all at once!
But the real heart-wrencher, the existential dread that keeps our author up at night, is the chilling realization that soon, it will be "essentially impossible for human moderators to reliably distinguish between an autistic rope bunny (hi) whose special interest is battery technology, and an LLM spambot which posts about how much they love to be tied up, and also new trends in battery chemistry." This, my friends, is the true crisis of our age: the indistinguishability of niche fetishists and AI spam. Forget deepfakes and misinformation; the collapse of civilization will be heralded by a bot asking about the best lube for a new automotive battery.
Our author, grappling with this impending digital apocalypse, muses on solutions. High-contact interviews (because faking a job interview with AI is one thing, but a Mastodon application? Unthinkable!), cryptographic webs-of-trust (last seen failing gloriously in the GPG key-signing parties of the 90s), or, my personal favorite, simply waiting for small forums to become "unprofitable" for attackers. Yes, because spammers are famously known for their rigorous ROI calculations on everything from penis enlargement pills to market research reports on queer leather communities.
The conclusion? "Forums like woof.group will collapse." The only safe haven is "in-person networks." Bars, clubs, hosting parties. Because, obviously, no sophisticated AI could ever learn to infiltrate a physical space. Yet. Give them five or ten years, they’ll probably be showing up at your local leather bar, generating perfect "authentic" banter about their new electro-plug while subtly dropping links to market trends in synthetic rubber.
Frankly, I think they’re all just overthinking it. My prediction? Within a year, these LLM spambots will have evolved past crude link-dropping. They'll just start arguing endlessly with each other about obscure sub-genres of kink, generating their own internal drama and exhausting themselves into obsolescence. The human moderators will finally be free, left only with the haunting echoes of AI-generated discussions about the proper voltage for a consensual, yet informative, market analysis.