Yup, creator of Aether here. Small difference, this is federated, Aether is decentralised. Far as I understand this is more like Mastodon where some people host servers that talk to each other. Aether is more like a decentralised Usenet, every user is a server.

Love the processes in this aether project with the voting for mods and such. Wish there was an easy way to clone it and create a subspace aether system that was not attached to the others. I have some user groups that would use this kind of thing - but they would quickly try to game the mod voting thing in many ways, wreck all kinds of havoc trying to get things blocked / banned and ruined - and so we'd need a function for a high level set of super mods and a way to prevent the coming toxic soup from running over into the main project. Took a look at the open source page on there and there is a bunch of stuff, it's impressive, but too complex for me to try to piece together. Perhaps something like riot matrix is more like we need, and to find some way to incorporate the mod voting kind of system as some kind of addin to a self hosted instance of matrix kind of thing.

Where the hell is the source-code? Can't find it anywhere linked on the website..