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We have something similar to this, Aether. https://getaether.net https://getaether.net. (code at github.com/nehbit/aether) Always glad to see more eyeballs on

We have something similar to this, Aether. https://getaether.net https://getaether.net. (code at github.com/nehbit/aether) Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance: - Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ as servers that talk to each other. - By proxy that means we can’t really have a web app unfortunately (working on it by the way of running a daemon on a raspberry pi) and they can - we need a native app running on your machine and seeding context to the network. - By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ in the form of the ownership of your home server that federated networks have. You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty - In Aether we have elections which elect mods based on popular vote and you control who is a mod, precisely because the ‘social compiler’ runs on your machine and allows you to compile it however you want. Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities - We have a mod audit log and have had it for a while - everyone’s mod actions are visible to everyone (this I think they also have) - Lastly, we have made the decision to not monetise Aether itself and create a team communication app called Aether Pro, and monetise that. This creates a ‘Chinese wall’ between where we make our money and the P2P network, which means it’s a shield against drifting towards trying to make money from a social network. The code bases are separate but similar, so that also means work done on the Pro helps Aether as well. We have gotten some funding for the Pro, and we consider the P2P version a ‘marketing / goodwill expense’ in the context of that funding. That aligns us towards making sure Aether is long-term viable, well maintained and monetisation-free. In contrast I think they’ve gotten money to work directly on this, which has both good and more hazardous sides. In summary, we opted for a long term structure that has less moral hazard (in my opinion, of course), in favour of a more stable app without a need for monetisation that has fewer, more stable releases. For context, here's how a recent thread looks on my Aether client: https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png

DevKoala 6y ago
Excellent. I am trying this. Thank you.
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  Please do! We have a small, friendly community. Always glad to see new faces. Let me know if you have any issues.
rglullis 6y ago
> By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ (...) so no one can control what you see. This right here is the main thing that will never let any fully-decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems: - Most people do want "middle-management". They don't want to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score points with their social peers. All they want is to open their browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done with it. - This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control does not exist. A federated system can degenerate into a fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances. Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of pushing it except for buzzword investors.
- phist_mcgee 6y ago
  Care to explain the Zawinski test? Google gave me zip on it.
  - emayljames 6y ago
    zawinski's law? Though not seeing how it is relevant to their point though.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    One does not link from HN to jwz site Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it, given that he retracted it on the grounds that too many people subverted the idea to justify all of bad practices related to social software. Anyway, archive is your friend: https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.o...
- comex 6y ago
  > Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances. Is running your own instance hard? Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance. At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance, so you can’t switch to a new instance without giving up your profile. Or they may even require other instances to have a human agree to federate with you, which is a big ask for a one-person instance. Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it? Then there should be no disadvantage in bundle that into the client app so that everyone does do it. But now you have a decentralized system.
LockAndLol 6y ago
> Aether is a relatively large app with an Electron and Go toolchain, at 100,000+ lines of code. Getting it to compile requires setting up a correct build runtime with the latest versions of Go, Node (for Electron) and C dependencies and development environments. Expect the initial set-up to take a few hours. Be patient! Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker, snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than that. Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the intricacies of operating something like is were solved.
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  Actually, we have recently improved on this, it’s probably now less than half an hour of setup, at least on Linux. The new guide is on the Github repo: https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732b1e https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732... We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example. To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.
  - 0x6c6f6c 6y ago
    There's a fully JavaScript implementation of gRPC[0] that you may be able to use should you implement a web app using Service Workers[1]. This would be installable for browsers in a manner that should provide long-lived access to the network. 0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API/Using_Service_Workers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
cambalache 6y ago
What does it mean the communities are ephemeral? Because reddit archives is one their strengths. Public Slack channels are lame to me because of their limits.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Sounds like there's some really interesting ideas here. > Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities Reminds me of the 'sharding' idea in World of Warcraft. I'm really curious if you'll end up with issues of 'social dissonance' where your perception of a community differs drastically from someone else's because you literally see different content, and if that affects how people engage with the community. Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? Is there a plan for how to deal with that, should Aether ever become popular enough to get more mainstream news attention? I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.
- buzzkillington 6y ago
  >Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? [...] I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective. We comply with the letter of the law for the jurisdiction we fall under. Trying to explain anything to a mob is pointless. We don't need to add ever more censors to what we see. The US government is bad enough, some hipster in NY or SF writing for a glorified wordpress blog should be as relevant as the mullah for Iran's most backward village.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Describing journalists concerned about bigoted communities present on your platform as "a mob" is certainly a hot take.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Allow me to add one of my own: Journalists' jobs aren't to share their "concerns", it's to report the facts. So much of the media's pathology is a result of the problem that news doesn't even try to be impartial anymore. If you want to "share your concerns", the place to do that is an op-ed, or a blog post, or twitter, or something. But it isn't journalism anymore.
TimJRobinson 6y ago
Have you thought about implementing a decentralized, user centric moderation system instead of electing mods? Like this: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation-system-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... Would this work with Aether?
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  The way it works in Aether is that we have a few rules on choosing what 'effective' mods you have on your view. From weakest (as in, most prone to be overridden) to strongest: - Default mods, which are either the creator of the community or those that are assigned by that person - Elected mods, mods which are chosen by the community. Election goes both ways, you can both be elected or impeached. For example, a default mod can be impeached by the election system, and that would render that mod a non-mod for you - Mods you've personally chosen. Choosing someone to be a mod for you is your vote in the election. So the system isn't 'enforcing' mods you haven't chosen onto you as a result of the elections. Elections only make the decision only if you haven't made a decision for that mod in either way — if you make a decision that is ironclad (for you, in your personal, local view), since nothing can override your personal vote for or against somebody. The more you vote in elections, the more you shape your own view of the universe. The article is long, but what I can see there that is not implemented in Aether is the transitive property of trust, instead of having a vote which is binary, he seems to be advocating for a 0 to 100 trust, and the idea that trust of the people you trust means something to you. (Let me know if I got this wrong). This is great in theory — and this was actually considered for implementation at one point. The issue isn't that it doesn't make sense but it is quite literally impossible to implement, since it makes it so that almost every trust decision made by someone on the network at some point in time affects almost all other entities, which leaves you with an almost entirely 'dirty' graph that you have to traverse in entirety and recompile. This can be done on a centralised service since there is one graph to compile and everyone submits to it. However, in Aether, what we try to do is that we try to keep the graph compilation part on the user end, both because it's a P2P network, and also because custom graphs compiled on the client end is what allows the votes to be able to modify the graph structure itself. That sort of gradual outflow of trust across a social graph making decisions on what to show or not show for every single piece of content is an intense amount of computation to do for every new modification to the trust gradient.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
> we can’t really have a web app Are you familiar with https://notabug.io/ https://notabug.io/ ? IIRC this is decentralized.
drummer 6y ago
You guys are on the right track with Aether. I love the features especially decentralized sovereignty and the moderation based on that. This needs to get adopted widely to stop censorship.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
This sounds pretty interesting, but is it a lot of work to moderate a home server yourself? > You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty I’m wondering what I’d have to do to just bare minimum make sure no illegal content gets onto any hardware that I own. Just to use the obvious extreme example, I don’t want to see any illegal pornography, which in addition to not wanting to see I’d have to report to authorities, which I’d presumably have to explain the presence of, which I’m guessing worst case involves them confiscating my devices for some time. There’s a practical benefit to me in having some middle manager taking responsibility for making sure that never gets to my network.
- ollo 6y ago
  I would like to know this as well. If it is clear how to do so, I'd gladly join.
  - rolleiflex 6y ago
    I responded to the parent, sending this over as a notification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23694615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23694615
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  All the content on Aether is text — it's pretty hard (but not impossible) to make text illegal. Of course what is on your computer is your responsibility, nothing changes that. There is a SFW list enabled by default that only shows the 'safe' communities to you in the app, but your app still communicates everything as of today. However, this is actually the most common feature request we have right now, an ability to block certain communities from transmitting. We are converting the SFW list to a 'filter lists' feature, much like adblock filter lists. These lists can be whitelists or blacklists, and they will be able to control not just visibility, but also the receiving and transmittance of content as well. So the expected behaviour is that if a community is in your blacklist, your computer will never fetch that content from that community by checking against its fingerprint. That should be helpful to solve this issue. We'll be providing a default whitelist as well.
kemonocode 6y ago
At first I kinda found the idea of an Aether Pro (and I'd go so far as to say using the "Pro" moniker is rather misleading as it's kind of an entirely different product altogether!) existing kinda iffy, but after reading up what it truly was I think it makes sense to have something similar to that and avoid many common pitfalls when it comes to securing funding for an open source project, so kudos for that! I do think both decentralized and federated platforms can coexist just fine. They serve slightly different needs and both provide alternatives to the centralized platforms that pervade the Internet these days.

DevKoala 6y ago

Excellent. I am trying this. Thank you.

rolleiflex 6y ago
Please do! We have a small, friendly community. Always glad to see new faces. Let me know if you have any issues.

rglullis 6y ago

> By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ (...) so no one can control what you see. This right here is the main thing that will never let any fully-decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems: - Most people do want "middle-management". They don't want to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score points with their social peers. All they want is to open their browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done with it. - This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control does not exist. A federated system can degenerate into a fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances. Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of pushing it except for buzzword investors.

phist_mcgee 6y ago
Care to explain the Zawinski test? Google gave me zip on it.
- emayljames 6y ago
  zawinski's law? Though not seeing how it is relevant to their point though.
- rglullis 6y ago
  One does not link from HN to jwz site Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it, given that he retracted it on the grounds that too many people subverted the idea to justify all of bad practices related to social software. Anyway, archive is your friend: https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050217051819/https://www.jwz.o...
comex 6y ago
> Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances. Is running your own instance hard? Then at best you’ll inevitably have some users who lack the know-how or time to set up their own instance. At worst, federated systems often link identity to home instance, so you can’t switch to a new instance without giving up your profile. Or they may even require other instances to have a human agree to federate with you, which is a big ask for a one-person instance. Or is running your own instance easy? So easy that anyone can do it? Then there should be no disadvantage in bundle that into the client app so that everyone does do it. But now you have a decentralized system.

LockAndLol 6y ago

> Aether is a relatively large app with an Electron and Go toolchain, at 100,000+ lines of code. Getting it to compile requires setting up a correct build runtime with the latest versions of Go, Node (for Electron) and C dependencies and development environments. Expect the initial set-up to take a few hours. Be patient! Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker, snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than that. Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the intricacies of operating something like is were solved.

rolleiflex 6y ago
Actually, we have recently improved on this, it’s probably now less than half an hour of setup, at least on Linux. The new guide is on the Github repo: https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732b1e https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732... We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example. To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.
- 0x6c6f6c 6y ago
  There's a fully JavaScript implementation of gRPC[0] that you may be able to use should you implement a web app using Service Workers[1]. This would be installable for browsers in a manner that should provide long-lived access to the network. 0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API/Using_Service_Workers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
- LockAndLol 6y ago

cambalache 6y ago

What does it mean the communities are ephemeral? Because reddit archives is one their strengths. Public Slack channels are lame to me because of their limits.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

Sounds like there's some really interesting ideas here. > Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities Reminds me of the 'sharding' idea in World of Warcraft. I'm really curious if you'll end up with issues of 'social dissonance' where your perception of a community differs drastically from someone else's because you literally see different content, and if that affects how people engage with the community. Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? Is there a plan for how to deal with that, should Aether ever become popular enough to get more mainstream news attention? I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.

buzzkillington 6y ago
>Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? [...] I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective. We comply with the letter of the law for the jurisdiction we fall under. Trying to explain anything to a mob is pointless. We don't need to add ever more censors to what we see. The US government is bad enough, some hipster in NY or SF writing for a glorified wordpress blog should be as relevant as the mullah for Iran's most backward village.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Describing journalists concerned about bigoted communities present on your platform as "a mob" is certainly a hot take.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Allow me to add one of my own: Journalists' jobs aren't to share their "concerns", it's to report the facts. So much of the media's pathology is a result of the problem that news doesn't even try to be impartial anymore. If you want to "share your concerns", the place to do that is an op-ed, or a blog post, or twitter, or something. But it isn't journalism anymore.

TimJRobinson 6y ago

Have you thought about implementing a decentralized, user centric moderation system instead of electing mods? Like this: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation-system-for-the-decentralized-web/ https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... Would this work with Aether?

rolleiflex 6y ago
The way it works in Aether is that we have a few rules on choosing what 'effective' mods you have on your view. From weakest (as in, most prone to be overridden) to strongest: - Default mods, which are either the creator of the community or those that are assigned by that person - Elected mods, mods which are chosen by the community. Election goes both ways, you can both be elected or impeached. For example, a default mod can be impeached by the election system, and that would render that mod a non-mod for you - Mods you've personally chosen. Choosing someone to be a mod for you is your vote in the election. So the system isn't 'enforcing' mods you haven't chosen onto you as a result of the elections. Elections only make the decision only if you haven't made a decision for that mod in either way — if you make a decision that is ironclad (for you, in your personal, local view), since nothing can override your personal vote for or against somebody. The more you vote in elections, the more you shape your own view of the universe. The article is long, but what I can see there that is not implemented in Aether is the transitive property of trust, instead of having a vote which is binary, he seems to be advocating for a 0 to 100 trust, and the idea that trust of the people you trust means something to you. (Let me know if I got this wrong). This is great in theory — and this was actually considered for implementation at one point. The issue isn't that it doesn't make sense but it is quite literally impossible to implement, since it makes it so that almost every trust decision made by someone on the network at some point in time affects almost all other entities, which leaves you with an almost entirely 'dirty' graph that you have to traverse in entirety and recompile. This can be done on a centralised service since there is one graph to compile and everyone submits to it. However, in Aether, what we try to do is that we try to keep the graph compilation part on the user end, both because it's a P2P network, and also because custom graphs compiled on the client end is what allows the votes to be able to modify the graph structure itself. That sort of gradual outflow of trust across a social graph making decisions on what to show or not show for every single piece of content is an intense amount of computation to do for every new modification to the trust gradient.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

> we can’t really have a web app Are you familiar with https://notabug.io/ https://notabug.io/ ? IIRC this is decentralized.

drummer 6y ago

You guys are on the right track with Aether. I love the features especially decentralized sovereignty and the moderation based on that. This needs to get adopted widely to stop censorship.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

This sounds pretty interesting, but is it a lot of work to moderate a home server yourself? > You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty I’m wondering what I’d have to do to just bare minimum make sure no illegal content gets onto any hardware that I own. Just to use the obvious extreme example, I don’t want to see any illegal pornography, which in addition to not wanting to see I’d have to report to authorities, which I’d presumably have to explain the presence of, which I’m guessing worst case involves them confiscating my devices for some time. There’s a practical benefit to me in having some middle manager taking responsibility for making sure that never gets to my network.

ollo 6y ago
I would like to know this as well. If it is clear how to do so, I'd gladly join.
- rolleiflex 6y ago
  I responded to the parent, sending this over as a notification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23694615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23694615
rolleiflex 6y ago
All the content on Aether is text — it's pretty hard (but not impossible) to make text illegal. Of course what is on your computer is your responsibility, nothing changes that. There is a SFW list enabled by default that only shows the 'safe' communities to you in the app, but your app still communicates everything as of today. However, this is actually the most common feature request we have right now, an ability to block certain communities from transmitting. We are converting the SFW list to a 'filter lists' feature, much like adblock filter lists. These lists can be whitelists or blacklists, and they will be able to control not just visibility, but also the receiving and transmittance of content as well. So the expected behaviour is that if a community is in your blacklist, your computer will never fetch that content from that community by checking against its fingerprint. That should be helpful to solve this issue. We'll be providing a default whitelist as well.

kemonocode 6y ago

At first I kinda found the idea of an Aether Pro (and I'd go so far as to say using the "Pro" moniker is rather misleading as it's kind of an entirely different product altogether!) existing kinda iffy, but after reading up what it truly was I think it makes sense to have something similar to that and avoid many common pitfalls when it comes to securing funding for an open source project, so kudos for that! I do think both decentralized and federated platforms can coexist just fine. They serve slightly different needs and both provide alternatives to the centralized platforms that pervade the Internet these days.