10 ms·

Aether for Redditors

168 points by dfischer 8y ago

vortico 8y ago
Is there an interface to Aether that I can view in my browser, such as at http://localhost:8080 http://localhost:8080?
- nyolfen 8y ago
  yes, if you're running the app; this is from the post: > Like Reddit, you can link to Aether from the web > Here’s an example link: > aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6
  - vortico 8y ago
    That opens the client, not uses the browser.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Not yet - but that’s a good idea.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It would be really great if Aether could work as a true daemon / service - so that it'd be guaranteed to be up and running at all times, even when e.g. not logged in - and then offered a local web interface on top of that.
nerdbaggy 8y ago
I wonder why the peer to peer. Aether can still remove content, so it’s not really decentralized. And you have to store the entire site on your computer, I wonder what the legal ramifications are if there is bad stuff saved on your computer but you didn’t put it there.
rolleiflex 8y ago
Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 Happy to answer any questions, as usual. Source code is here: https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether (I’ll update it with the latest release as soon as I can clean it up)
- wierdaaron 8y ago
  How big is the local cache of the network on each client device?
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    About 9mb as of now. Of course, the compiled graph is larger. If you want full text search, that has its own index that takes space as well. But that last one is optional.
- jka 8y ago
  Looks like a very simple and clean user experience, definitely curious to try this out. Is encryption between peers currently supported and/or planned?
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    Yes - it’s encrypted-only. It does not allow any plaintext communication. The way nodes talk to each other is plain old HTTPS (TLS v1.2). So I’m definitely not inventing my own crypto here, I’ve tried very hard to avoid that. The content on a node is public though, so this is transport encryption.
    - hyeonwho4 8y ago
      Is data saved to disk encrypted? Can you plausibly state that what I have been reading is invisible to a computer repair shop? Can I plausibly state that there are no links to (child) porn searchable on my disks?
Aearnus 8y ago
These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows "mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example. The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy to the masses. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least try to do that.)
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    I feel morally obligated to start using Aether because I think that p2p and decentralization is what we need. I am going to try to make it work. It would sure help to have a mobile app.
    - rolleiflex 8y ago
      Coming!
  - ggsp 8y ago
    As I have you here, an OT question: will the business version of Aether also remove content after six months?
    - rolleiflex 8y ago
      No. The business version is a hosted / on-prem SaaS, that removes the space limitations and other similar restrictions that deletion is a solution to. That said, you can still have it delete at a certain threshold. I know of a few large Silicon Valley companies that delete emails past 1.5-2y as a way of limiting their legal exposure. If you’re a 1000+ employee company, that is pretty much standard practice so long as you take care to not delete anything with a legal discovery hold.
gnicholas 8y ago
> Due to the recent news about Reddit Which news specifically? Also, it might be useful for the blog posts to have a date at the top. I saw there was a “1 day ago” notation at the bottom, but having it at the top would be more convenient/conventional.
- edoceo 8y ago
  Tencent investment?
  - _asummers 8y ago
    It's not unreasonable to assume people missed that news. It was front page here for a day and on reddit for about the same duration. If someone didn't login for a few days, it was very easily missed.
- wraithm112 8y ago
  Probably the investment round: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/
- weeeeeeb 8y ago
  The crackdown on anime content was the way bigger news to me. But that might just be my filter bubble.
- sridca 8y ago
  Tencent investment and the discussion on moderator censorship: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the_recent_chinese_company_tencent_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19151922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19151922
User23 8y ago
Windows 10 informs me this is unsafe to run. You're going to need to fix that if you want this to catch on.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Yup, It’s because it’s not signed with Authenticode, which is because it’s taking Comodo an insane amount of time to actually give me a certificate. Let’s Encrypt for code signing can’t come soon enough.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - slededit 8y ago
    It will learn even unsigned code after enough time, but future versions may or may not keep your earned reputation. The certificate is a good idea.
  - gruez 8y ago
    >Let’s Encrypt for code signing can’t come soon enough. AFAIK that will never happen because authenticode signing certificates are all essentially EV certificates, because they require verification of an individual's (or company's) identity. That's very expensive to do compared to DV certificates that letsecrypt currently issues, which have essentially $0 marginal cost.
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    I used Comodo also (now apparently bought by Sectigo) and they are the worst company I have ever dealt with. First I was trying to get them to tell me if my documents were acceptable before I took them to the notary. They did not seem to speak English particularly well and could not recognize that my internet/phone bill was a phone bill (because it also mentioned internet so they had never heard of a combination phone/internet bill before apparently), could not recognize a financial statement. They kept repeating themselves but with subtle contradictions. Eventually I complained to K-Software (the reseller) and the guy then referred me to some account rep or something with a Western name. Then she sent me instructions which I followed and uploaded their notarized form. Which the instructions did not even say to upload the documents, just the notarized form. Then they said nothing and I eventually asked them what was going on. Then the Comodo rep replies and first of all does not acknowledge that I uploaded anything, 100% contradicts what was in the instructions, saying that not only the form needed to be notarized, but every individual page. I told the K-Software guy I was not going back to the notary. Then he calls them, I wait, I email him again, then they say I have to have my phone number in a valid third party registry. But they don't say what the ___ is a valid third party registry. And they never said that was required before -- I gave them the phone bill with my phone number on it. Anyway it took almost two months and maybe thirty emails before I finally got it.
imh 8y ago
>Anything you post on Aether will be gone in about 6 months. This is nice, because no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep. This seems really misleading. If I can view it, I can save it. Enough people take data dumps from reddit that even if reddit decided to follow the same policy, it wouldn't mean "no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep."
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  My apologies. The front page at https://getaether.net https://getaether.net has a better description: ‘It keeps 6 months of posts by default. It's gone after. If something is worth keeping, someone will save it within six months — but not from beyond that.’
- stordoff 8y ago
  This immediately makes less interested in the platform. Reddit posts older than six months can be useful.
  - deeplearninganf 8y ago
    Different use case. Reddit is an ephemeral tool, its ancient gems are hidden and difficult to access, imho a real solution to useful information problem is something like wiki or a ML-based super-aggregate.
    - bhl 8y ago
      Not really: I’ve found very useful information by using Google and just having site:reddit.com, and or using the iffy reddit search bar. The benefit of having a voting system is that ancient gems will always get bubbled up.
    - stordoff 8y ago
      I don't really agree. Specifically for video games, I've found _a lot_ of useful information just by Googling something and the answer being on Reddit. A lot of 'casual' (as in people have just discussed it and not deliberately sought to put it out there) information would be lost if Reddit was wiped after six months. Yes, other tools might be better for information sharing, but Reddit as a conversation space and Google as a search tool over the top of it is valuable.
tinalumfoil 8y ago
Decentralized reddit already existed in the form if usenet. This adds some moderation features which is nice, but I have trouble believing people care about decentralization enough to switch. What would really help is if there was a website I could explore the content on before hosting anything myself. Imagine there's many instances each with many users that all sync between each other, and of I lose trust of one I can seamlessly switch to another. But of course this has been done before and died, so the point still remains of why people should switch.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet. (It’s more decentralised than Usenet - everyone is an ‘Usenet server’ in Aether, vs large university servers in the original Usenet)
  - tzs 8y ago
    > Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet. Maybe you should add support for NNTP clients to make it even more like an updated Usenet. I wish things like Reddit, HN, email servers, and everything else that handles threaded discussion would provide an NNTP interface. That would let the user use the same program for all of these things. They could still provide web interfaces for use in browsers, but those could internally use the NNTP interface. I suppose this would be hard for Reddit and some of the others, because it would be hard for them to show ads over the NNTP interface, but for anything that is not ad supported give me NNTP.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    How is it decentralized if illegal content can be taken down? It should be impossible for a single entity to do that in a truly decentralized system. It appears this has a backdoor.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      "Taken down" just means that clients get notification that such and such comment is bad. The stock client will remove them and reject them in the future, but there's no enforcement - you can have a client that e.g. completely ignores any such requests. If I understand it correctly, multiple such clients would end up maintaining all those deleted posts in distributed P2P storage, in their part of the network. So, basically, there's an opt-in "Dark Aether".
cwyers 8y ago
> a) Similar to Reddit’s gold, if you want to support Aether, you can buy a 'unique’ username (with a checkmark, like Twitter) that makes you the unique owner of that username for the donation duration. If you want to do so, check out the Patreon. That seems suboptimal. And what happens if you make a duplicate username while it's not being paid for, and then it gets paid for?
newhotelowner 8y ago
A native app is not really that great for Reddit style content. Not keyboard friendly at all. Took me a couple of minutes to find subs. I was about to give up. You cant have a Reddit without pictures/gifs. And it should open in the app. This should be like sabnzbd, or couchpotato. A local software that you can access in the browser http://localhost:xxx/ http://localhost:xxx/
joecool1029 8y ago
So it's basically an updated Usenet. I started to use Usenet years back to download shows. Around 10 years ago it was unusable due to spam, now there's actually a few active newsgroups and some people came back to post so they could remain pseudoanonymous and not deal with upvote economy. For whatever reason, spam seems to have mostly gone away. The infrastructure is still quite robust and unlike Aether, posts stay up for many years. Honestly, the only super annoying thing on Usenet today are noobs coming in from Google Groups and responding to threads started in the 90's.
gpm 8y ago
For something that is nominally open source, that's quite the TOS I get when I try and download and run it from getaether.com > and Aether app is offered to you conditioned on your acceptance > Aether App is subject to Aether Technologies Inc.'s Privacy Policy > If you use this [...] App [...] You may not assign or otherwise transfer your account to any other person or entity. > You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable, recovable license to access and use [...] Aether App > You will not modify, publish, transmit, reverse engineer, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit and of the content, in or oin part, found on the Site or App. While normally boiler plate I find this term particularly amusing given the whole focus on anti censorship > Aether Technologies Inc. reserves the right to review materials posted to a Communication Service [App] and to remove any materials in its sole discretion. This term seemed reasonable (apart from a EULA at all on a "open source" project) - until I saw the example. I'm sure I can do that on reddit. > Don't break it, or do anything that interferes with its normal use. By way of example, and not as a limitation, do not post base64 encoded images (or similar) in text form This part would just read like ass covering, except it's immediately followed by "In addition by [...] submitting your Submission, you are perpetually and nonrevocably licensing your Submission under Create Commons BY-SA license.". As such the only possible uses of it would seem to be abusive. > by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission [to the app] you are granting Aether Technologies Inc., our affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, without limiting, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission. In the best of practices it includes a mandatory arbitration agreement > In the event the parties are not able to resolve any dispute between them arising out of or concerning these Terms and Conditions, or any provisions hereof, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise at law or in equity for damages or any other relief, then such dispute shall be resolved only by final and binding arbitration pursuant to [blah blah blah blah] Just to be extra sure they won't be held accountable by the law they include a class action waiver (the caps are in the original) > Any arbitration under these Terms and Conditions will take place on an individual basis; class arbitrations and class/representative/collection actions are not permitted. THE PARTIES AGREE THAT A PARTY MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN EACH'S INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN [BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH]. And just in case any arbitrators get any ideas > Further, unless both you and Aether Technologies Inc. agree otherwise, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of a representative or class proceeding.
kawfey 8y ago
I feel like this is yet another something I'll have on my PC for a few days, forget about it, and come back to find it defunct for my desires because there's still reddit.
alasdair_ 8y ago
“It is very hard to make text illegal” - literally any kind of illegal content can be encoded as text trivially.
- stordoff 8y ago
  It's also not true - it may be in the US, but for instance in the UK: It is an offence to "the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet a document or record containing information of that kind [likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism]." It may protect the site, but it doesn't protect users. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58
buttershakes 8y ago
I really like this idea, but I'm struggling with the decentralized aspect of it. If you can control the content, what exactly are the user's getting? Content can be scraped and saved indefinitely, the IP address information can potentially be leaked, the exact security of the system is unclear. It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  I was confused, too. They claim it is cryptographically impossible to edit someone else's posts, but apparently some group of people have the ability to take down people's posts. I'm wondering -- what's the point, then? It's not censorship resistant, but at least it tries to be transparent (all moderator actions are visible). I'm still not seeing how this would be any better than Reddit if a small group of people have centralized control over the content distribution.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  The point is that you can choose your own moderators. No one that you don’t explicitly trust as a moderator can delete content you see. If you no longer trust a moderator, you disable him / her and all moderation actions that was taken by that person is reverted on your machine.
jeswin 8y ago
Running an app and a server locally is a hard sell when it only serves a single app. IPFS, dat and Secure Scuttlebutt also run a daemon, but they run generic protocols which enable multiple apps. Also, why the aether protocol in uris? Wouldn't that preclude browser support? Safelisting should happen for generic protocols, and apps demanding that of browsers will be a slippery slope. Also, curious how this different from SSB channels. It seems very similar, but I could be wrong.
ilaksh 8y ago
Windows 10 said it "protected my PC". Did you sign the executable? I recently went through a huge hassle getting a code signing certificate. So if you didn't get one I understand why.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951 tl;dr: I concur on the pain, and I’m working on it.
Kaveren 8y ago
I believe I've commented on this earlier, I remember it being submitted last year. I still think this is a really awful, completely useless product. I really like that HN & Reddit & Discord are persistent. It's very valuable to me and the general population to be able to search from stuff that happened years ago. The worst comment history usually does is get you a snarky reply on Reddit. Losing your job for no good reason is bad, but showing support for those people is more of a solution. People will need to get used to other people not being perfect as far as opinions go, and that people's opinions can change. I am very uninterested in Aether, the general population is not interested in Aether, and this will never catch on. The only people who care about this are a few tech people. Even people who get kicked off Twitter / Facebook / Reddit go on to centralized Gab / Voat / et cetera without a problem, this is not useful. Edit: Also trivial for someone maliciously or otherwise to just archive stuff, so you lose the benefits and gain very little.
ilaksh 8y ago
It says I need to pay on Patreon to get a unique username. Does this mean if I don't pay then someone else can impersonate me?
fireattack 8y ago
>You can disable any mod, and choose anyone as a mod In Aether, if you don’t like what a mod is doing, you can just disable him. Flip a switch, and everything he deleted reappears. You can also choose a non-mod as a mod. How exactly does this work? I assume the first part means that you can disable certain mod and then the content deleted by him will be visible for you, but still invisible for others (if they didn't disable this mod)? But what does it mean that I can choose a mod? Will it be my "personal" mode, i.e. the content removed by him will be invisible to me and me only, or will it be applied to everyone's content? So what stops everyone and their dog becomes mods eventually? Sorry if my questions don't make sense, but I have no clue how it works from these words.
- itake 8y ago
  My other thought is if illegal content is posted, how does it get removed? Like if a mod removes it and you don't follow that mod, then illegal content would still be distributed to your machine?
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  It’s an append only graph database whose edges are hydrated at the local user end. Since the edge construction happens on the user’s computer, the user can control how it is built. For example, if a user decides to no longer trust a moderator, an incremental recompile from the raw database reconstructs the relevant parts as if the moderator was never a mod for the local user in the first place.
  - fireattack 8y ago
    Ah sorry, by "how it works", I mean from a user experience standpoint, not from a technical one (i.e. I still don't get it :().
ilaksh 8y ago
I see these aether:// links which are supposed to link to subs but they just open a blank/error page in Chrome when I click them in Aether and I can't figure out how to subscribe to subs with the link.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
I half-completed a very similar project to this. Kudos on shipping. The main difference between this and mine is that mine required accounts to have a certain amount of hashcash-style proof of work before they were accepted. This prevents people from creating a large number of dummy accounts, which means that banning someone actually has teeth, since they can't come back with a fresh account instantly. Additionally, the posts were encrypted with the name of the community, so that you could make "private" communities simply by using hard-to-guess names. I toyed with the idea of making hashcash style PoW required for posts, as well as accounts, but I gave up on the project before I got that far.
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  That’s how Aether works. Every graph object requires a certain amount of PoW in the form of a Hashcash variant. You were on the right track! (Assuming this is the right track, ha)
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    Oh well at least my idea was good I suppose. (!)
    - avian 8y ago
      I get it why it's useful in practice here, but on a conceptual level relying on proof-of-work always seems weird to me. It's like saying "you have to pay to use this service, but instead of giving the money to the host, you need to drop it down the drain". From an economic standpoint it just doesn't make any sense.
ilaksh 8y ago
I signed up on Patreon for $10. How do I get my unique username?
orangea 8y ago
I'm surprised that the website doesn't mention anywhere whether Aether is open source or not, not even on the page titled "Open Source."
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
From the GitHub page: > The Linux version provided as a courtesy, it might work, but is completely unsupported. And the Linux version is provided as a snap, which really works best on Ubuntu and doesn't work at all on some distros (due to the Snap people's poor decision to make snap have an unnecessary systemd dependency). I really doubt you are going to make a lot of headway with a very 'techy' alternative to Reddit with such poor (and snippy) Linux support.
- calcifer 8y ago
  Out of the ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro. I doubt it will have any real impact on the number of users.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    The sort of people who are going to try to download some new (and somewhat dubious-sounding - "I'm going to be storing all of the content on my local machine?") are actually pretty likely not to be using a systemd distro. Getting early adopters would seem pretty crucial for this type of project, and I'm not sure where the creator imagines they're going to come from with the current passive-aggressive Linux support. > ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.
    - calcifer 8y ago
      > You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic. I'd suggest getting a refresher on sarcasm first.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        My suggestion followed on in the same sarcastic tone. The implication is still that there are hardly enough desktop Linux users to be relevant to this project - which I think is misleading here, since Aether is the sort of thing that Linux users are much more likely to try out than Mac or Windows users. And, my original point is still that a combination of relying on snaps and a snippy tone towards Linux isn't likely to be productive for Aether.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deanclatworthy 8y ago
Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6 months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities? Another thing that stood out to me is when I went to download, I noticed immediately I'm dealing with a DMG. So I tried to find a link to github where I could take a look at the source, and found the "Open source" link in the footer. This just listed a bunch of libraries, but not the place to build myself if I wanted to. Maybe include a link to github [1]. Finally, when I did reach your github, there is a big notice: > https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether What kind of metrics? And why isn't this in big text on your homepage? Can I disable it? Why do you need to keep metrics? 99 times out of 100 people will not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. I think this is a pretty a bad decision. https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether
- hyeonwho4 8y ago
  How much text content does an active user produce over 6 months? Most uers lurk, so the average user is probably producing a few hundred kilobytes of text. That adds up (and compresses) to only a few gigabytes.
- brp_korea 8y ago
  > Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6 months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities? It looks like disk usage is capped at 10 GB.
- leerob 8y ago
  > What kind of metrics? > 99 times out of 100 people will not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. It's open source - I would just take a look at the code.
fock 8y ago
How does this work when one is in a private network, where you can't advertise/remember your location easily? Seems like in the end you still need some servers to rely on to federate. Pleasantly surprised I found no mention of blockchain$$$ anywhere, but this probably can still change
pexaizix 8y ago
Downloaded it. Whooping 150 MB that took over two minutes to download. Then data took like 10 minutes to show up, with no clear sign that the app was bootstrapping and not merely non-functional. The app keeps using 100% of my IO for 20 minutes now, writing to files like "KVStore.kv" and "searchindex/store". If I had an SSD I would close it, afraid of it frying the disk.
Nanocurrency 8y ago
> Aether is within the jurisdiction of the United States Someone needs to fork this so that it doesn't operate under any jurisdiction.
0_gravitas 8y ago
I've blocked reddit some time ago on all of my devices, what events happened that the post is referencing at the start?
- ric2b 8y ago
  It has been banning several sub-reddits for political or PR reasons and it got a hefty investment from a Chinese company.
LordIoulaum 8y ago
So far, although it seems buggy, the general quality of content is fairly clean. They also do have a moderation function already, although I can't really comment on how it's used in practice. Moderation isn't an issue too early on. Beyond that... For a decentralized network, if the different sub-reddits (essentially) are moderated by their creators, they should end up with their own cultures in time. Good leadership is always key to building good communities.

168 points by dfischer 8y ago

vortico 8y ago

Is there an interface to Aether that I can view in my browser, such as at http://localhost:8080 http://localhost:8080?

nyolfen 8y ago
yes, if you're running the app; this is from the post: > Like Reddit, you can link to Aether from the web > Here’s an example link: > aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6
- vortico 8y ago
  That opens the client, not uses the browser.
rolleiflex 8y ago
Not yet - but that’s a good idea.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It would be really great if Aether could work as a true daemon / service - so that it'd be guaranteed to be up and running at all times, even when e.g. not logged in - and then offered a local web interface on top of that.

nerdbaggy 8y ago

I wonder why the peer to peer. Aether can still remove content, so it’s not really decentralized. And you have to store the entire site on your computer, I wonder what the legal ramifications are if there is bad stuff saved on your computer but you didn’t put it there.

rolleiflex 8y ago

Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 Happy to answer any questions, as usual. Source code is here: https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether (I’ll update it with the latest release as soon as I can clean it up)

wierdaaron 8y ago
How big is the local cache of the network on each client device?
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  About 9mb as of now. Of course, the compiled graph is larger. If you want full text search, that has its own index that takes space as well. But that last one is optional.
jka 8y ago
Looks like a very simple and clean user experience, definitely curious to try this out. Is encryption between peers currently supported and/or planned?
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Yes - it’s encrypted-only. It does not allow any plaintext communication. The way nodes talk to each other is plain old HTTPS (TLS v1.2). So I’m definitely not inventing my own crypto here, I’ve tried very hard to avoid that. The content on a node is public though, so this is transport encryption.
  - hyeonwho4 8y ago
    Is data saved to disk encrypted? Can you plausibly state that what I have been reading is invisible to a computer repair shop? Can I plausibly state that there are no links to (child) porn searchable on my disks?

Aearnus 8y ago

These kinds of social media platforms always seem so technologically interesting, but in practice, end up as a bastion for content too distasteful or hateful to post on "normal" services (think voat, the vast majority of Mastodon instances, gab, the list goes on). I feel like the centralization and the ability to direct and moderate persistent conversation is what allows "mainstream" social media to have such widespread popularity. These services abandon that model with good intentions but never positive results.

rolleiflex 8y ago
Creator here. I’m very aware of this problem - and I’m working make this suitable for mainstream use. That’s one of the reasons why there is a SFW list as mentioned in the article, for example. The aim of Aether is to deliver a real improvement in privacy to the masses. It explicitly chooses to be practical, with mass appeal, versus the narrow appeal of the instances you mention. (Well, at least try to do that.)
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I feel morally obligated to start using Aether because I think that p2p and decentralization is what we need. I am going to try to make it work. It would sure help to have a mobile app.
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    Coming!
- ggsp 8y ago
  As I have you here, an OT question: will the business version of Aether also remove content after six months?
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    No. The business version is a hosted / on-prem SaaS, that removes the space limitations and other similar restrictions that deletion is a solution to. That said, you can still have it delete at a certain threshold. I know of a few large Silicon Valley companies that delete emails past 1.5-2y as a way of limiting their legal exposure. If you’re a 1000+ employee company, that is pretty much standard practice so long as you take care to not delete anything with a legal discovery hold.

gnicholas 8y ago

> Due to the recent news about Reddit Which news specifically? Also, it might be useful for the blog posts to have a date at the top. I saw there was a “1 day ago” notation at the bottom, but having it at the top would be more convenient/conventional.

edoceo 8y ago
Tencent investment?
- _asummers 8y ago
  It's not unreasonable to assume people missed that news. It was front page here for a day and on reddit for about the same duration. If someone didn't login for a few days, it was very easily missed.
wraithm112 8y ago
Probably the investment round: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/
weeeeeeb 8y ago
The crackdown on anime content was the way bigger news to me. But that might just be my filter bubble.
sridca 8y ago
Tencent investment and the discussion on moderator censorship: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the_recent_chinese_company_tencent_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19151922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19151922

User23 8y ago

Windows 10 informs me this is unsafe to run. You're going to need to fix that if you want this to catch on.

rolleiflex 8y ago
Yup, It’s because it’s not signed with Authenticode, which is because it’s taking Comodo an insane amount of time to actually give me a certificate. Let’s Encrypt for code signing can’t come soon enough.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- slededit 8y ago
  It will learn even unsigned code after enough time, but future versions may or may not keep your earned reputation. The certificate is a good idea.
- gruez 8y ago
  >Let’s Encrypt for code signing can’t come soon enough. AFAIK that will never happen because authenticode signing certificates are all essentially EV certificates, because they require verification of an individual's (or company's) identity. That's very expensive to do compared to DV certificates that letsecrypt currently issues, which have essentially $0 marginal cost.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I used Comodo also (now apparently bought by Sectigo) and they are the worst company I have ever dealt with. First I was trying to get them to tell me if my documents were acceptable before I took them to the notary. They did not seem to speak English particularly well and could not recognize that my internet/phone bill was a phone bill (because it also mentioned internet so they had never heard of a combination phone/internet bill before apparently), could not recognize a financial statement. They kept repeating themselves but with subtle contradictions. Eventually I complained to K-Software (the reseller) and the guy then referred me to some account rep or something with a Western name. Then she sent me instructions which I followed and uploaded their notarized form. Which the instructions did not even say to upload the documents, just the notarized form. Then they said nothing and I eventually asked them what was going on. Then the Comodo rep replies and first of all does not acknowledge that I uploaded anything, 100% contradicts what was in the instructions, saying that not only the form needed to be notarized, but every individual page. I told the K-Software guy I was not going back to the notary. Then he calls them, I wait, I email him again, then they say I have to have my phone number in a valid third party registry. But they don't say what the ___ is a valid third party registry. And they never said that was required before -- I gave them the phone bill with my phone number on it. Anyway it took almost two months and maybe thirty emails before I finally got it.

imh 8y ago

>Anything you post on Aether will be gone in about 6 months. This is nice, because no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep. This seems really misleading. If I can view it, I can save it. Enough people take data dumps from reddit that even if reddit decided to follow the same policy, it wouldn't mean "no one can stalk your decade’s worth of Reddit history and figure out where you sleep."

rolleiflex 8y ago
My apologies. The front page at https://getaether.net https://getaether.net has a better description: ‘It keeps 6 months of posts by default. It's gone after. If something is worth keeping, someone will save it within six months — but not from beyond that.’
stordoff 8y ago
This immediately makes less interested in the platform. Reddit posts older than six months can be useful.
- deeplearninganf 8y ago
  Different use case. Reddit is an ephemeral tool, its ancient gems are hidden and difficult to access, imho a real solution to useful information problem is something like wiki or a ML-based super-aggregate.
  - bhl 8y ago
    Not really: I’ve found very useful information by using Google and just having site:reddit.com, and or using the iffy reddit search bar. The benefit of having a voting system is that ancient gems will always get bubbled up.
  - stordoff 8y ago
    I don't really agree. Specifically for video games, I've found _a lot_ of useful information just by Googling something and the answer being on Reddit. A lot of 'casual' (as in people have just discussed it and not deliberately sought to put it out there) information would be lost if Reddit was wiped after six months. Yes, other tools might be better for information sharing, but Reddit as a conversation space and Google as a search tool over the top of it is valuable.

tinalumfoil 8y ago

Decentralized reddit already existed in the form if usenet. This adds some moderation features which is nice, but I have trouble believing people care about decentralization enough to switch. What would really help is if there was a website I could explore the content on before hosting anything myself. Imagine there's many instances each with many users that all sync between each other, and of I lose trust of one I can seamlessly switch to another. But of course this has been done before and died, so the point still remains of why people should switch.

rolleiflex 8y ago
Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet. (It’s more decentralised than Usenet - everyone is an ‘Usenet server’ in Aether, vs large university servers in the original Usenet)
- tzs 8y ago
  > Yup! Aether is basically a nicer, decentralised Usenet. Maybe you should add support for NNTP clients to make it even more like an updated Usenet. I wish things like Reddit, HN, email servers, and everything else that handles threaded discussion would provide an NNTP interface. That would let the user use the same program for all of these things. They could still provide web interfaces for use in browsers, but those could internally use the NNTP interface. I suppose this would be hard for Reddit and some of the others, because it would be hard for them to show ads over the NNTP interface, but for anything that is not ad supported give me NNTP.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  How is it decentralized if illegal content can be taken down? It should be impossible for a single entity to do that in a truly decentralized system. It appears this has a backdoor.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    "Taken down" just means that clients get notification that such and such comment is bad. The stock client will remove them and reject them in the future, but there's no enforcement - you can have a client that e.g. completely ignores any such requests. If I understand it correctly, multiple such clients would end up maintaining all those deleted posts in distributed P2P storage, in their part of the network. So, basically, there's an opt-in "Dark Aether".

cwyers 8y ago

> a) Similar to Reddit’s gold, if you want to support Aether, you can buy a 'unique’ username (with a checkmark, like Twitter) that makes you the unique owner of that username for the donation duration. If you want to do so, check out the Patreon. That seems suboptimal. And what happens if you make a duplicate username while it's not being paid for, and then it gets paid for?

newhotelowner 8y ago

A native app is not really that great for Reddit style content. Not keyboard friendly at all. Took me a couple of minutes to find subs. I was about to give up. You cant have a Reddit without pictures/gifs. And it should open in the app. This should be like sabnzbd, or couchpotato. A local software that you can access in the browser http://localhost:xxx/ http://localhost:xxx/

joecool1029 8y ago

So it's basically an updated Usenet. I started to use Usenet years back to download shows. Around 10 years ago it was unusable due to spam, now there's actually a few active newsgroups and some people came back to post so they could remain pseudoanonymous and not deal with upvote economy. For whatever reason, spam seems to have mostly gone away. The infrastructure is still quite robust and unlike Aether, posts stay up for many years. Honestly, the only super annoying thing on Usenet today are noobs coming in from Google Groups and responding to threads started in the 90's.

gpm 8y ago

For something that is nominally open source, that's quite the TOS I get when I try and download and run it from getaether.com > and Aether app is offered to you conditioned on your acceptance > Aether App is subject to Aether Technologies Inc.'s Privacy Policy > If you use this [...] App [...] You may not assign or otherwise transfer your account to any other person or entity. > You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable, recovable license to access and use [...] Aether App > You will not modify, publish, transmit, reverse engineer, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit and of the content, in or oin part, found on the Site or App. While normally boiler plate I find this term particularly amusing given the whole focus on anti censorship > Aether Technologies Inc. reserves the right to review materials posted to a Communication Service [App] and to remove any materials in its sole discretion. This term seemed reasonable (apart from a EULA at all on a "open source" project) - until I saw the example. I'm sure I can do that on reddit. > Don't break it, or do anything that interferes with its normal use. By way of example, and not as a limitation, do not post base64 encoded images (or similar) in text form This part would just read like ass covering, except it's immediately followed by "In addition by [...] submitting your Submission, you are perpetually and nonrevocably licensing your Submission under Create Commons BY-SA license.". As such the only possible uses of it would seem to be abusive. > by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission [to the app] you are granting Aether Technologies Inc., our affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, without limiting, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission. In the best of practices it includes a mandatory arbitration agreement > In the event the parties are not able to resolve any dispute between them arising out of or concerning these Terms and Conditions, or any provisions hereof, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise at law or in equity for damages or any other relief, then such dispute shall be resolved only by final and binding arbitration pursuant to [blah blah blah blah] Just to be extra sure they won't be held accountable by the law they include a class action waiver (the caps are in the original) > Any arbitration under these Terms and Conditions will take place on an individual basis; class arbitrations and class/representative/collection actions are not permitted. THE PARTIES AGREE THAT A PARTY MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN EACH'S INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN [BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH]. And just in case any arbitrators get any ideas > Further, unless both you and Aether Technologies Inc. agree otherwise, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of a representative or class proceeding.

kawfey 8y ago

I feel like this is yet another something I'll have on my PC for a few days, forget about it, and come back to find it defunct for my desires because there's still reddit.

alasdair_ 8y ago

“It is very hard to make text illegal” - literally any kind of illegal content can be encoded as text trivially.

stordoff 8y ago
It's also not true - it may be in the US, but for instance in the UK: It is an offence to "the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet a document or record containing information of that kind [likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism]." It may protect the site, but it doesn't protect users. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58

buttershakes 8y ago

I really like this idea, but I'm struggling with the decentralized aspect of it. If you can control the content, what exactly are the user's getting? Content can be scraped and saved indefinitely, the IP address information can potentially be leaked, the exact security of the system is unclear. It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.

anonytrary 8y ago
I was confused, too. They claim it is cryptographically impossible to edit someone else's posts, but apparently some group of people have the ability to take down people's posts. I'm wondering -- what's the point, then? It's not censorship resistant, but at least it tries to be transparent (all moderator actions are visible). I'm still not seeing how this would be any better than Reddit if a small group of people have centralized control over the content distribution.
rolleiflex 8y ago
The point is that you can choose your own moderators. No one that you don’t explicitly trust as a moderator can delete content you see. If you no longer trust a moderator, you disable him / her and all moderation actions that was taken by that person is reverted on your machine.

jeswin 8y ago

Running an app and a server locally is a hard sell when it only serves a single app. IPFS, dat and Secure Scuttlebutt also run a daemon, but they run generic protocols which enable multiple apps. Also, why the aether protocol in uris? Wouldn't that preclude browser support? Safelisting should happen for generic protocols, and apps demanding that of browsers will be a slippery slope. Also, curious how this different from SSB channels. It seems very similar, but I could be wrong.

ilaksh 8y ago

Windows 10 said it "protected my PC". Did you sign the executable? I recently went through a huge hassle getting a code signing certificate. So if you didn't get one I understand why.

rolleiflex 8y ago
See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176951 tl;dr: I concur on the pain, and I’m working on it.

Kaveren 8y ago

I believe I've commented on this earlier, I remember it being submitted last year. I still think this is a really awful, completely useless product. I really like that HN & Reddit & Discord are persistent. It's very valuable to me and the general population to be able to search from stuff that happened years ago. The worst comment history usually does is get you a snarky reply on Reddit. Losing your job for no good reason is bad, but showing support for those people is more of a solution. People will need to get used to other people not being perfect as far as opinions go, and that people's opinions can change. I am very uninterested in Aether, the general population is not interested in Aether, and this will never catch on. The only people who care about this are a few tech people. Even people who get kicked off Twitter / Facebook / Reddit go on to centralized Gab / Voat / et cetera without a problem, this is not useful. Edit: Also trivial for someone maliciously or otherwise to just archive stuff, so you lose the benefits and gain very little.

ilaksh 8y ago

It says I need to pay on Patreon to get a unique username. Does this mean if I don't pay then someone else can impersonate me?

fireattack 8y ago

>You can disable any mod, and choose anyone as a mod In Aether, if you don’t like what a mod is doing, you can just disable him. Flip a switch, and everything he deleted reappears. You can also choose a non-mod as a mod. How exactly does this work? I assume the first part means that you can disable certain mod and then the content deleted by him will be visible for you, but still invisible for others (if they didn't disable this mod)? But what does it mean that I can choose a mod? Will it be my "personal" mode, i.e. the content removed by him will be invisible to me and me only, or will it be applied to everyone's content? So what stops everyone and their dog becomes mods eventually? Sorry if my questions don't make sense, but I have no clue how it works from these words.

itake 8y ago
My other thought is if illegal content is posted, how does it get removed? Like if a mod removes it and you don't follow that mod, then illegal content would still be distributed to your machine?
rolleiflex 8y ago
It’s an append only graph database whose edges are hydrated at the local user end. Since the edge construction happens on the user’s computer, the user can control how it is built. For example, if a user decides to no longer trust a moderator, an incremental recompile from the raw database reconstructs the relevant parts as if the moderator was never a mod for the local user in the first place.
- fireattack 8y ago
  Ah sorry, by "how it works", I mean from a user experience standpoint, not from a technical one (i.e. I still don't get it :().

ilaksh 8y ago

I see these aether:// links which are supposed to link to subs but they just open a blank/error page in Chrome when I click them in Aether and I can't figure out how to subscribe to subs with the link.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

I half-completed a very similar project to this. Kudos on shipping. The main difference between this and mine is that mine required accounts to have a certain amount of hashcash-style proof of work before they were accepted. This prevents people from creating a large number of dummy accounts, which means that banning someone actually has teeth, since they can't come back with a fresh account instantly. Additionally, the posts were encrypted with the name of the community, so that you could make "private" communities simply by using hard-to-guess names. I toyed with the idea of making hashcash style PoW required for posts, as well as accounts, but I gave up on the project before I got that far.

rolleiflex 8y ago
That’s how Aether works. Every graph object requires a certain amount of PoW in the form of a Hashcash variant. You were on the right track! (Assuming this is the right track, ha)
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Oh well at least my idea was good I suppose. (!)
  - avian 8y ago
    I get it why it's useful in practice here, but on a conceptual level relying on proof-of-work always seems weird to me. It's like saying "you have to pay to use this service, but instead of giving the money to the host, you need to drop it down the drain". From an economic standpoint it just doesn't make any sense.

ilaksh 8y ago

I signed up on Patreon for $10. How do I get my unique username?

orangea 8y ago

I'm surprised that the website doesn't mention anywhere whether Aether is open source or not, not even on the page titled "Open Source."

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

From the GitHub page: > The Linux version provided as a courtesy, it might work, but is completely unsupported. And the Linux version is provided as a snap, which really works best on Ubuntu and doesn't work at all on some distros (due to the Snap people's poor decision to make snap have an unnecessary systemd dependency). I really doubt you are going to make a lot of headway with a very 'techy' alternative to Reddit with such poor (and snippy) Linux support.

calcifer 8y ago
Out of the ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro. I doubt it will have any real impact on the number of users.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  The sort of people who are going to try to download some new (and somewhat dubious-sounding - "I'm going to be storing all of the content on my local machine?") are actually pretty likely not to be using a systemd distro. Getting early adopters would seem pretty crucial for this type of project, and I'm not sure where the creator imagines they're going to come from with the current passive-aggressive Linux support. > ~100 people who use desktop Linux (I'm one of them) a generous 1 (rounded upwards) uses a non-systemd distro You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic.
  - calcifer 8y ago
    > You also may want to brush up on your arithmetic. I'd suggest getting a refresher on sarcasm first.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      My suggestion followed on in the same sarcastic tone. The implication is still that there are hardly enough desktop Linux users to be relevant to this project - which I think is misleading here, since Aether is the sort of thing that Linux users are much more likely to try out than Mac or Windows users. And, my original point is still that a combination of relying on snaps and a snippy tone towards Linux isn't likely to be productive for Aether.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deanclatworthy 8y ago

Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6 months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities? Another thing that stood out to me is when I went to download, I noticed immediately I'm dealing with a DMG. So I tried to find a link to github where I could take a look at the source, and found the "Open source" link in the footer. This just listed a bunch of libraries, but not the place to build myself if I wanted to. Maybe include a link to github [1]. Finally, when I did reach your github, there is a big notice: > https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether What kind of metrics? And why isn't this in big text on your homepage? Can I disable it? Why do you need to keep metrics? 99 times out of 100 people will not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. I think this is a pretty a bad decision. https://github.com/nehbit/aether https://github.com/nehbit/aether

hyeonwho4 8y ago
How much text content does an active user produce over 6 months? Most uers lurk, so the average user is probably producing a few hundred kilobytes of text. That adds up (and compresses) to only a few gigabytes.
brp_korea 8y ago
> Cool. I really like the idea of these things in principle. But how well is 6 months of content going to scale when you have 1 million active communities? It looks like disk usage is capped at 10 GB.
leerob 8y ago
> What kind of metrics? > 99 times out of 100 people will not be able to correctly anonymise metrics. It's open source - I would just take a look at the code.

fock 8y ago

How does this work when one is in a private network, where you can't advertise/remember your location easily? Seems like in the end you still need some servers to rely on to federate. Pleasantly surprised I found no mention of blockchain$$$ anywhere, but this probably can still change

pexaizix 8y ago

Downloaded it. Whooping 150 MB that took over two minutes to download. Then data took like 10 minutes to show up, with no clear sign that the app was bootstrapping and not merely non-functional. The app keeps using 100% of my IO for 20 minutes now, writing to files like "KVStore.kv" and "searchindex/store". If I had an SSD I would close it, afraid of it frying the disk.

Nanocurrency 8y ago

> Aether is within the jurisdiction of the United States Someone needs to fork this so that it doesn't operate under any jurisdiction.

0_gravitas 8y ago

I've blocked reddit some time ago on all of my devices, what events happened that the post is referencing at the start?

ric2b 8y ago
It has been banning several sub-reddits for political or PR reasons and it got a hefty investment from a Chinese company.

LordIoulaum 8y ago

So far, although it seems buggy, the general quality of content is fairly clean. They also do have a moderation function already, although I can't really comment on how it's used in practice. Moderation isn't an issue too early on. Beyond that... For a decentralized network, if the different sub-reddits (essentially) are moderated by their creators, they should end up with their own cultures in time. Good leadership is always key to building good communities.