Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

From the FAQ:

> How long does it take for a post to reach the most of the network?

> [...] Long answer [...]

> [...] 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.

Regardless of the actual FAQ discussed here, the statement is made that "some" nodes are behind NAT's, implying that most will not 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.

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.)

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?

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.

It isn't possible, but you can choose which subs where you want to subscribe.

There will be a moderated list of subs (maintained by the main developer), but users will be free to try to find an join even the most controversial ones.

Also the application takes 1-5 minutes to "download fresh content".

> Is anyone able to download the Windows client

Yeah, but with the same result as what another poster said

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

As of yet, the github page says

> Aether 2 last version: 2.0.0 (currently non-functional, in development) [..] (Not yet working, 80% complete)

and the last commit was 2 months ago :(

edit: this is how the page looks to me: https://i.imgur.com/2tsW5zv.png

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 they themselves are not white supremacists -- but it's almost certainly unusable for those that are the target of the white supremacists ire. Look at any "open communication platform" that doesn't make any effort to ban "toxic" behaviour and you'll find that the toxic behaviour leaks into every aspect of the platform.

If a website permits members to be openly anti-semitic or racist or sexist then they will be anti-semitic, racist and sexist everywhere, whether that's a quarantined sub-community about anti-semitism, or a community about video games, make-up or curating art for galleries. No amount of education is going to encourage jewish people to spend their time talking to openly anti-semitic people about video games. If you permit toxic behaviour then you exclude anybody who feels threatened by that behaviour.