Aether: Open-source,self-governing, public communities with auditable moderation | Hacker News Reader

Aether: Open-source,self-governing, public communities with auditable moderation

getaether.net

41 pointsthunderbong13 comments

I’m the maintainer of this project. While it is good to see it posted here, I should note that Aether is on a hiatus for now.

I might eventually get back to it, and I’ve been working on it since 2013 so it is a long lived work for me, but I currently have zero capacity to support it in any meaningful way.

That said, if there are any serious would-be maintainers interested I would be happy to review code and eventually distribute commit rights though.

I pulled the repositories, built it, and was looking to get involved.

If you or others are interested in working on it with me I'd be open to it.

> 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

Great so, entirely useless for developers then.

I don't think anyone on planet earth agrees with you that it's "useless" (especially that so much development support happens in discord now), and even worse, no one agrees with how you say it.

Mmk well, we're facing Reddits shutting down left and right, losing over a decade of arcane and non-trivial information about various processors, microarchitectures, non-documented standards and other artifacts of knowledge that you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

But sure, everyone "on planet Earth" disagrees with me.

>we're facing Reddits shutting down left and right, losing over a decade of arcane and non-trivial information about various processors, microarchitectures, non-documented standards and other artifacts of knowledge that you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

This sucks, but people should have known better than to entrust important information to a for-profit company that already has a bad track record. If you want anything to last the ages, it needs to be backed up in multiple places by different people.

That's a really poor argument. Now I entrust.... who exactly? How is this a sell for "6 months ephemeral data"?

Also, who is guaranteeing that? Who says it isn't going to be scraped? What's the point if not making historical data hard for the average user to find and easy for a malicious user to find?

How is it a poor argument?

You don't entrust anyone, it's simple. If you want data to last a long time, it has to be distributed, and not under the control of any single entity. Otherwise, I can virtually guarantee there will be a failure, whether it's because of maliciousness or just an accident (how many old Hollywood movies were lost because of one big fire?). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire)

There are reddit dumps everywhere you lost the discoverability not the data.

If your primary trusted source of information is your chat log you got bigger problems than looking for a new chat system.

https://github.com/aethereans/aether-app/blob/master/LICENSE... AGPL-3.0 Only

Had to dig to find the source code repository.

I'd love to have a social network/experiment where you can see your feed based on 3 distinct algorithms.

Democratic, Founder Controlled, Seniority Weighted.

HN is primarily seniority weighted, reddit is ~democratic with founder (or mod) overrides. I'd like a (laissez|tenure|founder).civreddit.com site that let's me toggle eternal September on and off... and of course they would all have rules of conduct except maybe for chan.civreddit.com, basically you're just adding a co-hort based ranking system.

“There can be many of the same name”… is this not a glaring issue? Surely unique names are a requirement for a successful social platform? If content is ephemeral, by default, at least allow usernames to be unique for that same period; i.e. register a username and, so long as one contributes to and interacts with the platform, ownership of the identity cannot change. Your Pro users can, naturally, register a username for “life”, whatever that means in 2023. ;p

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