Introducing Quark's Bar

Introducing a new social corner of the galaxy: Quark's Bar! You can find it at quarksbar.social in the form of a Mastodon server. If you're a fan of any era of Star Trek and you'd like to have some conversation and fun, you're invited to create an account and join us!

As most do, I have a love-hate relationship with social media. That said, I'm a big fan of open source software and public protocols as a means to free expression. So when the bird site died, I was elated to come across Mastodon.

Mastodon is a bird-site-like system based on the ActivityPub protocol. It's an open protocol that Mastodon uses and participates in. There are many other platforms that use ActivityPub, but Mastodon seems like one of the biggest players. Unlike the bird-site, it's federated — meaning there are independent servers that interconnect using the ActivityPub protocol. This leads to a local community on a given server that can interact with users from other Mastodon servers.

I joined a couple of different Mastodon servers related to tech, Star Trek, books, Star Trek books, or writing. Eventually I found the community at Ten Forward. While I still enjoy that server and the community of folks there, ultimately the experience there inspired me. It felt like the world needed a complimentary space for Niners, fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

As a tech enthusiast and tinkerer, I knew how set up a Mastodon server, so I did just that. It took less than an hour to bring quarksbar.social online for the first time. But beyond just creating a new server, slapping a domain, and branding on it, I wanted this social space to recreate some some element of the atmosphere of Deep Space Nine. What if you could interact with the characters from Deep Space Nine, and specifically, from Quark's Bar?

I began a small project to write a bot that could post to the Mastodon API, and connected it to a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate text. Machine learning has been enjoying a sort of renaissance period. Of course I've played with it, and already had plenty of experiences making productive use of it. Crafting a model to respond a specific way was new territory—one I was eager to explore. It only took a day to collate a couple of character datasets to feed into the model.

Quark's Bar has a couple of characters you might recognize: Quark and his talkative bar-fly companion, Morn. They each interact and respond in very Quark- and Morn-like ways. They each randomly post 2-3 times a day with some internal prompts for the models to generate realistic responses that get posted to Mastodon. You can follow them to get their antics in your feed and even message them to have a conversation!

These are relatively wide-open models backed by HuggingChat, so you can easily break the forth wall if you're determined to, but for those interested in immersing themselves, they can be a fun diversion. I've thought of adding other characters too. Garak, a particular favorite of mine, could be deliciously fun to have around. But maybe Rom (pre-Grand Nagus), or Nog in a hat tip to the late Aaron Eisenberg. If you have any other ideas of characters to include, I'd love to hear them!

I'll note there seems to also be a fair amount of controversy as it relates to using LLMs. I have a lot to say about that, but I'll save that for another entry later.

In the meantime, follow along on the server and have fun! See you at the bar!