First public release of Aether 2.0 - A decentralized Reddit alternative with amazing new solutions to old problems
Aether has been created by a former Google and Facebook product designer and engineer, Burak Nehbit, with the goal to create a privacy aware, censorship resistant but still moderated decentralized social network. It is an Open Source application available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
It has very neat features, especially when it comes to the moderation aspect. In a decentralized system, where you have no central authority and therefore no censorship, things like hateful speech and harassment can be an issue. Some people want no moderation, they want to see everything and engage hateful speech with debate, fight bad ideas with good ideas. And they should! More power to them, that is the right way to do it as far as I can tell. But not everyone can or wants to do that, and those people shouldn't be left out. Moderation however is a hard problem to solve when there is no central authority.
Aether does something really intriguing here. It works a lot like Reddit, you can create communities which are just like subreddits and these communities can have moderators. All actions a moderator takes are public and can be viewed in the application, and if you don't like what a moderator does, you can just disable that moderator for yourself. However, that alone wouldn't be enough. If there is a bad moderator, people new to the community would have to find out for themselves before they see all of the posts that have been censored without good cause. So when you disable a moderator, it also counts as a vote to impeach them. We'll have to see how this works out in practice in the long run, but it does sound really amazing.
Another feature and one that I'm a bit unsure about is that Aether is "ephemeral". Content is removed from the network after 6 months. The idea here is that a bad actor can't go through your post history, take something you said ages ago out of context and for example try to get you fired because of that. Online witch hunts are becoming ever more common these days, so maybe that is a good way to combat that. Personally, I want content to be preserved forever, so I'm not a fan of the idea, but it's not a deal breaker, it's great if there are alternatives so everyone can use what works best for them.
Just like on Reddit you can create new posts that can be just a link to a video or website, or can contain markdown formatted rich text. You can upvote posts, downvote posts and every action you take has to be "minted", so there seems to be a Bitcoin ish proof of work concept at work here to give a high CPU cost to spamming, another issue in decentral networks.
The design of Aether is in my opinion really great, which shouldn't really come as a surprise because Burak is a designer specializing among other things on UX, user experience. Everything is intuitive, minimalist and just looks very clean and appealing.
It is an Electron app, so it is quite resource hungry, but personally I make an excuse for social network apps when it comes to Electron because those do tend to need the capabilities of a web browser, so these resources aren't wasted.
When you create an account on Aether, you enter a username and optionally a bio. A profile picture is generated automatically, crpytographically. The thing is, your username isn't unique, multiple people can have the same name, but the profile picture is unique, so you can use that as a unique identifier to see if a post really comes from the right user. Funding Open Source is hard, Aether tries to do it by giving you the option to buy a unique username that is then shown in orange within Aether so people know you supported the project and that the name is unique, that's quite a neat trick that solves two problems, having a central username registry in a decentral network, and like I said, funding an Open Source application.
My account for example looks like this, so if you see that image you know it's actually from me:
Aether on Linux
The Linux version of Aether is experimental and not officially supported right now, but it worked good enough for me. One caveat, it doesn't seem to exit properly, so you might want to kill lingering processes when you're done. From the terminal:
pkill aether
To install it on Linux, you need to have Snap installed, then you download the Snap file from the Aether website and install it from a terminal:
snap install --dangerous Aether-2.0.0-dev.5+1811030036.53a6bb49.snap
The dangerous flag is needed because there is no signature provided for the snap.
Then you can start it from the terminal with:
snap run aether
You might ask yourself why this is Aether 2.0. There was an Aether 1.0 and I did try that, but it was so long ago that I honestly remember almost nothing about it. Aether 2.0 is very different, I believe it is rewritten from scratch, so it shares nothing but the name and the general idea but is better in every way.
PS: Don't be too hard on Aether if you notice bugs, the creator wanted to have a soft launch, so just a few people trying it out to fix the most egregious bugs, but someone posted it to Hacker News, so now the cat is out of the bag. The Aether creator is also discussing the app in that thread with the username "rolleiflex". There was a private beta for a while though, so there shouldn't be too many issues.
Visual tour of Aether
This is a quick visual tour of what you see when you first start Aether, create an account, view communities, create a post and so on.
