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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 dec

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".
    - ubercow13 8y ago
      Is there a single master moderator hard coded into the default client with the ability to take things down?
LeoPanthera 8y ago
Usenet is federated, not decentralised, and the distinction is important.

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".
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    Is there a single master moderator hard coded into the default client with the ability to take things down?

LeoPanthera 8y ago

Usenet is federated, not decentralised, and the distinction is important.