it seems like they’re trying to operate a torrent mirror of huggingface? but then, what’s with that “Claim your handle” message? kinda looks fishy overall…
Yeah needing an account is antithetical to open source and an affront to piracy and if it was a private tracker they shouldn’t and wouldn’t be advertising like this.
It seems that accounts aren’t required to download models or participate in the torrent swarm and have a somewhat reasonable justification of needing a way to maintain model provenance, which afaik pirate sites also require accounts for uploads for similar reasons:
Hugging Face verification confirms that someone claiming a creator’s handle controls the matching HF account or organization. It helps prevent impersonation and preserves attribution as models spread beyond their original host.
It’s also reasonable to have a centralized API since a lot of software in the ecosystem has using the huggingface API as a default way of doing things, so that makes sense for the goal of resilience to huggingface getting locked down somehow in the future.
The gamification-ish features do seem a little contradictory with the stated “decentralized infrastructure” objective though:
Pirate Face is preparing community benefits for account holders, including free compute credits and exclusive model releases.
Also loses points with me for (as far as I can see) not publishing a code repo, and the writing on the website having a very AI generated style which combined with the goals and features being a bit all over the place makes it tough to get a read on the project’s ethos and intentions.
it seems like they’re trying to operate a torrent mirror of huggingface? but then, what’s with that “Claim your handle” message? kinda looks fishy overall…
Plus the verification. If it’s FNS-based verification, then I’m all for it.
Yeah needing an account is antithetical to open source and an affront to piracy and if it was a private tracker they shouldn’t and wouldn’t be advertising like this.
It seems that accounts aren’t required to download models or participate in the torrent swarm and have a somewhat reasonable justification of needing a way to maintain model provenance, which afaik pirate sites also require accounts for uploads for similar reasons:
It’s also reasonable to have a centralized API since a lot of software in the ecosystem has using the huggingface API as a default way of doing things, so that makes sense for the goal of resilience to huggingface getting locked down somehow in the future.
The gamification-ish features do seem a little contradictory with the stated “decentralized infrastructure” objective though:
Also loses points with me for (as far as I can see) not publishing a code repo, and the writing on the website having a very AI generated style which combined with the goals and features being a bit all over the place makes it tough to get a read on the project’s ethos and intentions.