Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch.<p>I’m here to answer any questions as usual. I’ll pick the best and try to add it to the FAQ on the site.
Nice! I remember hearing about Aether some time ago, and I'm glad to see development is continuing; I think the world needs more decentralized social networks. I plan to try it out and maybe post more in-depth feedback.<p>For now, though, since nobody else in this thread has mentioned it, I'm going to be that guy – sorry:<p>I wish it weren't Electron. I don't really expect it not to be; I realize your development resources are limited, and that it's the easiest way to make a cross-platform application, which is a must for a social network. Still, having to deal with a non-native UI makes it harder to truly enjoy using the app. Also, if it uses as much memory as Electron apps typically do, I'm going to want to quit it when it's not actively in use – but apparently Aether really wants to stay running in the background so it can continue to synchronize posts. (Is there a way to close the client but keep the backend running?)
> Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting.<p>If these are public communities that anyone can join pseudonymously (are they?) how does Aether prevent Sybil attacks, where a malicious actor joins a community using multiple identities and votes themselves into power?<p>Also, spam?
> What Aether does is, you can actually disable the mods that you don’t approve just for yourself, and those disables count as an impeach vote. If majority of the community agrees, the mod loses mod rights for a while for everyone. That makes it so that Aether communities are places where the content is what the current users of the communities want, not those who were there first by chance.<p>Even if "impeaching mods through votes" is unpractical, subscribing to an unmoderated view of the forum on your own accord is brilliant!
For anybody who is curious as me:<p>> Aether is a product of Burak Nehbit (@nehbit). You can reach out at burak at getaether dot net.<p>> Burak Nehbit<p>> Burak is an ex-Google, ex-Facebook product designer and engineer. He specialises in end-to-end product experience, from product, UX, to API (developer) experience. He is an expert in the fields of distributed networks and monetisation (e.g: prior jobs at YouTube and Facebook).<p>> He was also the part of the team that built the next generation, material design AdWords at Google. (e.g: complex data visualisation, dashboards).<p>> He is available for consulting as a full-stack designer and engineer in distributed networks space. He lives in San Francisco.<p><a href="https://getaether.net/about-contact/" rel="nofollow">https://getaether.net/about-contact/</a>
From the FAQ:<p>> How long does it take for a post to reach the most of the network?<p>> [...] Long answer [...]<p>> [...] In fact, it’s a little larger than one request in a minute, because some nodes are behind restrictive firewalls and NATs, and they cannot be reached, they can only make requests out.<p>Regardless of the actual FAQ discussed here, the statement is made that "some" nodes are behind NAT's, implying that most will <i>not</i> be behind NAT's. Living in the Netherlands, I'm not sure about countries overseas in the Americas, but here I'd wager >99% of normal household PC's will be behind a router implementing NAT. This makes actual peer-to-peer communication nigh impossible here, and I'm always doubtful about nice peer-to-peer solutions that claim to be cool and such but sneakily have the ever-present requirement that you have a public IP address. I don't. Nobody I know does, except for VPS's and so forth. But I generally don't run a graphical client on my VPS.<p>Of course, theoretically, this should be solved by IPv6. But really I wouldn't know how to start using that, and whether my provider has all the hardware and software in place to actually have this work. (And whether my provider-issued router supports it, as well.)<p>Can anyone chime in on how the situation regarding NAT's is in the Americas? And does anyone have a good source on how to get started with IPv6 communication between peers, when I don't even know the stuff I mentioned above?<p>EDIT: I see that Aether has/seems to have the option to work around this problem by allowing one to run the backend (the thing that actually connects to the peer-to-peer network) on a different machine than the client. That would enable using a VPS to run the backend.
Moderation seems like a view layer on top of the content graph, right?<p>I feel like a feature to blacklist actual storage and distribution of a particular post by fingerprint is going to be needed, because I'm not cool with simply not rendering child porn or someone's banking details if I'm still storing it for 6 months, and transmitting that info for two weeks.
It'd be nice if I didn't have to download an application to use it. Open to a reddit alternative, but I care more about convenience than any sort of encryption a client would offer.
>Aether is a peer-to-peer app, and it has no servers. A result of this is that source IP of any specific public post cannot (easily) be determined.<p>Not possible. Either source IP's are in communication, meaning you know the active posters IP, or the content is being proxied from a centralized server.<p>I hate Discords lies in saying they won't sell user data, but at the least they know the real danger of how IP's are infact all that's needed to call a swatt team down to kill someone in the U.S.<p>If you want to build an actual private conscious platform you will have to do something like FreeNode where people can make their own 'servers' for free, but also make their own actual servers if they want to.
How does it compare to RetroShare [1] ? RetroShare has been around for years and works quite well. It seems like Aether attempts to provide quite similar features.<p>[0] <a href="http://retroshare.net/" rel="nofollow">http://retroshare.net/</a>
For linux users who don't want to install the snap, just try it out:<p>$ sudo mkdir /mnt/aether<p>$ sudo mount -t squashfs <downloaded.snap> /mnt/aether<p>$ /mnt/aether/aether
If you advertise a “privacy-sensitive” product, please don’t load css from googleapis.com and JS from googletagmanager.com on your website.<p>Actually don’t load anything from third parties. It’s a complete turn off.
Sounds good to me as it sounds like the individual is the ultimate end moderator allowing community moderators to try remove stuff but it is ultimately up to the individual if he wishes to see that content. I have to say I extremely dislike moderation. But this moderation it seems like I can choose. I am not a kid I want to choose. This seems like a good in between where offensive stuff may be stopped but no one will prevent you from removing the veil of secrecy should you curious mind want to see more.
How come this is called a privacy sensitive aplication while this is happening "and it has anonymous metrics in. Stable versions are going to ask in the onboarding if you want to join the anonymous metrics program (like Firefox)." ?<p>The dev should be upfront about it even when the prerelease versions are being used.<p>Tell us what those "anonymous metrics" are for instance.<p>Is the communication between nodes encrypted or transported over SSL?
To state the obvious, I can't download—"You caught it before the launch. :)"<p>That said, I really, really appreciate the native client here and I'm excited to try it out.
>Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting.<p>This invites tyranny of the majority. Which will mean for certain topics where the community dislikes open discussion and questioning of ideas, divisiveness will grow because bad ideas can not be effectively challenged.
Trying to install using snap, keep getting the following errors, any advice? Never stops retrying.<p>bee@blackandyellow:~/Downloads$ snap install --dangerous --devmode Aether-2.0.0-dev.5+1811030036.53a6bb49.snap<p>2018-11-03T11:59:53-04:00 INFO Waiting for restart...<p>2018-11-03T12:00:01-04:00 INFO auto-connect of snap "aether" will be retried because of
"aether" - "core" conflict<p>EDIT: Snap files are an archive of sorts. I was able to extract it into a folder and run the file named "aether" to get it to work.<p>EDIT2: This gets the frontend working but I don't think it gets the backend working entirely.
You can use with Tor:<p><a href="https://meta.getaether.net/t/how-to-use-aether-behind-tor/53" rel="nofollow">https://meta.getaether.net/t/how-to-use-aether-behind-tor/53</a>
I created Rust sub. Feel free to join. Also, I don't see how to find or share link to a community. Is there a way to find community by a fingerprint?
> Aether is a peer-to-peer app, and it has no servers. A result of this is that source IP of any specific public post cannot (easily) be determined.<p>Really? Doesn't p2p model actually expose your IP address to everybody you communicate to?
> "Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. If a mod behaves inappropriately, users can disable that mod locally as well."<p>This sounds like it's definitely vulnerable to abuse. Democracy is nice, but I'm not sure it's a great idea in a situation like this where it's online with total anonymity and easy to vote fraudulently.<p>> "Aether keeps a 6 months of content by default. It's gone after."<p>I often want to search for stuff that seemed unimportant at the time a year or more later. We should focus on changing society so it's not so critical of statements people made years ago when they changed as a person, this is a better solution.<p>Skeptical of the value of community-building that Aether can provide, it seems like a novelty product to me. What is wrong with pseudononymous communities like Reddit & HN?
Anything to worry about as far as attack vectors when running something like this? eg, could someone hack my computer more easily than they could from just running Facebook in a browser, etc?
Please add a way to copy a link to clipboard instead of opening it in the default browser.<p>Viewing/saving/url-copying a picture without opening the source in the default browser would also be great.
Why does it enforce CC-BY-SA? I never care about what are people going to do with comments I post, can't I choose WTFPL / CC0 / Unlicense instead?
Could you make the life span settable by the speaker? That is, the default is 6 months, but perhaps I want less? Or more (to be archived locally some way)?
Maybe they can get Gab to adopt this.[1] Gab is having trouble finding hosting. This could go mainstream fast if it picked up the Gab crowd.<p>[1] gab.ai
> Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting.<p>Fyi, impeach means to hold a trial not to kick them out.<p>On this point I have to disagree. Democracy does not work well in foss communities and can easily be hijacked and makes it to easy to foster strife and divisions. I like the traditional foss way of being led by a BDFL where if you disagree with leadership you can "Just fork it".
Is the linux tarball on the website updated to the most recent version? It runs under Arch, but just syncs endlessly. It's also a light client, where the Windows version is dark theme. I don't like using snaps, so this is preferred.
>Introduction: What’s Aether?<p>>Aether gives you fresh, new content about the things you’re interested in.<p>>You can create a community for your friends, or for strangers that are interested in similar things. All communities are public, and everyone can write to any community. (There’ll be communities restricted to certain people, but we’re still working on that for now.)<p>>If you’re familiar with Reddit, Slashdot, or Usenet, it’s pretty similar. Aether does a two main things differently though. The first is that it’s ephemeral. The content disappears after a while. The other is, the communities are democratic, they elect their own leadership.<p>I hate these non-definitions. You've told me a lot of things, but I still don't know <i>what is aether</i>. Is it a website? a service? a protocol? an API?.