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Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

getaether.net

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Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#91

Post by cslarson »

tomsmeding wrote: post #88
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?

Does any existing kind of social network prevent that kind of attack? I don't believe so, and I'd think that's pretty difficult to accomplish. Aether does attempt to make this nontrivial, I believe, by requiring proof-of-work before posting things. I don't know, but possibly that proof-of-work also applies for impeachment votes (I hope it does!). Then depending on how hard that proof-of-work requirement is and how ma…

Reddit is experimenting with sybil-resistent voting on a sub I moderate (r/ethtrader). In fact there is a vote[0] going on to retain me as the first moderator. The sybil-resistence comes from weighting polls with community points (on our sub we call them donuts - don't ask). Donuts are intended to represent contribution to the community so derive from sub specific karma, being a mod, etc. It's still an experiment but I think it's going well so far.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/9tm60s/governanc...

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#92

Post by um_ya »

tomsmeding wrote: post #88
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?

Does any existing kind of social network prevent that kind of attack? I don't believe so, and I'd think that's pretty difficult to accomplish. Aether does attempt to make this nontrivial, I believe, by requiring proof-of-work before posting things. I don't know, but possibly that proof-of-work also applies for impeachment votes (I hope it does!). Then depending on how hard that proof-of-work requirement is and how ma…

Reddit's way of doing it works pretty well. You create your own community with your own rules, then people join it if they like the way things are run. Only downside to Reddit is the subreddit name squating.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#93

Post by rolleiflex »

dcow wrote: post #90
rolleiflex wrote: post #47

Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch. I’m here to answer any questions as usual. I’ll pick the best and try to add it to the FAQ on the site.

I would like to give Aether2 a test run. The only version I can find is the old 1.2.3 release on GitHub. Others here seem to have version 2. Where can I get it?

https://getaether.net has the new one. If you get a green site, delete your browser cache and try again.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#94

Post by rolleiflex »

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.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#95

Post by rolleiflex »

dhimes wrote: post #34
a012 wrote: post #7

For anybody who is curious as me: > Aether is a product of Burak Nehbit (@nehbit). You can reach out at burak at getaether dot net. > Burak Nehbit > Burak is an ex-Google, ex-Facebook product designer and engineer. He specialises in end-to-end product experience, from product, UX, to API (developer) experience. He is an expert in the fields of distributed networks and monetisation (e.g: prior jobs at YouTube and Face…

So, Burak, care to share the thought behind your username? :)

Which username? I use @b on Aether.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#96

Post by billconan »

rolleiflex wrote: post #47

Hey guys - Burak here. Ouch, this was supposed to be a ‘soft’ launch. I’m here to answer any questions as usual. I’ll pick the best and try to add it to the FAQ on the site.

I thought about doing something like this with orbitdb. maybe large content, like video, could be using ipfs.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#97

Post by drngdds »

Lkjhmnbv wrote: post #24
prolikewh0a wrote: post #11

How do you get this to not turn into a fascist/racist trash bin worse than 4chan/b/ as other Reddit clones have seemingly fallen into?

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 speech advocates. Most normal people avoid it because they don't realistically need to worry about being banned from mainstream platforms and they don't want to deal with fascists. (Besides, the racist trolls aren't actually interested in open and respectful discourse. That's a lie.)

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#98

Post by benhylau »

tomsmeding wrote: post #88
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?

Does any existing kind of social network prevent that kind of attack? I don't believe so, and I'd think that's pretty difficult to accomplish. Aether does attempt to make this nontrivial, I believe, by requiring proof-of-work before posting things. I don't know, but possibly that proof-of-work also applies for impeachment votes (I hope it does!). Then depending on how hard that proof-of-work requirement is and how ma…

My understanding is that any participant action requires proof-of-work.

Social networks like Secure Scuttlebutt prevents this type of attack by syncing only data within social trust circles. So spammers and bots can vote up each other all they want, but their actions will not be visible outside of their little island unless someone explicitly "friends" one of them. Aether, being a global view of unpartitioned data, has a more difficult time tackling this type of attack, and its proof-of-work minting of user actions seem like a reasonable approach.

Re: Aether – Free, privacy-sensitive public communities

#100

Post by benhylau »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #5

It'd be nice if I didn't have to download an application to use it. Open to a reddit alternative, but I care more about convenience than any sort of encryption a client would offer.

Since Aether is a peer-to-peer network, the client syncs content and becomes a node itself to scale up the network's capacity. It also allows the user to perform actions without letting a backend track your navigation history, etc. I don't think there is encryption done on the content, only signing and verifying with keys, as there is no concept of private messages in the Aether network at the moment.
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