Aether is a reddit alternative not dissimilar to Lemmy in that it is distributed and open source.
Some advantages to Aether over Lemmy are:
It is entirely decentralized rather than federated giving it superior censorship resistance and smooth horizontal scalability. Each user on the Aether network acts as a node operator allowing other users to connect and view the communities that they subscribe to.
Moderators within each community are elected by, are impeachable by, and their decisions can be individually ignored by the users of each community. All mod actions are public information and, as mentioned, each mod action or moderator can be ignored by each user. This maximizes the accountability of the network and greatly reduces the chances of censorship.
The biggest flaw with Aether is that it is not currently maintained (to my knowledge). With such a massive migration of users to Lemmy and the Fediverse as large, I would love to see an increased interest in decentralized solutions like Aether.
Would it be technically feasible for Aether to join the fediverse through modified Lemmy instances? If so it could act as a silver bullet to enable horizontal scalability of the network at large.
I welcome any discussion on the topic.
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Censorship is good in certain instances. Whether it be doxxing, revenge-porn, CP, having things ephemeral and unremovable by any means is bad.
Very fair point, and all perfect examples of the value of circumstantial censorship.
To Aether’s credit: something can’t be both ephemeral and unremovable; being ephemeral suggests that it will be removed automatically given enough time. To my understanding: the moderation policy on Aether prevents users from downloading content that moderators have hidden. It is only if a user goes out of their way to view hidden content that they risk exposure to it.
If federation from Aether to Lemmy were technically possible, surely it would be within the capabilities of Lemmy to only pull and display data that the moderators of an Aether instance deem appropriate. It would of course be up to any Lemmy server host whether they accept the federation, and if they feel the need to blacklist any Aether communities.
Ya, on Lemmy’s end there’d still be control over the removal of content.
Though I do wonder if it even makes sense for interop to come from Lemmy’s side? After all, Lemmy’s just one of many implementations of ActivityPub. Kbin, Mastodon, and other softwares can freely traverse Lemmy with varying levels of usability. Instead of implementing Aether interop from the Lemmy side and give Lemmy access to Aether content, it seems more sensible to make Aether interoperable with the ActivityPub protocol. Of course this isn’t exactly feasible without a maintained fork.
It does make more sense the other way around you are right, and the issue really is that it is unmaintained
Aether is based on Scuttlebutt I think? Maybe I should poke around upstream and see if any bridge exists already.
Isn’t aethers big thing that everything is ephemeral? If you look at reddits value from my perspective, it isn’t that.
It’s that there’s a huge amount of actual human experience and information available to me through google. Sure there’s a lot of astroturfing happening, but if I wanted a quick glimpse of what people thought about a product, my google search was “$product Reddit” to get a pulse. And then join those communities if I bought the product.
I don’t care about censorship resistance. Though I think the governance model improvements are a great thing that Lemmy could implement.
Comments and posts being ephemeral on Aether is essentially a moot point from a data preservation perspective, as it would be trivial for someone to backup the data.
The ephemeral nature of Aether is more valuable from a user convenience perspective as everything you subscribe to in Aether is stored on your device. Posts deleting themselves after a time means that your Aether data folder doesn’t grow too large.
To further my point: Lemmy server hosts would be a great group to backup Aether data for users that don’t want to have a large local data folder and for record keeping.
To me, Aether’s big thing is that it applies true decentralization and opt-in censorship resistant to reddit’s organic community growth and thread style.
The democratization of moderation on Aether is an extremely elegant solution that I don’t think translates well to Lemmy. Lemmy server hosts could ultimately overrule any moderator decision just as reddit did this past week. This is not possible in a top down way on Aether, but I still see Lemmy as a useful potential bridge.
I don’t know that much about aether, but I have a hard time imaging a voting system of governance that can’t be gamed.
True decentralization is nice but not a big deal for me. Given the open nature of Lemmy, the bar to moving instances is significantly lower than leaving Reddit. It would of course be very inconvenient, but so, it sounds, is aether.
Ultimately, to be accessible to average users, you need some amount of centralization it seems. Everything else is pretty science-projecty.
If you could migrate a community from one instance to another and have subscriptions update automatically, it makes the rogue instance admin a little less scary. But still a risk of course.
I gotta be honest, that sounds like crap. It’s a recipe for a race to the bottom
And, if it isn’t maintained, it might as well not exist. Trying to fuck around with it would just take the lemmy team’s time away from their progress as they move forward with their intended plans.
Fair point about it being a potential waste of resources as Aether is unmaintained.
What specifically sound like crap to you? Attempting to shoehorn Aether into Lemmy somehow? Just asking for clarity :)
Aether itself. Moderation by the masses is just going to end up a cesspool
It’s democratized representational moderation.
Only members of a community that have been there for a while can become moderators. Moderator elections are held from time to time, and only long standing members of each community may vote on their moderators. A moderator is not removed unless they are inactive for a long period, or the community disagrees with their decisions enough to impeach them.
Any user on Aether is free to blacklist any other user, preventing that users content from ever touching their computer. (This feature is present on Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse also)
