To be clear, I agree that the line you quoted is almost assuredly incorrect. If they changed it to "thousands of deepfake apps powered by open source technology" then I'd still be dubious, simply because it seems weird that there would be thousands of unique apps that all do the same thing, but that would at least be plausible. Most likely they misread something like https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-downloadable-deepfake-image-generators.html and thought "model variant" (which in this context, explicitly generally means LoRA) and just jumped too hard on the "everything is an open source app" bandwagon.

I did some research - browsing https://github.com/topics/deepfakes (which has 153 total repos listed, many of which are focused on deepfake detection), searching DDG, clicking through to related apps from Github repos, etc..

In terms of actual open source deepfake apps, let's assume that "app" means, at minimum, a piece of software you can run locally, assuming you have access to arbitrary consumer-targeted hardware - generally at least an Nvidia desktop GPU - and including it regardless of whether you have to write custom code to use it (so long as the code is included), use the CLI, hit an API, use a GUI app, a web browser, or a phone app. Considering only apps that have as a primary use case, the capability to create deepfakes by face swapping videos, there are nonetheless several:

• Roop
• Roop Unleashed
• Rope
• Rope Live
• VisoMaster
• DeepFaceLab
• DeepFaceLive
• Reactor UI
• inswapper
• REFace
• Refacer
• Faceswap
• deepfakes_faceswap
• SimSwap

If you included forks of all those repos, then you'd definitely get into the thousands.

If you count video generation applications that can imitate people using, at minimum, Img2Img and 1 Lora OR 2 Loras, then these would be included as well:

• Wan2GP
• HunyuanVideoGP
• FramePack Studio
• FramePack eichi

And if you count the tools that integrate those, then these probably all count:

• ComfyUI
• Invoke AI
• SwarmUI
• SDNext
• Automatic1111 SD WebUI
• Fooocus
• SD WebUI Forge
• MetaStable
• EasyDiffusion
• StabilityMatrix
• MochiDiffusion

If the potential criminals use easier ready-made (commercial) web-services instead of buying a RTX 5090, learning ComfyUI, dealing with the steep learning curve etc, we’d know we have to primarily fight those apps and services, not necessarily the generative AI tools.

This is the part where, to be able to answer that, someone would need to go and actually test out the deepfake apps and compare their outputs. I know that they get used for deepfakes because I've seen the outputs, but as far as I know, every single major platform - e.g., Kling, Veo, Runway, Sora - has safeguards in place to prevent nudity and sexual content. I'd be very surprised if they were being used en masse for this.

In terms of the SaaS apps used by people seeking to create nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes... my guess is those are actually not really part of the figure that's being referenced in this article. It really seems like they're talking about doing video gen with LoRAs rather than doing face swaps.

Without searching for them myself to confirm, it’s plausible, especially if you take it to mean “apps leveraging open source AI technology.”

There are a ton of open source AI repos, many of which provide video related capabilities. The number of true open source AI models is very slim, but “Open weight” AI models are commonly referred to as open source, and from the perspective of building your app, fine tuning the model, or creating Loras for it, open weight is good enough.

Some Loras come with details on the training data set, so even if the base model is only open weights, the Lora can still be open source.

Until recently, Civitai had Loras for famous people, e.g., Emma Watson, and apparently just regular people. There was a post here last week, I think (or maybe to some other community), to 404 Media, about those being taken down thanks to credit card processors drawing a line in the sand at deepfake imagery.

ComfyUI is a self hostable AI platform (and there are also many hosts that offer it) that lets you build a workflow from multiple nodes, each of which generally integrates some open source AI tech that was otherwise released. For example, there are nodes that add the capabilities to perform:

• image generation with Stable Diffusion, Flux, Hidream, etc
• TTS with KokoroTTS, Piper, F5 TTS, etc
• video generation with AnimateDiff, Cog, Wan2.1, Hunyuan, FramePack, FantasyTalking, Float
• video modification, i.e., LatentSync, which takes a video and lipsyncs it to a provided audio file
• image manipulation, i.e., controlnet, img2img, inpainting, outpainting, or even specific tasks like “remove the background” or “change the face to this other face”

If you think of a deepfake as just a video of a recognizable person doing a thing, you can create a deepfake by:

• taking an existing video and swapping the face in each frame
• faceswap video specific approaches, i.e., Roop.
• an image to video workflow, i.e., with Wan: “the person dances.” You can expand the options available with Wan by using Loras.
• a text to video workflow, where you use a Lora for that person
• an image+audio to video workflow, i.e., with FantasyTalking/Float, creating a lipsync to an audio file you provide
• a video+audio to video workflow with LatentSync to make it look like they said something different, particularly using a TTS (like F5 TTS) that does voice cloning to generate the new audio

My suspicion is that most of the AI apps that are available online are just repackaging these open source technologies, but are not open source themselves. There are certainly some, of course, though the ones I know of are more generic and not deepfake specific (ComfyUI, SwarmUI, Invoke AI, Automatic1111, Forge, Fooocus, n8n, FramePack Studio, FramePack Eichi, Wan2GP, etc.).

This isn’t a licensing issue, as many open source projects are licensed with MIT or Apache licenses, which don’t require you to open source derivative products. Even if they used the GPL, it wouldn’t be required for a SaaS web app. Only the AGPL would protect against that, and even then, only the changes to the AGPL library would need to be shared; the front end app could still be proprietary.

The other issue could be them not knowing what “app” means. If you think of a Lora as an app, then the sentence might be accurate. I don’t know for sure that there were thousands of Loras for people that published their training data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.

Have you tried just setting the resolution to 1920x1080 or are you literally trying to run AAA games at 4K on a card that was targeting 1080p when it was released, 4 and a half years ago?

I think the best way to handle this would be to just encode everything and upload all files. If I wanted some amount of history, I'd use some file system with automatic snapshots, like ZFS.

If I wanted to do what you've outlined, I would probably use rclone with filtering for the extension types or something along those lines.

If I wanted to do this with Git specifically, though, this is what I would try first:

First, add lossless extensions (*.flac, *.wav) to my repo's .gitignore

Second, schedule a job on my local machine that:

1. Watches for changes to the local file system (e.g., with inotifywait or fswatch)
2. For any new lossless files, if there isn't already an accompanying lossy files (i.e., identified by being collocated, having the exact same filename, sans extension, with an accepted extension, e.g., .mp3, .ogg - possibly also with a confirmation that the codec is up to my standards with a call to ffprobe, avprobe, mediainfo, exiftool, or something similar), it encodes the file to your preferred lossy format.
3. Use git status --porcelain to if there have been any changes.
4. If so, run git add --all && git commit --message "Automatic commit" && git push
5. Optionally, automatically craft a better commit message by checking which files have been changed, generating text like Added album: "Satin Panthers - EP" by Hudson Mohawke or Removed album: "Brat" by Charli XCX; Added album "Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not" by Charli XCX

Third, schedule a job on my ~~remote machine~~ server that runs git pull at regular intervals.

One issue with this approach is that if you delete a file (as opposed to moving it), the space is not recovered on your local or your server. If space on your server is a concern, you could work around that by running something like the answer here (adjusting the depth to an appropriate amount for your use case):

git fetch --depth=1
git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now --all
git gc --aggressive --prune=all

Another potential issue is that what I described above involves having an intermediary git to push to and pull from, e.g., running on a hosted Git forge, like GitHub, Codeberg, etc.. This could result in getting copyright complaints or something along those lines, though.

Alternatively, you could use your server as the git server (or check out forgejo if you want a Git forge as well), but then you can't use the above trick to prune file history and save space from deleted files (on the server, at least - you could on your local, I think). If you then check out your working copy in a way such that Git can use hard links, you should at least be able to avoid needing to store two copies on your server.

~~The other thing to check out, if you take this approach, is git lfs.~~ EDIT: Actually, I take that back - you probably don't want to use Git LFS.

My immediate reaction: It still looks like this, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t, but I feel like I saw this like a couple weeks ago. Does it still look like this on the website on mobile or something?

Depends on your perspective. Would it be fine for Meta Threads to replace it? Threads supports ActivityPub, so in some ways it likely interacts better with the fediverse.

If we agree that Threads isn’t a suitable replacement, then clearly there’s some criteria a replacement should meet. A lot of the things that make Threads unpalatable are also true of Bluesky, particularly if your concern relates to the platform being under the control of a corporation.

On the other hand, from the perspective of “Twitter 2.0 is now a toxic, alt-right cesspool where productive conversations can’t be had,” then both Threads and Bluesky are huge improvements.

Do you honestly think that’s because all the older toys got banned and not largely because toy companies sell whatever makes them the most money?

They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:

For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling "ublock vs origin". Take a look at this link:

http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/

"Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:

• In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
• Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
• The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."

So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!

Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/

TL;DR:

• gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of "my facebook isnt working plz help" issues.
• he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic's version back to himself).
• chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a "made with love by Chris" note.
• gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn't confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic's version).
• Google took down gorhill's extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
• gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

For anyone who didn’t click into the original post and whose client didn’t include its text, here are the instructions for opting out:

Opt-out. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.

Note that the forced arbitration clause applies only to Discord users in the US. The class action waiver appears to apply regardless.

This is also not a new addition to their TOS, but it does appear to require opting out again even if you already did, and to grant an additional opt out opportunity if you didn’t.

Have you considered not using the Home Assistant OS? You don’t need to run it to use Home Assistant. You can instead set your host up with some other OS, like Debian, and then run Home Assistant in a docker container (or containers, plural) and run any other containers you want.

I’m not doing this myself so can’t speak to its limitations, but from what I’ve heard, if you’re familiar with Docker then it’s pretty straightforward.

A lot of apps use hard coded paths, so using a subdomain per app makes it much easier to use them all. Traefik has middleware, including stripPrefix, which allow you to strip a path prefix before forwarding the path to the app, though - have you tried that approach?

Do you not think it’s relevant to point out that:

• Only 3.7% of the protests involved vandalism or property damage
• Only 2.3% of the protests involved any sort of violence (excluding vandalism or property damage)
• Much of the violence was directed against the BLM protesters
• Much of the violence was begun or escalated by police (who are supposed to be trained to de-escalate)
• Much of the property damage and property damage was not linked to protesters

If 5% of the people involved at violent BLM protests were violent and if the numbers above reflected only protester initiated violence, then that would mean roughly 0.12% of BLM protesters (or 1 in a thousand) were violent. But since, as we know, most of the violence was directed against them, that number is probably more like 0.05%, or 5 in 10,000. Obviously that number would be much worse for the actual instigators of most of the violence (police and far-right Trump supporters).

Main source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds/

Also weird that you say “like 30 people” died when it was more like 10:

• 8 BLM protesters
• 1 far-right, pro-Trump protester, who was shot by a self-identified anti-fascist protester who said he had been acting in self-defense
• the above anti-fascist protester, who was shot by police

Yes, there were like 25 deaths related to political unrest in 2020, but most of those were not at BLM protests. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled

But hey, keep telling yourself that an active, intentionally orchestrated attempt by Trump and his supporters to violently overturn the results of our Presidential election was “basically the same thing lol” as a bunch of people who were protesting police violence and racism.

the next-generation Switch might still be able to hold its own in terms of graphics performance with Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S in some optimized titles.

I’ll believe that when I see it.