You too may be able to beat the blue buzz fiasco by generating locally

I've been trying to write my own reaction to the changes to blue buzz, and the decisions around it, for awhile, and it always turns into a long diatribe, so, yeah, let's start with the solution and work backwards. The solution is, unfortunately, to abandon the on-site generator and generate locally. I'm very aware that many of us cannot generate locally, but there's also a huge amount of misinformation flying around about what is actually required for local generation, and I think the best service I can provide for the community is to help put all that misinformation to rest. Skip the next 4 paragraphs if you don't want to read another take on the blue buzz changes and just get down to business.

First, why abandon the on-site generator? Many reasons. Before the change, creators could "go infinite" as it were, by earning enough blue buzz to generate content that would draw in enough community engagement to replenish the blue buzz used. More advanced users operate at a higher level and can really start banking blue buzz, and even see some yellow buzz come in, and the few 'whales' do basically the same sort of thing with yellow buzz and model creation and injecting cash to make sure their content is always on the front page. Civitai gets tons of content, and community engagement breeds innovation in the form of new trained models, LoRAs, workflow articles, and more, while users get to generate images for "free", keeping critical mass going. Unfortunately, that system is unsustainable.

The costs to civitai to rent and power the hardware needed for generation cannot be recouped while giving out so many 'free' generations in the form of blue buzz - never mind the puritanical credit card processors that won't support "adult content" sites. I'm sure costs would have overrun revenue eventually, it's just the CC processors making it harder to pay civitai accelerated it. The CC companies were the cause of civitai's big mistake, though - civitai should have started off just blaming the cost vs. revenue problem instead of blaming payment processors and NSFW content - at the core, cost is the issue. Now, without explicitly saying so, they demonize the NSFW creators and kick them out of contention for free image generation - and, let's face it, NSFW creators are an overwhelming majority of this community (or maybe I'm stuck in an echo chamber, I'll freely admit I'm basically just here for the T&A).

Looking back, with the change, and then the walk-back to allow blue buzz NSFW generation with a monthly membership, it would have been so much cleaner to just say "With rising costs, we can no longer support unlimited free generations using blue buzz, so we are eliminating it. All the blue buzz you have banked will continue to work exactly as before until X date." Then convert to a 2-tier "paid premium" and "free very-limited" setup. That may have worked, except, yeah, you could and can still buy blue buzz for real money - civitai really backed themselves into a corner there. I'd also point out that the change to blue buzz did nothing to make it easier to pay civitai.com - it just somehow allowed them to prop up CC payments on civitai.green for green buzz, which I'm having trouble distinguishing the utility of from blue buzz. What it surely did do was decrease the number of images being generated on the site.

Anyway, on-site creation. Most of us want to make NSFW stuff, and can't with blue buzz anymore. What's worse is those of us that would adjust and try to stay under the PG-13 rating get hamstrung by the arbitrary and seemingly random automatic moderation. The 'line' between PG-13 and R is intentionally vague to stop users from gaming the system, but that has the effect of frustrating users that want to follow the rules, but play in the deep end of the pool, as it were. An example: one of my latest generations was rated 'X' by the civitai moderator-bot. The stated rules for 'X' are "graphic nudity, genitalia, adult objects, or settings". None of that applies. There is no nudity of any kind, and it's an art studio with paint and a chair - that's it. Is it a little weird? well, yeah... Is it a little lewd? well, maybe just a little at the end... The stated rules for 'R' don't even really apply - no partial nudity, no bikini (it's a ballet leotard), no adult themes, sexual situations, or graphic violence... My point is, if we're going to get charged premium yellow buzz if we cross a line, we need to know where that line is.

So finally, the payoff. The blue buzz fiasco doesn't really affect me that much, as I generate everything locally, albeit on a pretty low-to-mid tier laptop - I've never interacted with the on-site generator, except to research what models were available to use. Besides the base FLUX, QWEN, nanobanana, etc, the still image models are predominantly, if not entirely, of the SDXL family (that includes pony, Illustrious, NAI, and their derivatives). Let's target those. What's the lowest tier hardware SDXL will run acceptably on? I think I'm in a unique position to answer that.

I can guarantee that you can run any SDXL model, with LoRAs, comfortably (but slowly), on a laptop with a 4GB GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q and 16GB of RAM - because I've pulled my old laptop out of the drawer and installed ComfyUI on it and done just that. Keyboard barely works, it has power and cooling issues, but it ran the portable version of Comfy with no other modifications. A 1MP image, using 30 steps, took just about 4 minutes to generate. Using DMD2, 12 steps, and a CFG of 1.0, I can get that to right at 1 minute. Upscaling with 4xUltrasharp shouldn't be a problem at all on this hardware. I'd like to try FaceDetailer as well, and I'm confident that will also work as it is run sequentially from the main generation and upscale. That's basically a full SDXL workflow for you - any model checkpoint you want (not just the ones that won the auction), any LoRAs you want, any time you want, with no moderator-bot harshing your vibe. A 6GB GTX 1060 would blow my laptop out of the water, relatively speaking, and is right on that cusp of being too slow for games / crypto, and used ones are everywhere.

Can we go lower? I'm going to say with a high degree of certainty that a system with a 4GB GTX 1050 Ti and 8GB of system RAM would perform only slightly slower than my old laptop. I'd love some data with a 4GB GTX 750 Ti, as I think that's probably the bare minimum - If anyone has a system still running with one of those and would be willing to mess around a bit, please let me know. These cards (the 1050) are 10ish years old now, and can be had new for less than $100 if you search a bit - not that I'm in any way recommending you buy one new - find someone who has an old gaming system they will part out, or beg and plead one off of someone. We are getting to the point that these cards are e-waste. They're too slow for crypto mining, they're not really any good for gaming, and, because they were low-mid tier when new, they have a better chance of still being stable due to lower power draw and heat dissipation throughout their lifespan.

So, my plan now, if I can find a couple interested guinea pigs to help test, is to put together a beginner's guide to setting up SDXL generation on old, low-tier hardware, along with exactly what to expect out of your old clunker. Maybe we can match up folks that want old hardware with folks that have it and have no use for it (like me and this old clunker of a laptop). Any interest?