
Aether for Redditors - dfischer
https://blog.getaether.net/post/182801048137/aether-for-redditors
======
Aearnus
These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically
interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful
or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of
Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and
the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows
"mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services
abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.

~~~
rolleiflex
Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this
suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list
as mentioned in the article, for example.

The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy _to the masses_.
It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow
appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least _try_ to do that.)

~~~
Aeolun
Since you are here. After reading the post I was left with one very big
question.

If the network is p2p, and nobody but me can delete my posts, how would you be
able to deal with illegal content?

I’ll have a look, and I second the need for a mobile app. Reddit happens
during train rides :)

~~~
tux1968
The police should deal with illegal content. Anything else that offends
someone should be easy to ignore with personal filters.

~~~
tobylane
How do you deal with trolls going around filters? I'm sure most of us did that
in the past, some of us were young teenagers in the time of auto moderated
live chat.

~~~
tux1968
Better filters. For instance crowd sourced filters that you can subscribe to
and help update. Just like ad blocking technology does today to combat
advertisers attempt to evade them.

~~~
tobylane
That requires centralisation because either trolls will affect the filter or
the list won't be updated.

~~~
tux1968
Each filter comes from its own central location curated as seen fit by its
owner, but there can be any number of filters distributed across the net. Each
will win subscribers based on their reputation.

Again, this has all been tested in the wild. It works just fine for ad
filtering today.

~~~
tobylane
Not really. Adblock made deals with advertisers so people have to use Adblock
Pro, and avoid Adblock awesome because it has adware. Same for uBlock.

edit: To make my point clear: it seems unfeasible to weed out bad actors
without relying on good actors. Someone you place trust in (adblock list
maintainers, p2p network filter maintainers) can make deals with who you try
to avoid ('non-intrusive ads', mates). It's little better than letting the
centralised host moderate, especially when the biggest moderators like Adblock
are the ones we tell people to avoid. Otherwise it's just like PGP, perfectly
designed to be never used.

~~~
tux1968
That's irrelevant to the point, or actually makes it stronger. uBlock Origin
continues on in spite of those compromised competitors and all of the
subscriptions can continue to be utilized. I really don't understand what
you're arguing against. The software can be replaced, a bad acting filter list
can be ignored, and many good lists can be aggregated to counteract ad
agencies attempts to bypass filters. And with the right software you can
create your own local filters with a single click on the offending material.

We don't need a parental authority to protect us from seeing naughty images,
we can take care of ourselves.

------
deanclatworthy
Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6
months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities?

Another thing that stood out to me is when I went to download, I noticed
immediately I'm dealing with a DMG. So I tried to find a link to github where
I could take a look at the source, and found the "Open source" link in the
footer. This just listed a bunch of libraries, but not the place to build
myself if I wanted to. Maybe include a link to github [1].

Finally, when I _did_ reach your github, there is a big notice:

> [https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether)

What kind of metrics? And why isn't this in big text on your homepage? Can I
disable it? Why do you need to keep metrics? 99 times out of 100 people will
not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. I think this is a pretty a bad
decision.

[https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether)

~~~
hyeonwho4
How much text content does an active user produce over 6 months? Most uers
lurk, so the average user is probably producing a few hundred kilobytes of
text. That adds up (and compresses) to only a few gigabytes.

------
imh
>Anything you post on Aether will be gone in about 6 months. This is nice,
because no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit history and figure out
where you sleep.

This seems really misleading. If I can view it, I can save it. Enough people
take data dumps from reddit that even if reddit decided to follow the same
policy, it wouldn't mean "no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit
history and figure out where you sleep."

~~~
stordoff
This immediately makes less interested in the platform. Reddit posts older
than six months can be useful.

~~~
deeplearninganf
Different use case. Reddit is an ephemeral tool, its ancient gems are hidden
and difficult to access, imho a real solution to useful information problem is
something like wiki or a ML-based super-aggregate.

~~~
stordoff
I don't really agree. Specifically for video games, I've found _a lot_ of
useful information just by Googling something and the answer being on Reddit.
A lot of 'casual' (as in people have just discussed it and not deliberately
sought to put it out there) information would be lost if Reddit was wiped
after six months.

Yes, other tools might be better for information sharing, but Reddit as a
conversation space and Google as a search tool over the top of it is valuable.

------
rolleiflex
Prior discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208)

Happy to answer any questions, as usual.

Source code is here:
[https://github.com/nehbit/aether](https://github.com/nehbit/aether) (I’ll
update it with the latest release as soon as I can clean it up)

~~~
wierdaaron
How big is the local cache of the network on each client device?

~~~
rolleiflex
About 9mb as of now. Of course, the compiled graph is larger. If you want full
text search, that has its own index that takes space as well. But that last
one is optional.

------
LeoPanthera
I half-completed a very similar project to this. Kudos on shipping.

The main difference between this and mine is that mine required accounts to
have a certain amount of hashcash-style proof of work before they were
accepted. This prevents people from creating a large number of dummy accounts,
which means that banning someone actually has teeth, since they can't come
back with a fresh account instantly.

Additionally, the posts were encrypted with the name of the community, so that
you could make "private" communities simply by using hard-to-guess names.

I toyed with the idea of making hashcash style PoW required for posts, as well
as accounts, but I gave up on the project before I got that far.

~~~
rolleiflex
That’s how Aether works. Every graph object requires a certain amount of PoW
in the form of a Hashcash variant. You were on the right track! (Assuming this
_is_ the right track, ha)

~~~
LeoPanthera
Oh well at least my idea was good I suppose. (!)

~~~
avian
I get it why it's useful in practice here, but on a conceptual level relying
on proof-of-work always seems weird to me. It's like saying "you have to pay
to use this service, but instead of giving the money to the host, you need to
drop it down the drain". From an economic standpoint it just doesn't make any
sense.

------
nerdbaggy
I wonder why the peer to peer. Aether can still remove content, so it’s not
really decentralized. And you have to store the entire site on your computer,
I wonder what the legal ramifications are if there is bad stuff saved on your
computer but you didn’t put it there.

------
gnicholas
> _Due to the recent news about Reddit_

Which news specifically? Also, it might be useful for the blog posts to have a
date at the top. I saw there was a “1 day ago” notation at the bottom, but
having it at the top would be more convenient/conventional.

~~~
edoceo
Tencent investment?

~~~
_asummers
It's not unreasonable to assume people missed that news. It was front page
here for a day and on reddit for about the same duration. If someone didn't
login for a few days, it was very easily missed.

------
joecool1029
So it's basically an updated Usenet.

I started to use Usenet years back to download shows. Around 10 years ago it
was unusable due to spam, now there's actually a few active newsgroups and
some people came back to post so they could remain pseudoanonymous and not
deal with upvote economy. For whatever reason, spam seems to have mostly gone
away. The infrastructure is still quite robust and unlike Aether, posts stay
up for many years.

Honestly, the only super annoying thing on Usenet today are noobs coming in
from Google Groups and responding to threads started in the 90's.

------
tinalumfoil
Decentralized reddit already existed in the form if usenet. This adds some
moderation features which is nice, but I have trouble believing people care
about decentralization enough to switch.

What would really help is if there was a website I could explore the content
on before hosting anything myself. Imagine there's many instances each with
many users that all sync between each other, and of I lose trust of one I can
seamlessly switch to another.

But of course this has been done before and died, so the point still remains
of why people should switch.

~~~
rolleiflex
Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet.

(It’s more decentralised than Usenet - everyone is an ‘Usenet server’ in
Aether, vs large university servers in the original Usenet)

~~~
anonytrary
How is it decentralized if illegal content can be taken down? It should be
impossible for a single entity to do that in a truly decentralized system. It
appears this has a backdoor.

~~~
int_19h
"Taken down" just means that clients get notification that such and such
comment is bad. The stock client will remove them and reject them in the
future, but there's no enforcement - you can have a client that e.g.
completely ignores any such requests. If I understand it correctly, multiple
such clients would end up maintaining all those deleted posts in distributed
P2P storage, in their part of the network.

So, basically, there's an opt-in "Dark Aether".

~~~
ubercow13
Is there a single master moderator hard coded into the default client with the
ability to take things down?

------
newhotelowner
A native app is not really that great for Reddit style content.

Not keyboard friendly at all.

Took me a couple of minutes to find subs. I was about to give up.

You cant have a Reddit without pictures/gifs. And it should open in the app.

This should be like sabnzbd, or couchpotato. A local software that you can
access in the browser [http://localhost:xxx/](http://localhost:xxx/)

------
_emacsomancer_
From the GitHub page:

> The Linux version provided as a courtesy, it might work, but is completely
> unsupported.

And the Linux version is provided as a snap, which really works best on Ubuntu
and doesn't work at all on some distros (due to the Snap people's poor
decision to make snap have an unnecessary systemd dependency).

I really doubt you are going to make a lot of headway with a very 'techy'
alternative to Reddit with such poor (and snippy) Linux support.

~~~
calcifer
Out of the ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1
(rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro. I doubt it will have any real
impact on the number of users.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
The sort of people who are going to try to download some new (and somewhat
dubious-sounding - "I'm going to be storing all of the content on my local
machine?") are actually pretty likely _not_ to be using a systemd distro.
Getting early adopters would seem pretty crucial for this type of project, and
I'm not sure where the creator imagines they're going to come from with the
current passive-aggressive Linux support.

> ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded
> upwards) uses a non-systemd distro

You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.

~~~
calcifer
> You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.

I'd suggest getting a refresher on sarcasm first.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
My suggestion followed on in the same sarcastic tone. The implication is still
that there are hardly enough desktop Linux users to be relevant to this
project - which I think is misleading here, since Aether is the sort of thing
that Linux users are much more likely to try out than Mac or Windows users.
And, my original point is still that a combination of relying on snaps and a
snippy tone towards Linux isn't likely to be productive for Aether.

------
cwyers
> a) Similar to Reddit’s gold, if you want to support Aether, you can buy a
> 'unique’ username (with a checkmark, like Twitter) that makes you the unique
> owner of that username for the donation duration. If you want to do so,
> check out the Patreon.

That seems suboptimal. And what happens if you make a duplicate username while
it's not being paid for, and then it gets paid for?

------
ilaksh
I see these aether:// links which are supposed to link to subs but they just
open a blank/error page in Chrome when I click them in Aether and I can't
figure out how to subscribe to subs with the link.

------
buttershakes
I really like this idea, but I'm struggling with the decentralized aspect of
it. If you can control the content, what exactly are the user's getting?
Content can be scraped and saved indefinitely, the IP address information can
potentially be leaked, the exact security of the system is unclear.

It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open
moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.

~~~
rolleiflex
The point is that you can choose your own moderators. No one that you don’t
explicitly trust as a moderator can delete content you see. If you no longer
trust a moderator, you disable him / her and all moderation actions that was
taken by that person is reverted on your machine.

------
Kaveren
I believe I've commented on this earlier, I remember it being submitted last
year.

I still think this is a really awful, completely useless product. I really
like that HN & Reddit & Discord are persistent. It's very valuable to me and
the general population to be able to search from stuff that happened years
ago.

The worst comment history usually does is get you a snarky reply on Reddit.
Losing your job for no good reason is bad, but showing support for those
people is more of a solution. People will need to get used to other people not
being perfect as far as opinions go, and that people's opinions can change.

I am very uninterested in Aether, the general population is not interested in
Aether, and this will never catch on. The only people who care about this are
a few tech people. Even people who get kicked off Twitter / Facebook / Reddit
go on to centralized Gab / Voat / et cetera without a problem, this is not
useful.

Edit: Also trivial for someone maliciously or otherwise to just archive stuff,
so you lose the benefits and gain very little.

------
fireattack
>You can disable any mod, and choose anyone as a mod In Aether, if you don’t
like what a mod is doing, you can just disable him. Flip a switch, and
everything he deleted reappears. You can also choose a non-mod as a mod.

How exactly does this work?

I assume the first part means that you can disable certain mod and then the
content deleted by him will be visible for _you_ , but still invisible for
others (if they didn't disable this mod)?

But what does it mean that I can choose a mod? Will it be my "personal" mode,
i.e. the content removed by him will be invisible to me and me only, or will
it be applied to everyone's content? So what stops everyone and their dog
becomes mods eventually?

Sorry if my questions don't make sense, but I have no clue how it works from
these words.

~~~
rolleiflex
It’s an append only graph database whose edges are hydrated at the local user
end. Since the edge construction happens on the user’s computer, the user can
control how it is built. For example, if a user decides to no longer trust a
moderator, an incremental recompile from the raw database reconstructs the
relevant parts as if the moderator was never a mod for the local user in the
first place.

~~~
fireattack
Ah sorry, by "how it works", I mean from a user experience standpoint, not
from a technical one (i.e. I still don't get it :().

------
jeswin
Running an app and a server locally is a hard sell when it only serves a
single app. IPFS, dat and Secure Scuttlebutt also run a daemon, but they run
generic protocols which enable multiple apps.

Also, why the aether protocol in uris? Wouldn't that preclude browser support?
Safelisting should happen for generic protocols, and apps demanding that of
browsers will be a slippery slope.

Also, curious how this different from SSB channels. It seems very similar, but
I could be wrong.

------
vortico
Is there an interface to Aether that I can view in my browser, such as at
[http://localhost:8080](http://localhost:8080)?

~~~
rolleiflex
Not yet - but that’s a good idea.

~~~
int_19h
It would be really great if Aether could work as a true daemon / service - so
that it'd be guaranteed to be up and running at all times, even when e.g. not
logged in - and then offered a local web interface on top of that.

------
gpm
For something that is nominally open source, that's quite the TOS I get when I
try and download and run it from getaether.com

> and Aether app is offered to you conditioned on your acceptance

> Aether App is subject to Aether Technologies Inc.'s Privacy Policy

> If you use this [...] App [...] You may not assign or otherwise transfer
> your account to any other person or entity.

> You are granted a non-exclusive, _non-transferable, recovable_ license to
> access and use [...] Aether App

> You will not modify, publish, transmit, reverse engineer, participate in the
> transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit and of the
> content, in or oin part, found on the Site or App.

While normally boiler plate I find this term particularly amusing given the
whole focus on anti censorship

> Aether Technologies Inc. reserves the right to review materials posted to a
> Communication Service [App] and to remove any materials in its sole
> discretion.

This term seemed reasonable (apart from a EULA at all on a "open source"
project) - until I saw the example. I'm sure I _can_ do that on reddit.

> Don't break it, or do anything that interferes with its normal use. By way
> of example, and not as a limitation, do not post base64 encoded images (or
> similar) in text form

This part would just read like ass covering, except it's immediately followed
by "In addition by [...] submitting your Submission, you are perpetually and
nonrevocably licensing your Submission under Create Commons BY-SA license.".
As such the only possible uses of it would seem to be abusive.

> by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission
> [to the app] you are granting Aether Technologies Inc., our affiliated
> companies and necessary sublicensees permission use your Submission in
> connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including,
> without limiting, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly
> display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your
> Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission.

In the best of practices it includes a mandatory arbitration agreement

> In the event the parties are not able to resolve any dispute between them
> arising out of or concerning these Terms and Conditions, or any provisions
> hereof, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise at law or in equity for
> damages or any other relief, then such dispute shall be resolved only by
> final and binding arbitration pursuant to [blah blah blah blah]

Just to be extra sure they won't be held accountable by the law they include a
class action waiver (the caps are in the original)

> Any arbitration under these Terms and Conditions will take place on an
> individual basis; class arbitrations and class/representative/collection
> actions are not permitted. THE PARTIES AGREE THAT A PARTY MAY BRING CLAIMS
> AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN EACH'S INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF
> OR CLASS MEMBER IN [BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH].

And just in case any arbitrators get any ideas

> Further, unless both you and Aether Technologies Inc. agree otherwise, the
> arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not
> otherwise preside over any form of a representative or class proceeding.

~~~
akkartik
Why do you think it's open source? I didn't see sources anywhere on the site.

~~~
gpm
See the comment by the author with a link to the github repo above me in the
comments. The repo contains an AGPL license file (though I suppose he is free
to change that).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176835)

------
orangea
I'm surprised that the website doesn't mention anywhere whether Aether is open
source or not, not even on the page titled "Open Source."

------
LordIoulaum
So far, although it seems buggy, the general quality of content is fairly
clean.

They also do have a moderation function already, although I can't really
comment on how it's used in practice.

Moderation isn't an issue too early on.

Beyond that... For a decentralized network, if the different sub-reddits
(essentially) are moderated by their creators, they should end up with their
own cultures in time.

Good leadership is always key to building good communities.

------
fock
How does this work when one is in a private network, where you can't
advertise/remember your location easily? Seems like in the end you still need
some servers to rely on to federate.

Pleasantly surprised I found no mention of blockchain$$$ anywhere, but this
probably can still change

------
ilaksh
Windows 10 said it "protected my PC". Did you sign the executable? I recently
went through a huge hassle getting a code signing certificate. So if you
didn't get one I understand why.

~~~
rolleiflex
See here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951)

tl;dr: I concur on the pain, and I’m working on it.

------
ilaksh
It says I need to pay on Patreon to get a unique username. Does this mean if I
don't pay then someone else can impersonate me?

------
alasdair_
“It is very hard to make text illegal” - literally any kind of illegal content
can be encoded as text trivially.

~~~
stordoff
It's also not true - it may be in the US, but for instance in the UK: It is an
offence to "the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet
a document or record containing information of that kind [likely to be useful
to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism]."

It may protect the site, but it doesn't protect users.

[https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58)

------
ilaksh
I signed up on Patreon for $10. How do I get my unique username?

------
0_gravitas
I've blocked reddit some time ago on all of my devices, what events happened
that the post is referencing at the start?

~~~
ric2b
It has been banning several sub-reddits for political or PR reasons and it got
a hefty investment from a Chinese company.

------
Nanocurrency
> Aether is within the jurisdiction of the United States

Someone needs to fork this so that it doesn't operate under any jurisdiction.

------
pexaizix
Downloaded it. Whooping 150 MB that took over two minutes to download. Then
data took like 10 minutes to show up, with no clear sign that the app was
bootstrapping and not merely non-functional.

The app keeps using 100% of my IO for 20 minutes now, writing to files like
"KVStore.kv" and "searchindex/store". If I had an SSD I would close it, afraid
of it frying the disk.

------
User23
Windows 10 informs me this is unsafe to run. You're going to need to fix that
if you want this to catch on.

~~~
rolleiflex
Yup, It’s because it’s not signed with Authenticode, which is because it’s
taking Comodo an insane amount of time to actually give me a certificate.
Let’s Encrypt for code signing can’t come soon enough.

~~~
ilaksh
I used Comodo also (now apparently bought by Sectigo) and they are the worst
company I have ever dealt with. First I was trying to get them to tell me if
my documents were acceptable before I took them to the notary. They did not
seem to speak English particularly well and could not recognize that my
internet/phone bill was a phone bill (because it also mentioned internet so
they had never heard of a combination phone/internet bill before apparently),
could not recognize a financial statement. They kept repeating themselves but
with subtle contradictions.

Eventually I complained to K-Software (the reseller) and the guy then referred
me to some account rep or something with a Western name. Then she sent me
instructions which I followed and uploaded their notarized form. Which the
instructions did not even say to upload the documents, just the notarized
form. Then they said nothing and I eventually asked them what was going on.
Then the Comodo rep replies and first of all does not acknowledge that I
uploaded anything, 100% contradicts what was in the instructions, saying that
not only the form needed to be notarized, but every individual page. I told
the K-Software guy I was not going back to the notary. Then he calls them, I
wait, I email him again, then they say I have to have my phone number in a
valid third party registry. But they don't say what the ___ is a valid third
party registry. And they never said that was required before -- I gave them
the phone bill with my phone number on it.

Anyway it took almost two months and maybe thirty emails before I finally got
it.

~~~
rolleiflex
I'm also going through the same thing (K-Software > Comodo) and it is
horrible. I would strongly recommend against. Pay a little more and retain
your sanity.

------
kawfey
I feel like this is yet another something I'll have on my PC for a few days,
forget about it, and come back to find it defunct for my desires because
there's still reddit.

