Is Lemmy Federation with Aether possible?
Aether is a reddit alternative not dissimilar to Lemmy in that it is distributed and open source.
Some advantages to Aether over Lemmy are:
It is entirely decentralized rather than federated giving it superior censorship resistance and smooth horizontal scalability. Each user on the Aether network acts as a node operator allowing other users to connect and view the communities that they subscribe to.
Moderators within each community are elected by, are impeachable by, and their decisions can be individually ignored by the users of each community. All mod actions are public information and, as mentioned, each mod action or moderator can be ignored by each user. This maximizes the accountability of the network and greatly reduces the chances of censorship.
The biggest flaw with Aether is that it is not currently maintained (to my knowledge). With such a massive migration of users to Lemmy and the Fediverse as large, I would love to see an increased interest in decentralized solutions like Aether.
Would it be technically feasible for Aether to join the fediverse through modified Lemmy instances? If so it could act as a silver bullet to enable horizontal scalability of the network at large.
I welcome any discussion on the topic.
I gotta be honest, that sounds like crap. It's a recipe for a race to the bottom
And, if it isn't maintained, it might as well not exist. Trying to fuck around with it would just take the lemmy team's time away from their progress as they move forward with their intended plans.
Fair point about it being a potential waste of resources as Aether is unmaintained.
What specifically sound like crap to you? Attempting to shoehorn Aether into Lemmy somehow? Just asking for clarity :)
Censorship is good in certain instances. Whether it be doxxing, revenge-porn, CP, having things ephemeral and unremovable by any means is bad.
Very fair point, and all perfect examples of the value of circumstantial censorship.
To Aether's credit: something can't be both ephemeral and unremovable; being ephemeral suggests that it will be removed automatically given enough time. To my understanding: the moderation policy on Aether prevents users from downloading content that moderators have hidden. It is only if a user goes out of their way to view hidden content that they risk exposure to it.
If federation from Aether to Lemmy were technically possible, surely it would be within the capabilities of Lemmy to only pull and display data that the moderators of an Aether instance deem appropriate. It would of course be up to any Lemmy server host whether they accept the federation, and if they feel the need to blacklist any Aether communities.
Isn’t aethers big thing that everything is ephemeral? If you look at reddits value from my perspective, it isn’t that.
It’s that there’s a huge amount of actual human experience and information available to me through google. Sure there’s a lot of astroturfing happening, but if I wanted a quick glimpse of what people thought about a product, my google search was “$product Reddit” to get a pulse. And then join those communities if I bought the product.
I don’t care about censorship resistance. Though I think the governance model improvements are a great thing that Lemmy could implement.