Adventures in Imagineering — Communities and Conduct

I have been developing software for over thirty years and for around 20+ of those years I have been involved in open source and free software. In fact, for most of my software development career, I’ve released software for free because I believe that if it is something I like and find useful, then it might help others too. In fact, I think the only exception has been my mobile software for iOS, but that’s a different story.

Why do I say this about releasing software for free? Because of something that happened in the Stable Diffusion “community” today. Somebody hacked NovelAI, a company involved in the Stable Diffusion efforts, and released their proprietary (non-open source) models and source code to the public.

But that’s not what this post is about — it’s about what happened after, and the “community” response to the events.

Apparently, a developer who develops for Stable Diffusion (not somebody employed by Stability AI, the company, but who is an independent developer) added support for the leaked models in his web UI. Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, asked the developer to remove his code changes. The developer refused. Stability AI banned this particular developer from their Discord server. Then the Stable Diffusion “community” on social media (I’m talking about a particular community here since that’s the one I know of) exploded with comments and opinions.