Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 232 posts

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#201

Post by _up »

rolleiflex wrote: post #122
imglorp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is brilliant. The moderation layer is a like a data view. I wonder, what happens if, going a step further, there are different moderation teams working on the same comment stream, and readers could flip between them at will? If you ever wondered what the other side was thinking, you could flip views and experience it. Of course, you still need some absolute site rules to cover doxxing and illegalities.

> I wonder, what happens if, going a step further, there are different moderation teams working on the same comment stream, and readers could flip between them at will? It already has that. :) That is the whole point of moderation - you can choose who you want to be moderated by. (It’s on a per mod basis for now, though, but per mod team is a good idea. Thanks for the feature request!)

Maybe people you follow or "mark as trustworthy", should also be more relevant in what you see.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#202

Post by fbender »

rolleiflex wrote: post #130
sfilargi wrote: post #126

If you advertise a “privacy-sensitive” product, please don’t load css from googleapis.com and JS from googletagmanager.com on your website. Actually don’t load anything from third parties. It’s a complete turn off.

I agree - but anybody who ever built anything would tell you it’s a tradeoff. Yes, I could get metrics through the server logs. But I’m just one single guy that built this thing. I don’t have the resources to build a privacy sensitive tool and a privacy sensitive page view reporter that tells me how many people visited a page, so I can improve it. One challenge at a time.

Why not use Piwik/Matomo?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#203

Post by fbender »

aluren wrote: post #75
beatgammit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they... compartmentalize And that's the key problem. People are more divided than ever, especially in politics, to the point where rational discussion is nearly impossible. Instead of letting people separate into echo chambers, it seems much better to force everyone to be in the same space, which should result in people hearing each side of an argument. Use moderation to punish people who don't act civilly, which s…

What? No, we should not force people to share the same space as fascists and racists. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. If I were to encounter neo-nazis in real life, I would not engage in a civil discussion, confident that the police is there to make sure everyone is civil. I would walk away . Online, it's pretty much the same thing. I'm not sure why it's so hard to fathom that most people have more productive…

You can still walk away, but the key point is that those who do not want to walk away will still hear differing (to theirs) opinions.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#204

Post by fbender »

the8472 wrote: post #66
beatgammit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they... compartmentalize And that's the key problem. People are more divided than ever, especially in politics, to the point where rational discussion is nearly impossible. Instead of letting people separate into echo chambers, it seems much better to force everyone to be in the same space, which should result in people hearing each side of an argument. Use moderation to punish people who don't act civilly, which s…

I think you want to narrow the overton window. My preference is to keep the overton window wide but have multiple subgroups along the continuum so that the outer percentiles only form small subgroups that don't dominate. In other words echo chambers are only a problem when they are large and even worse when you have to choose one of two chambers dominated by either extreme. The political analogue would be the 2 party…

I disagree. The small groups, especially the ones with self-amplifying „high echos“ in their groups are the ones (groups or individual members of that group) that easily radicalize. That‘s how terrorist cells, guerillas, and „lone wolf“ aggressors arise (left and right, political and social, agnostic and religious, whatever-you-can-think of extremists). Just check the news of the last months, I mean weeks…er, days!

And I‘m not saying your point about large echo chambers is wrong, it’s quite true (again, see recent news). But the problem is with any kind/size of echo chamber. And „echo chamber“ is a different thing than domain-specific groups like HN – it‘s only an echo chamber when HN is your only source of (tech/entrepreneurial) news/discussions. Note that even where you live can easily become an echo chamber if you rarely break out of it.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#205

Post by fbender »

nixarian wrote: post #118
drngdds wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"awful people" As in, people who are inherently awful, cannot be helped, and should therefore be cut out of society. Why stop there? Why not put them in prisons? Fine with that? Why stop there? Why waste resources on trash? Why not incinerate them in some kind of large cooking appliance? :^)

There‘s certainly a risk here but that is why we have laws. E.g. in Germany, showing fascist symbols is forbidden (unless it‘s an educational/historical context). It‘s up to the people and courts to ensure the law is not overstepping the boundaries of free expression, and it‘s up to the executive and judicial branch to ensure people don’t tend to prejudgement.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#206

Post by fbender »

nixarian wrote: post #120
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…

But that's exactly what you're doing. You're oppressing them by denying them the ability to speak because you believe (perhaps rightly) that their opinion and way of living is wrong. Would you actually not deny housing to a nazi? Openly fascist people ARE denied jobs, how can you imagine otherwise? "Closet" facists are allowed to have jobs, in the same way closet homosexuals were allowed to have jobs back when homose…

There‘s still a huge difference between „certain people are not allowed to live“ vs. „I want to be allowed to love whomever I chose“. That former group should still not be excluded from certain basic „rights“, at least until they act on their beliefs (but that‘s up to the courts to decide). But again, you are comparing apples to oranges and questioning the moral principles the (at least Western) society is built on.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#207

Post by fbender »

rolleiflex wrote: post #176
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 bi…

How about providing a WebExtension that exposes the bits that require a binary (e.g. P2P and possibly proof-of-work part if WASM does not work for you) or are provided by the platform, then you can waive the Electron requirement for those who do not want it, plus your web interface potentially works the same for read-only visitors and users (who have the web extension installed). You can also include the frontend bits in the WebExtension so no one relies on the website working anymore.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#208

Post by dangoor »

axonotl wrote: post #13
axonotl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

paid unique usernames? I can foresee a lot of blackmail happening using this.

The app wasn't able to load a list of communities in ~15 minutes. Will test when a better version is available.

I found that on first run, the results returned were blank. Restarting fixed that.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#209

Post by andro_dev »

How come this is called a privacy sensitive aplication while this is happening "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)." ?

The dev should be upfront about it even when the prerelease versions are being used.

Tell us what those "anonymous metrics" are for instance.

Is the communication between nodes encrypted or transported over SSL?

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#210

Post by Orochikaku »

tomsmeding wrote: post #79
rolleiflex wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because some nodes are behind restrictive firewalls and NATs That is just a weird turn of phrase on my part, will fix it. What I mean is: because some nodes are behind restrictive firewalls and [restrictive] NATs. In other words, most NATs work fine. Even if they don’t work fine, it has a process called a ‘reverse open’ where the inbound connection is requested by the receiving remote and the remote ‘captures’ and…

Thanks for replying -- the client seems to work beautifully on osx here. It took some time to start showing post content, and I even restarted it once because it didn't seem to do that after a few minutes, but now it does, so that's good. My NAT is apparently a restrictive one, since I've got "Mapping failed, no router, or router uncooperative" as my port mapping status. But as you predicted, I've indeed got some inb…

I unfortunately am getting the same error however I'm not getting any inbound connections either

https://i.imgur.com/49VaP62.png

Post reply on HN