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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#181

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

natch wrote: post #165
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

I think your view here may be a little more pessimistic than mine.

I don't think the majority is opposed to critical thinking, although I think most people are bad at it. I also think most people are bad at civil and effective communication, so you may get toxic communities even from well-meaning people.

I'll be interested to see what happens. You may be right that communities will select mods that create echo chambers.

I'm a little more optimistic. Whichever way it goes, I think the ability to experiment (e.g. with weighted or modified voting schemes) with this sort of mechanic is definitely worth pursuing.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#182

Post by lostmsu »

berberous wrote: post #3

The idea of impeaching mods sounds interesting, but unworkable. How do you stop hostile communities from brigading and removing each other’s mods?

I wonder why can't one just pick mods for themselves. E.g. "subscribe" to a mod, meaning whatever that mod hides, you don't see. It could even be mutual.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#183

Post by jonnydubowsky »

faitswulff wrote: post #35
dhimes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, however, is that people are unresponsive to arguments. We are not reasonable, unfortunately. People aren't coming to these places to learn. They don't want to learn. I'm very curious as to how we can get out of this, because I really have a hard time understanding people and this is an enormous laboratory.

> unresponsive to arguments Not just unresponsive to arguments, but will argue in bad faith, and it takes 10x as much effort to disprove someone's bad contentions than it does to produce them.

I agree with this position and wonder if there is any supporting evidence that speaks to this point that you know of?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#184

Post by jonnydubowsky »

nixarian wrote: post #121
commun3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comment…

Anti-semites don't see things that way. They see Jewish people as attacking THEM, denying THEM the right to their way of existence. They might use the same language you use.

You bring up an important point, implementing equal rights does not reduce the rights of those who previously were oppressors, no matter how delusional their thinking is.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#186

Post by guachesuedehack »

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…

Hit me up if you need help ! Email in profile

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#187

Post by guachesuedehack »

rolleiflex wrote: post #62
TekMol wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good. But a native application? I would only install a native application if it comes from a source that has a proven trackrecord of being trustworthy. Can you track how many people installed it, now that it is on HN? You say it puts everyone on "one single universe with the same content". So it should be easy to put up an instance that provides a web interface to the content, right? I would think that posting…

Yes I can, because this is a developer preview version, 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). Yes it would be easy - that would just be an another node that showed it’s read-only UI on the web. (You still need to mint proofs of work, so you would need an actual computer for posting.)

is it open sourced ?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#188

Post by rolleiflex »

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…

Actually the group's decisions are made by singular decisions based on users, so your own decisions are prioritised over the group's. So if the group decides to impeach a mod, but you voted to keep the mod in place, that mod is still a mod for you, because you voted to support that guy — even if s/he is no longer a mod for the group.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#189

Post by rolleiflex »

lostmsu wrote: post #182
berberous wrote: post #3

The idea of impeaching mods sounds interesting, but unworkable. How do you stop hostile communities from brigading and removing each other’s mods?

I wonder why can't one just pick mods for themselves. E.g. "subscribe" to a mod, meaning whatever that mod hides, you don't see. It could even be mutual.

That’s exactly how it works. Default mods are just that, default.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#190

Post by qwerty456127 »

benhylau wrote: post #168
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 beh…

> This is because your node syncs _all_ the data, including the content that you don't navigate to.

All the data? Isn't it going to take a huge lot when the network grows popular?

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