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Aether, (Ephemeral) Reddit Without Centralized Server

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 05 2015, @08:03PM   
from the i-wonder-if-they-run-rehash dept.

c0lo writes:

Stumbled upon this (disclaimer, I'm not affiliated and don't hold any special interest):

Aether is an app you install to your computer to connect to Aether network. This network is made of different boards (forums) where people post and discuss things. On the surface, it's fairly similar to Slashdot, Metafilter, Reddit, or any other community site on the Internet.

The different thing about Aether is that it doesn't have a server somewhere. The only thing the app does is that it finds and connects to other people using Aether. In other words, it's a distributed, peer-to-peer network.

This makes it impossible to censor, and renders its users anonymous. It's useful for people concerned about privacy, or pretty much anyone who doesn't want to be watched and catalogued for every word they write on the Internet (so, pretty much everybody).

It's also temporary. Whatever you post disappears after six months. It's designed to be an ephemeral space, and it's focused on now, rather than the past. Other people can still keep copies of what you wrote, but it won't last forever in the network itself. They also won't know who you are.

Community moderated, distributed and anonymous. Almost to good to be true, but... how do you know it is actually _gewg that's posting?

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Original Submission

• Re:you(sic) post disappears after six months Re:you(sic) post disappears after six months (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:12PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:12PM (#205373)

  There are bookmarklets and services to automatically backup pages of interest to one of the many online services that do it and that way you can bookmark those and always have access.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Re:you(sic) post disappears after six months (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:21PM

  by c0lo (156) on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:21PM (#205376) Journal

  Except that it's not necessary web:

  Aether doesn't depend on the web. This is possible because it's nothing but a communication protocol that describes how you find other people speaking Aether protocol, and how to speak to them. Aether (the app) is just a reference implementation of a client that talks Aether protocol. The protocol itself is open.

  --
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

  Parent

• Re:you(sic) post disappears after six months (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:04PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:04PM (#205389)

  Yeah, that will work for some purposes.
  ...though the cloud thing isn't necessarily perfect either.

  You may have noticed that I am fond of the Google Cache of pages.
  Those allow me to highlight portions of the page which I think are especially cogent.
  Posting a link to that marked-up Cache (along with a link to the original) is technique I like to use.

  Paradoxically, over time, that gives another point of failure if Google loses track of the page or changes their 12-character identifier for that page.
  (Sites switching over to https-only is a recent wrinkle in this paradigm.)
  OTOH, having a record of significant words in the text has allowed me to find the page again or another copy of the text when the original can't be found.

  Pages that e.g. are behind a database search page[1] or are forbidden by a robots.txt won't get cached, so those may be other gotchas.

  [1] Often, copies of pages are still at Archive.org, but a Google Cache of those doesn't exist.

  -- gewg_

  Parent