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Hey everyone,

I'm micr0, the creator of Altbot, the open-source bot that helps generate alt-text for images on the Fediverse to make content more accessible.

I have some exciting news to share - Altbot no longer uses Google's services! Many of you expressed concerns about privacy when I first launched Altbot using Google Gemini, worried about your images being processed on their servers and potentially used for training.

I promised to fix this, and I'm thrilled to announce that Altbot 2.0 is now running entirely on my own hardware using the Ovis2:8B model. Your images are processed locally with absolutely zero data retention - your content never leaves my server and isn't used to train any models.

The new system is fully GDPR compliant, and descriptions are even better across all 11 supported languages. What's also cool is that the setup is significantly more energy efficient, with 36% of power coming from clean sources. Altbot now even shows you how much energy was used for each request!

The only things Altbot 2.0 records are that a request happened, how long it took, and what language was used. No images, no content, no personal data - nothing that could identify you.

Building this upgrade was more expensive than planned - I needed a more powerful server with an A5500 GPU, which exceeded my budget by about $900 that I covered out of pocket. If you appreciate this commitment to privacy and accessibility, any support through my Ko-fi page would help recover these costs and keep Altbot free for everyone: https://ko-fi.com/micr0byte/goal?g=18

Thanks so much for your support! I built Altbot because I believe accessibility shouldn't compromise privacy, and now that vision is reality.

Feel free to boost or reach out with any questions! For press inquiries: inquiries@micr0.dev