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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#161

Post by natch »

rolleiflex wrote: post #94
tlrobinson wrote: post #61

> 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?

For both of your questions, the answer is proof of work. For Sybils, that’s something I’ve considered. I’m thinking of making voting eligibility a trailing indicator where it tracks past activity to be considered a ‘citizen’ of that community, and allowing the mod team to temporaily lock down the community if they see such a thing happening.

What are your thoughts about the phenomenon called tyranny of the majority?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#162

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

Kaveren wrote: post #157

> "Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. If a mod behaves inappropriately, users can disable that mod locally as well." 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. > "Aether keeps a 6 months of content by default. It's gone after." I often…

> We should focus on changing society so it's not so critical of statements people made years ago when they changed as a person

I'm a believer in progress long term, but I seriously doubt humanity is really capable of what you're describing in a way that's applied equally to all groups of people.

It seems several orders of magnitude much easier for people to develop the habit of recording information they might need later.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#163

Post by natch »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #160
natch wrote: post #159

>Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. 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.

Won’t this be resolved the way it does on Reddit with people ejecting to more specific communities? I’m a feminist for example, but I’m no longer welcome in mainstream feminist subreddits, so I subscribe to various more-specific-feminism subbreddits, and explicitly debate friendly ones.

I'm not too happy with that resolution though, because it leads to problems.

While it may seem to reduce short term conflict, it exacerbates the effect of many of us living in ever-more-impervious bubbles. Which could lead to larger problems down the road as people's shared understandings about reality diverge even more.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#164

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

natch wrote: post #159

>Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. 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.

I've never seen a community that was completely open to discussion and where bad ideas disappeared because they were effectively challenged.

On the other hand, I've been in several communities where the mods had a clear agenda and the participants were helpless to change it.

I'd personally rather the people who are hostile to new ideas or critical thinking have their own communities and that their ability to harm other communities can be mitigated by a moderation system accountable to the users.

I do think there needs to be serious discussion about how to make communities that are good for people. The echo chamber and polarization effects tend to contract people into a smaller worldview. How to have a cohesive community that doesn't do that is essentially an unsolved problem in the social sciences.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#165

Post by natch »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #164
natch wrote: post #159

>Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. 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.

I've never seen a community that was completely open to discussion and where bad ideas disappeared because they were effectively challenged. On the other hand, I've been in several communities where the mods had a clear agenda and the participants were helpless to change it. I'd personally rather the people who are hostile to new ideas or critical thinking have their own communities and that their ability to harm oth…

I agree with most of what you said, but we might be looking at it from different angles.

Especially want to zero in on this:

>I'd personally rather the people who are hostile to new ideas or critical thinking have their own communities

A fact that you don't seem to have in your mind here is that often those people are the majority.

So you'll have majorities voting in mods who are hostile to new ideas and critical thinking.

With this platform we still get lock-in of polarized thinking and echo chambers.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#166

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

pelagic_sky wrote: post #10

Downloaded and installed, but no content has loaded in last 30min.

Same here. At first I thought it was the hug of death, but I feel like with p2p it should only get faster as more people join?

Inbounds conns. in last 15m 0

Last inbound Unknown

Outbound conns. in last 15m 0

Last outbound Unknown

Last outbound duration Unknown

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#167

Post by benhylau »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #143

WTF is is this "Minting proof-of-work for the entity..." thing when submitting comments? Does it mine BitCoins or something?

There is no mining of cryptocurrencies. You are spending CPU cycles to compute a proof so spamming the network with user actions is non-zero cost.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#168

Post by benhylau »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #147

Is Aether actually going to be hard for privacy-hostile governments to block or compromise?

I think the _scope_ of privacy here should be clarified. Content on Aether is public. There is no concept of private encrypted messaging. The privacy guarantee is that what content you view within the network, your navigation path, cannot be tracked by a server. This is because your node syncs _all_ the data, including the content that you don't navigate to. This is in contrast to the way many services track user behaviour by their username.

As discussed in other posts, it is difficult to discover origin IP of pseudonymous users, because in a flood network, when my node gets some information it is usually not from the IP where that information was generated. That is another privacy feature due to the way Aether distributes data.

Aether is more difficult to block than centralized services, since you will have to catch all the nodes instead of just one set of known IPs / domains. With great effort it is probably possible to DPI at ISPs to identify Aether traffic and drop? But being a peer-to-peer protocol, Aether can easily sync across VPN tunnels, run within private networks, or physical meshnet infrastructure independent of ISPs.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#169

Post by comex »

rolleiflex wrote: post #148
FlyingSnake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks great, kudos on the `soft' launch. * The FAQs say that the app is a p2p based app. What is the p2p protocol being used here? * How does it compare to libp2p, SSB, and others? * What's the security model, and how would the system mitigate Sybil attacks etc? Are there any plans to have mobile apps (preferable native)? I think if people could use it on their mobile phones, it would be a game changer.

Thanks! > The FAQs say that the app is a p2p based app. What is the p2p protocol being used here? * How does it compare to libp2p, SSB, and others? * What's the security model, and how would the system mitigate Sybil attacks etc? It's built from scratch. It runs c0 subprotocol of Mim. You can see some basic comparisons here: https://getaether.net/docs/how_is_it_different_from/ Other questions - all good questions, bu…

> It runs c0 subprotocol of Mim.

Can you elaborate? Googling these terms doesn't produce much other than a few papers using "MiM" to mean man-in-the-middle, as well as your comment itself!

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#170

Post by comex »

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.

For now, though, since nobody else in this thread has mentioned it, I'm going to be that guy – sorry:

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?)

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