Recently, Altbot has been targeted by DDoS attacks. While the motive is unclear, it seems tied to a misguided belief that the bot’s alt-text generation is harmful to the environment. Let me set the record straight.

Altbot uses Gemini-1.5-flash, a specifically low-power AI model. Processing a single alt-text request consumes around 0.0005 kWh, meaning that in the 4 months since I created Altbot—and tens of thousands of alt-text entries generated—it has consumed roughly 10 kWh in total. That’s about the same energy as running a single LED light bulb nonstop for 41 days or driving an electric car just 40 miles.

These DDoS attacks, however, have already consumed more electricity and computing power than Altbot has across its entire existence... in a matter of hours. This means the attacks have caused more environmental harm than the very thing they seem to be protesting.

Altbot exists to improve accessibility on Mastodon, not to harm the environment. Accessibility and sustainability can coexist, and I’m committed to keeping Altbot energy-efficient and purposeful.

If there are concerns, I encourage constructive dialogue—not destructive actions that undermine both inclusivity and sustainability.

Thank you to everyone supporting Altbot’s mission of making the Fediverse more accessible for all.

TL;DR:
Altbot, an opt-in accessibility tool using a low-power AI model, has consumed only 10 kWh of energy in its 4 months of operation—equivalent to running an LED light for 41 days. Recent DDoS attacks against Altbot, ironically, caused far more environmental harm in just a few hours than the bot has in its entire existence. Let’s prioritize constructive dialogue over destructive actions to support both accessibility and sustainability.

@micr0 also as someone who sometimes has to use image recognition algorithms for this purpose I find altbot preferable to doing it personally - because if and when it is wrong (and it often is) it is not public information... Unlike altbot who shares it for all to see and a human tends to then provide more correct information...

@micr0 damn we really do have to tap the sign don’t we

@micr0 it also then makes it shared resources on top of being correctable...

@ari @micr0 fedi’s hate of anything that even mentions AI or LLMs anywhere or uses anything related to it is genuinely fucking delusional

@ari @micr0 like look at what happened to the VLC subtitle generation WHICH IS OPTIONAL and the Firefox AI whatever extension WHICH IS OPTIONAL

jesus fucking christ 99% of this platform needs to touch grass

@Makura @micr0 @ari Just the word "AI" throws all of fedi in a frenzy, even when it's not referring to Generative AI like LLMs.

@sirobsidian @Makura @micr0 @ari it's just pronouns for leftists, istg people see 2 letters and just completely stop thinking and go into an uncontrolled rage

@sirobsidian @micr0 @ari collective baseless hate

there’s maybe like a small rock that can be grabbed onto and that’s corporate misuse and overmarketing of generative AI

the rest is literally just rebranded functionality, or genuine uses of AI/neural networks/ML (accessibility like altbot here is doing, scientific discovery, face recognition for security systems, what VLC just did, translation, etc etc there are too many fields in which even LLMs are very useful)

@micr0 costs 0 watt hours to write the text yourself

@zebo @micr0 this is actually not true, people consume energy, I couldn’t tell you how much. But generally like .. we do ..

@Li @micr0 you are missing the point

@Li @zebo @micr0 shit, guess we should kill everybody /s

@zebo not true, writing the text yourself also uses a computer and energy in your body

@zebo @micr0 im not sure what the point is; then,

@Li @micr0 you are already posting the image, just write the text yourself it takes like 30 seconds

@zebo @Li yeah like its lit more effort to use the bot lmao

@zebo just did the math for fun actually

assuming the human brain uses about 0.3kWh a day, if you spend more than 2 minutes writing the alt text you’re going to use more watts than the robot does. that’s not including your computer at all

@tauon @zebo @micr0 it’s not just people .. every creature does, and also like it’s the way pretty much anything happens at all in the universe, .. also ik it’s a joke but if your answer to this is “people shouldn’t exist” .. i don’t know why you don’t know why you specifically are still here if you think that .. but also .. no ..

@Li @zebo sorry i couldn’t understand anything about what you meant

@tauon @zebo wait is /s in this case sarcasm not serious ..? I hate tone indicators ugh

@Li @zebo serious is /srs

@Makura @micr0 i could actually complain about the firefox AI stuff because they’re dumping money into the money hole while their browser is dying 😭

@zebo

literally disabilities (innate, acquired, situation, combo, or otherwise).

Boom. It's easier to assume there is always an exception than to forget to consider you can be mistaken or miss information only to be told later.

(Doesn't mean everything has to be perfect: just leave space for updates. People need prompts to remember they can be forgetful, mistaken, misinformed, etc. I am all the time. Everyone is.)

@micr0 @Li

@jstatepost

... has anyone yet made a ---

@sirobsidian @Makura @micr0 @ari

@MxVerda @jstatepost im genuinely confused on what their reply is supposed to mean 😭

@Makura

oh sorry. late here.

I meant to imply a Linux AI something. idk what it would do but some VC should pitch it eventually

@jstatepost

@tauon @Li @zebo the bot can automatically reply to an image you've posted that doesn't have alt text applied, so not necessarily

@zebo @micr0 not to like, be contradicting but it should be remembered this is an accessibility tool. i don't think this is meant for the people who'd have no difficulties typing further

@esm @Li @zebo but you have to enable that & then correct whatever it says so still

@esm @Li @zebo also it doesn’t actually add alt text to the image so it’s not that useful

@tauon @esm @zebo the idea isn't to replace humans writing alt text, but rather to have *something* to fall back on, in the case that someone leaves it out.

@Li @esm @zebo it just seems like too much effort

@zebo @micr0 @Li@tech.lgbt it's called not everyone can do English or descriptions

Also yes technically it uses electricity to do it yourself
It's called neurons

@ari @micr0 @Makura These are all harmful in that they normalize something harmful and regurgitate biases (some of them hateful and oppressive) from training data into output. But some of the reactions (like DDoS) are disproportionate and unjustifiably harmful too.

@ari @micr0 @Makura To give a concrete example, unless it was trained from data where all use of gendered words was intentionally stripped, image labeling models will necessarily misgender people in the images they describe based on biases regarding gender roles or gender presentation.

They'll also do the opposite, e.g. mislabeling a doctor as a nurse because of feminine appearance. This direction of error is likely to have racist aspects too.

All of this is a very legitimate reason to hate "AI" even in "benign" and local contexts.

Some instances have up to 50,000 character limits. Mastodon social has 500 character limit and that hasn't changed since it started. There is a Github issue where people are trying to convince Mastodon developer to make this far easier to change. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12265 @Mor696 @micr0

@Mor696@mastodon.social @micr0@fuzzies.wtf mastodon is open source software so people can host their own mastodons and make them have bigger character limits! neat, huh?
i dont use mastodon though i use sharkey

@Mor696 @micr0 it is the server they are on. Different servers give you different character limits. Kolektiva, the server I'm on, has a 10,000 character limit

@Mor696 different servers can have different character limits set. For example, the server I'm on has a 1000 character limit.

@Mor696 @micr0

It's a Mastodon fork, see the about page of his server. Being in the fediverse you meet all kind of things. Some servers also support markdown, which means some formatting, for example. The beautiful thing is that we can anyway communicate 😊

https://fuzzies.wtf/about

@Mor696 @micr0 instance owner can set character limit for the instance. So you at mastodon.social, me at f.cz and Micr0 at fuzzies.wtf can all have different character limit.

@Mor696 @micr0 In short (in advance sorry for kinda dumbing this down but I don’t rly know what you know): Mastodon/Fedi is made up of different servers that talk to eachother, those can use different softwares, and some of those allow custom character limits. You are on an instance that has specific char limit, while others can be on different instances with different limits.
Hope this explains it somewhat

@Mor696 hi! I run my own instance of mastodon that has the character limit practically removed, so that I (and other people on my instance) can post longer thoughts without the limitations. a lot of instances that are not mastodon. social have longer limits and differences like that

some other differences include:
emoji reactions
a more modern UI
more posting options
more customizability
etc.

the protocol that makes mastodon (and other fediverse platforms) doesn't really have limits for this, it's just a matter of what your software or instance, chooses to implement/limit.

I hope that answers your question!

@Mor696 @micr0 servers running different mastodon versions and different fediverse software have higher character limits, I think it’s like 40 thousand here or something? Mastodon’s default 500 is super low for fedi standards

@micr0 @Mor696 damn U explained it way better than I did
I need to up my game

@eri @zebo I like how that person just pulled out the 0 cost thing out of their ass to be sassy and contrarian and all it did was prompt the exact opposite information to come to light

I keep forgetting that it looks like arcane magic to baseline Mastodon users that people on other software can write thousands of characters per post lmao

@micr0 This person shouldn’t be attacking a well intentioned service that helps with accessibility, they’re obviously missing the point

Not going to question where you got a server that runs 24/7 and still draws less than an LED bulb though (maybe a pi zero?)

@Mudlark
@micr0 if it's hosted on something that would already be running anyways, then it would make sense to only measure the power of processing a request

@Mudlark @micr0 @LivInTheLookingGlass this,

most fedi people’s homelab or gaming pc do not even provide a service like altbot

@yassie_j Yes, it is quite tragic actually that the average user cannot conceive of software being made to our whims rather than an unalterable facet of reality

@zebo @micr0 it costs 0Wh to wash the dishes by hand or to sweep instead of vacuum

@chalkllate @eri literally not even the point i was trying to make

@chalkllate @eri @zebo i’m reporting you

@yassie_j oh lol, I never knew people where actually this dense

@desea your last name is pretty cool desea!!

@4censord I am imagining that Micro is the only person on the Mastodon Network allowed more than 500 char

@yassie_j thank you! have you put it into a translation device yet? it is the pride of my long family line and rich with history

@desea oh, what does it mean? Translate isn’t helpful

@zebo @micr0 costs multiple lost brain cells actually

@zebo @micr0 do you know how much electricity it takes to send 100 network requests every time you make a post? do you know how much electricity it takes to load an image from another machine, proxied through a datacenter, for each user who sees your post? do you know how much electricity it takes to verify the signatures on each of the 100s of requests you send out whenever you like a post? is 0.0005 kwh really some outlandish amount for someone hosting an activitypub instance on 6th gen intel? couldn’t you go back to posting about being attracted to drawings of children on your own timeline or something?

@yassie_j us simple folk cant bear the power of having thoughts of more than 500 chars

@Mor696 @micr0 I pay 30 euros a month extra

@zebo @micr0 @Li so are you

@Mor696 @micr0 Mastodon Plus

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri how come?

@eri @zebo also, the vast majority of foods take more energy to produce than they provide to the people eating them, so you can probably triple the expected power consumption

@zebo @eri @chalkllate does it matter?

@max @zebo @chalkllate @eri being an asshole

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri i feel like the first entity was the one being an asshole

@max @zebo @chalkllate @eri i don’t see how that is

@tauon @max
Dawg, are you kidding me rn? Replying "ermmm it takes 0 watts to do the alt-text yourself" to someone making a reasonable plea for people to stop DDOSing them is EXTREMELY rude. Especially given how it's 1) wrong and 2) erases how, yeah, having to write more text arduously describing every image in a post CAN be a mental burden and Altbot is just like, nice to have for those scenarios.

It adds nothing to the conversation other than allowing them to act holier-than-thou, and that's asshole behavior.

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri it seems to me like they're steamrolling over anyone who might find it impossible or prohibitively difficult to write alt text for disability reasons?

it's also a pretty low-effort, rude response to someone who put a ton of effort into making a bot with their own time and money solely because they thought the fediverse could benefit from it, even setting aside the fact that they now have to beg people not to DDoS it.

on top of that, like other people in this thread have mentioned, running a fediverse server on an old desktop with a ~30w average power consumption would consume this much energy in just under two weeks.

@AppleAmps @tauon this too

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri more generally, the structure of the platform we're having this conversation on is, at present, much more power-hungry per user than a centralized one. i think that we definitely shouldn't ignore the environmental impacts of the services that we're using, but, if you'd like to do that, we need to stop laser-focusing on someone's image captioning bot out of blind hatred of the AI boom-bubble and try to figure out how to reduce the inherent waste of a structure that requires all of our posts to be copied across hundreds or even thousands of servers, many of which pay no attention at all to their climate impact.

@tauon @esm @Li @zebo that's more a limitation of the platform than of the bot, but you can always edit the original post to add the generated alt text

@micr0 sorry you're having to deal with this. why can't they go attack something actually harmful, like the anti-trans tiplines, those period tracking apps that are submitting data to prosecute people who have abortions, the police, amazon, walmart, the heritage foundation, the RNC, the DNC, some bullshit church...the list of more appropriate targets goes on and on. no praxis. no theory. all reaction.

@micr0 the whole thing just has this "I would rip the wheelchair out from under someone because it has some adaptation that uses machine learning to make the world more accessible to them" vibe. That's deeply cringe and full of Purity Culture; which as we know (or maybe they don't know) is one of the basic foundations of white supremacy culture. just kind of sad.

@old_angry_queer @micr0
"no praxis. no theory. all reaction." is a great line

@max @zebo @chalkllate @eri also as someone who finds it incredibly difficult to write alt text you are being ableist by using it as an argument

@max @zebo @chalkllate @eri & also arguing in a twitter sort of way is really not helping your case. it just makes you seem like ai bros, which you are

@tauon @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri at this point ure just calling anyone who disagrees with you an ai bro lmao

@lu @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri

dislikes being called a twitter user
acts like a twitter user

mfw

@tauon @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri you’re just disregarding the point max is making when saying this and the then “ai bro” reply. If an efficient bot can help me write meaningful alt text, even if it’s AI, I’ll take it. I’m also perfectly happy to have other people give me tips or suggestions. But regardless, I struggle to properly describe things in a way that isn’t just “this is a photo of this thing and it says this”, and this bot would be quite helpful.

@nex @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri

If an efficient bot can help me write meaningful alt text
it isn’t meaningful unless all that matters about the image is a simple description of what is literally there (i.e. “a person standing in front of a mountain”, “a video game ui”, etc)
I struggle to properly describe things in a way that isn’t just “this is a photo of this thing and it says this”
this is literally enough

@tauon @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri “this is literally enough” I’ve been told before that my alt text is so poor that I might a well not have any, or that I’m excluding people by not providing a detailed enough description of the image. I guess you can’t please everyone?

If the sort of descriptions it’s spitting out are as simple as the ones listed then yeah fair enough it’s a bit redundant, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it giving out texts better than that before. I haven’t actually seen much of the bot in action though so unsure 🤷‍♀️

@nex @max @zebo @chalkllate @eri well those people are just assholes then idk what to say

@ari @micr0 @Makura they increased spending on Firefox btw

@micr0 Just looking at the impact of the bot itself might be a little shortsighted when talking the enviromental impact of an AI. There is the required training as well. But since you don't know how many clients there will be for any given its hard to split the energy used for training.

I am though pretty impressed how energy efficient the thing is. At that point I might use more energy when thinking and writing down an alt-text myself

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri i was just drawing from my own experience as someone with bipolar II. i have severe depressive episodes that make it a grueling task to eat or hold a conversation with someone, during which it is often more difficult than normal to write descriptions for images

@micr0 @novenary dishwashers and vacuum cleaners are not powered by machines that destroy creativity and human thought

@zebo @micr0 if that's what you disagree with then why didn't you say it in the first place?

@mia @zebo hey, what the actual fuck?

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri i think that that gives me a license to talk about this, but i'd love to hear why you don't think i have a valid disability.

@novenary @micr0 idk i thought the snark was funnier

@nex @tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri nexy you don't need to waste your time on this argument too 😭

@max @nex @zebo @chalkllate @eri bro no one posted anything for 3 hours we’re good

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @nex @eri i did but you sort of ignored it lol

@max @zebo @chalkllate @nex @eri i probably didn’t see it or forgot to answer

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @nex @eri https://wetdry.world/@max/113804989636748267

@tauon ?

@max @tauon @esm @zebo eh alt text written by a people can be much higher quality, i think this shouldn’t be the norm for it ..

@tauon am i blocked

@max no

@micr0 rip ur inbox

if you have push notifications it might be good to turn em off for a little bit and get yourself whatever your preferred beverage is, kick back and watch a show or a movie or something

@ivy real, I muted all notifications from mastodon like 5 minutes after I posted this lmao

@micr0

@lu @tauon @max @zebo @eri their first post in this chain was saying they were reporting me because I disagreed with someone while matching their tone, I don’t think you’re gonna get through to them in any meaningful way sorry

@chalkllate @lu @max @zebo @eri and now you’re misgendering me that’s awesome

@tauon @zebo @chalkllate @eri @lu it seems a little rude to go "i don't want to argue about this any more" and then continue making snarky responses in the same thread

@max @zebo @chalkllate @eri @lu i’m not arguing about it, i don’t like when people insult me

@micr0 team #bottie 👏

@micr0 ironically they're using more computing power in the form of the botnet than altbot uses to generate text

@eri @zebo setting aside accuracy, that's actually a really impressive power efficiency for computing

@esoteric_programmer I would argue yes. and I have almost 2 thousand active users to back that up, they wouldn't use it if it was bad.

give it a try yourself, you will probably be surprised with how good it is

@dalias @ari @micr0 @Makura also, quoting how much electricity is used in use is misleading.

How much water and power was used by the creation of Gemini? This needs accounting for too.

And while building dependency on billionaires' products, you need to consider the harm those are going to be doing thanks to projects normalising and (indirectly) funding them. eg google have recently abandoned CO2 reduction targets bc AI.