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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#171

Post by int_19h »

natch wrote: post #163
erikpukinskis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If enough people believe the same, then such segregation will not happen, because moderation will be self-moderated.

OTOH, if enough people really want all those bubbles, there isn't really anything you can do to stop them.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#172

Post by int_19h »

drngdds wrote: post #97
Lkjhmnbv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way you prevent them from becoming progressice/racist trash bin worse than reddit. You let them speak and prove them idiots. It's really not hard. Unless you're constantly on the side that's losing, then it's pretty miserable. But know that even though you're losing now you can reformulated your arguments and try again because no ones going to censor you. You have all the same rights because you, like they,…

>literal Sieg Heil Nazis are people deserving respect I respectfully disagree. ETA: Sunlight isn't actually a disinfectant here. If it was, moderation-lite platforms wouldn't be full of fascist trash. What actually happens is this: 1. Someone makes a moderation-lite platform in response to censorship on mainstream platforms 2. Thousands of awful people flock to the platform, along with two or three principled free sp…

Conversely, as mainstream platforms ban more and more viewpoints, it does start to affect "normal people" as well - and that increases the potential userbase for all these alternative services to spring up.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#173

Post by sandov »

>Introduction: What’s Aether?

>Aether gives you fresh, new content about the things you’re interested in.

>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.)

>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.

I hate these non-definitions. You've told me a lot of things, but I still don't know what is aether. Is it a website? a service? a protocol? an API?.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#174

Post by devwastaken »

comex wrote: post #170

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 resourc…

I think native UI in dedicated applications is massively overrated. It's great if it's apart of the system, if there's a config menu or something you'd expect from the system itself, but I have never had a problem with Spotify or Discord in terms of 'non native'. They can be a lot better absolutely, but native look is far worse.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#176

Post by rolleiflex »

comex wrote: post #170

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 resourc…

I know - given enough time and money, I'd make a CLI app using something like ncurses. Unfortunately though, the reality is that I just don't have the resources.

The backend is its own process, you could definitely find the binary in the application package and run it on its own — it's not bound to Electron in any other way. Electron is just the client, the frontend graph compiler, and the backend are two separate binaries that communicate with each other over gRPC. That means you could run any of these independently, as well. [0] The client is Electron, but nothing except the UI happens in JS, everything happens in the frontend and the backend, and they're both tiny, fast, native-compiled Go apps. My backend, for example, is 4.8mb, frontend I think is 6mb. The rest of the size of the app (70mb) is just Electron, its dependencies, and the whole enchilada that comes with it. I'm not happy about it either.

For better or worse, though, since the JS part of the app is nothing but its 'skin', it's as memory efficient as Electron apps get. No real processing happens in JS, it's all Go.

[0] That said, it's not something I support right now, because if you ran the backend separately and then started the app, you'd effectively be running two backends. There is not yet a way to tell the app package that it should connect to an existing backend running locally instead of starting one.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#177

Post by jonnydubowsky »

lxe wrote: post #113

> 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. Even if "impeaching mods…

I like the way you sum this up Ixe. Your comment illicits a mental model like a manual transmission where the terrain (dynamics of the conversation) sets the context for what gear to select (which mods to have in place) , based on how much gas you are giving the engine, which is a personal choice of the driver. One driver may choose a very low gear to go down a hill (a conservative moderator that controls the decent of the vehicle) and another driver may wish to just coast down at high speed (very litte moderation). Same car, same terrain, different driver, different choice for what gear to keep it in. The mental model gets a little loose goosy when you consider that this is not a single person making the decision but rather a group, but oh well. Thanks Burak for making this platform. I'm really enjoying the ride so far!

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#178

Post by FPGAhacker »

comex wrote: post #170

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 resourc…

I haven’t worried about how much memory an app uses in many years. On a MacBook Pro with solid state storage, it’s just not noticeable. I did some testing a long time ago to see how the system behaved when apps used essentially all of the memory and then some.

I actually couldn’t tell. I don’t remember anymore if I tried playing a game or not, so that might have been noticeable. But my VMs and browsers and several emacs’ connected to several clojure repls didn’t even hiccup.

The fans ran high and the computer was hot, but otherwise it just wasn’t a thing.

Is it that different on windows or Linux? At work windows is abysmal, even with an ssd, but I blame all the antivirus and corporate spyware.

—-

I do marvel at app binary sizes, just because my floppy disks used to hold jus 144k. I did a hello world in Haskell this morning and it was a meg or two. Hello world could fit on a floppy from the //e era. That’s something.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#179

Post by hannasanarion »

natch wrote: post #161
rolleiflex wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tyranny of the minority is worse

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#180

Post by jonnydubowsky »

jonnydubowsky wrote: post #177
lxe wrote: post #113

> 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. Even if "impeaching mods…

I like the way you sum this up Ixe. Your comment illicits a mental model like a manual transmission where the terrain (dynamics of the conversation) sets the context for what gear to select (which mods to have in place) , based on how much gas you are giving the engine, which is a personal choice of the driver. One driver may choose a very low gear to go down a hill (a conservative moderator that controls the decent…

I completed the mental model... It's. Like one of those 12 passenger 4x4 off road tour vans, or even a 100 passenger hydrofoil boat, where the driver has a reputation score, as do the passengers, and you can pick which boat you want to go on based on the expected conditions of the drive. If the boat ride is billed as a leisurely jaunt for calm bird watching, and the driver knows this is what the passengers want, and he decides to push the pedal to the metal and everyone is thrown about, the passengers can suspend the driver and pick one who understands the consensus of the what the groups specifications are. This has amazing potential as a platform for civil engagement and public works management and other areas of social coordination. I can't wait to get into this further.
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