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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#101
post #82
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, unfortunately, unworkable. You cannot successful quarantine toxic people from non-toxic people in the same community. People who aren't toxic rarely want to spend their time around toxic people, and those that don't mind it are usually those who aren't the targets of the toxic people. A community with many members who are openly white supremacists might not be uncomfortable for other white people -- even if…

See my sibling comment. Should we (society) have quarantined and de-platformed homosexuals when they were (historically) considered "toxic"?

You can talk in hand-wavey sound bites about civil liberties that's not the world we've chosen to create, and it's hard to understand how you can earnestly compare racism and homosexuality. Are violent racists oppressed when they're not permitted to deny the rights of minorities, in the same way minorities are oppressed when they're not permitted to exercise their rights? Perhaps when you're philosophising in comments on the internet about civil liberties they're the same but in the real world they are not.

You cannot effectively allow people to individually "filter out" toxic behaviour within a community because toxic behaviour permeates all aspects of participation in a community. The views we hold are fundamental to all aspects of our lives: our lives are built upon our views. A violent anti-semite's beliefs are present in their views on politics, religion, video games, food, housing, travel, science, technology... you cannot effectively "filter out" the fundamentals of someone's view points without neutering their speech -- which is no different from de-platforming them.

A community is a group of people and a group of people is a collection of beliefs, a community is not a bunch of people who use the same website but are intentionally siloed because their beliefs are incompatible. People who favour the PlayStation 4 over the Xbox One can be part of a community with people who favour the Xbox One over the Playstation 4, but can people who wish death upon all jews be a part of a community with jewish people?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#103
>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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#104

>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. 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. 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 i…

The posts are echoed across the network. You know where you got the post, you don’t know whether that post was created by that specific IP. Because you could have gotten the same post from all other nodes in the network as well.

Delivery IP is not the creation IP.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#105

Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch. 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.

I thought about doing something like this with orbitdb. maybe large content, like video, could be using ipfs.

That would be very cool! Let me know if you ever implement it, Aether only delivers text at this moment.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#106

>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. 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. 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 i…

> 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.

Which of these is true of a P2P network of Tor hidden services?

e.g. https://ricochet.im/ is P2P chat that uses Tor hidden services. It neither has centralised servers nor leaks IP addresses.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#107

> Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. 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? Also, spam?

Does any existing kind of social network prevent that kind of attack? I don't believe so, and I'd think that's pretty difficult to accomplish. Aether does attempt to make this nontrivial, I believe, by requiring proof-of-work before posting things. I don't know, but possibly that proof-of-work also applies for impeachment votes (I hope it does!). Then depending on how hard that proof-of-work requirement is and how ma…

It’s definitely not a solved problem, which is why I was curious if Aether had any interesting solutions.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#108

>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. 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. 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 i…

The posts are echoed across the network. You know where you got the post, you don’t know whether that post was created by that specific IP. Because you could have gotten the same post from all other nodes in the network as well. Delivery IP is not the creation IP.

The IP by definition of a P2P network must be the creation IP at some point.

IP's delivering the content are liable for what they spread. Using client IP's to distribute data like a proxy only shifts the burden onto the clients themselves.

These are all problems that should be gone over in detail on Aethers site, and should have been the main problem to tackle in its protocol.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#110
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which username? I use @b on Aether.

I was teasing the parent- not being serious.

Ah okay, sorry! I’m the Burak mentioned above and I’m as puzzled as anyone else on why this was posted, and why this is the highest upvoted comment, to be honest. Make a thing for privacy and the next thing people do is post your info online - Satoshi had a point. :)
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