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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

Prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208

Happy to answer any questions, as usual.

Source code is here: https://github.com/nehbit/aether (I’ll update it with the latest release as soon as I can clean it up)

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How big is the local cache of the network on each client device?

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.

Looks like a very simple and clean user experience, definitely curious to try this out. Is encryption between peers currently supported and/or planned?

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.

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?

How would you read the content if it was encrypted?

You'd probably have to require the peers to be online for a post to be visible by requesting the description key from the creator.

The creator is intentionally not knowable. The idea is that every client has a copy of all public data so hiding it from the computer technician seems like a pointless objective.

> so hiding it from the computer technician seems like a pointless objective.

Scary in jurisdictions where possession is a strict liability offence.

Great to hear, thanks! :)

Any particular reason for the license choice? AGPL may create some friction with potential contributors. Is it related to the business offering?

How bandwidth-hungry is it? Is it feasible that someday I could participate in the network from my cell phone?

It doesn’t appear to be very bandwidth hungry so far. Of course we’ll see, but I’m more optimistic for that than I used to be when I first launched it in December.

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