I learned about this substack newsletter from someone at the NTEN 2026 nonprofit technology conference. It comes out each Friday and helps nonprofits (and people helping them!) keep abreast of the latest developments in AI, with thought provoking and important insights.
Deb Stuligross, the person behind strefatch.org, gave a talk at the NTEN conference about AI and its impact on our planet. The tl;dr is that we all should “use the simplest AI model that gets the job done” and we should “Generate images and video with intention, not habit.” All the rejected images and videos that lead to the perfect creation still end up having an environmental burden.
She asked everyone in the room to sign up to commit to creating an acceptable use policy for our organizations that includes the above directives.
She also has an accompanying post on her substack:
Deb’s approach to this presentation and her substack is also an example of digital sovereignty. She’s able to work with others while retaining her content on her substack and inviting people there to join in discussion with her. And it’s working - read the comments!
(It’s still on substack though and not self-hosted, but as we’ve been learning digital sovereignty is a journey.. I’m planning to set up a self-hosted ghost site to accompany this discourse site. Ghost is marketed as a substack alternative.)
Deb also reached out by email to remind me about the AUP pledge, so I will respond to let her know what we are doing here.
One valuable use case for AI is finding quick answers to questions, and that is primarily how I use it these days. I did also use it to create a placeholder website and to update my LinkedIn. I have not started using the image and video creation AI tools, or AI reasoning tools.
When setting up self-hosted systems, you end up repeating the same tasks all the time. So rather than resorting to AI chatbots out on the internet I prefer to use Discourse AI which lets me keep the output of my chatbot conversations right here on my own self-hosted site where I can refer to them. When dealing with oft-repeated tasks or procedures that are also of interest to others, I post recipes in public topics.
At the time of this writing I am only using the Claude Sonnet 4.6 LLM for all Discourse AI bots and for automatic translation, which I am paying for. I can also change that later when better, more environmentally friendly and ethical options come online.
If you’d like to take Discourse AI for a spin here, let me know.