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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?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by joshuac on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:52PM
Your assumptions have Aether getting 27+ times the number of installs as the number of people who have registered on Reddit over a decade and then daily commentary from every one of those users.
A massive success would be more like 1/27th the Reddit userbase and more reasonable posting rate may be a little closer to only the 90th percentile posting 7 times per week, with a rapidly dropping off interaction rate for the remainder.
Put another way, if Reddit (very roughly) gets about 550 thousand comments per day and Aether is a humongous success at 1/20th the size of Reddit, and also only needs to store about 180 days of comments, that's about 5 million comments, or a whopping 5MB assuming 1KB per plain-text posted comment.
Disk storage isn't going to be a problem.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by dusty monkey on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:04PM
Put another way, if Reddit (very roughly) gets about 550 thousand comments per day and Aether is a humongous success at 1/20th the size of Reddit, and also only needs to store about 180 days of comments, that's about 5 million comments, or a whopping 5MB assuming 1KB per plain-text posted comment.
With math like that, there is no problem that can't be solved. Problems seem to get exponentially easier the more you figure on them.
- when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting for evil - stop supporting evil -
(Score: 1) by joshuac on Monday July 06 2015, @05:10AM
How did you you already know about my mathematical solution for world hunger already? ;)
Sorry about that math, obviously I hadn't done even a quick proofreading before posting and going out the door.
I do still standby the obvious; Aether won't have a billion users nor every user commenting every day.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:43PM
Don't forget how readily text is compressed. 75% compression is common with generic methods. Tweak it to be text-centric and 90% is quite possible.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 06 2015, @01:18AM
7zip seems to be the compression to use for text (as wikipedia uses it).
(Score: 3, Informative) by jcross on Monday July 06 2015, @12:06AM
Additionally, you can easily shard the site into independent "sub-aethers", and users would only be downloading/storing/uploading content from the ones they're actually interested in. Systems that can be subdivided like that tend to scale very easily.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 06 2015, @03:23AM
Three statements cause me problems:
1) The different thing about Aether is that it doesn't have a server somewhere.
2) It's also temporary. Whatever you post disappears after six months.
3) Disk storage isn't going to be a problem.
I can't get to #2, or #3.
because I can't get past #1.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:19PM
Why can't you get past #1? Has the concept of peer-to-peer networks passed you by?
#2 will obviously be controlled by the client, people can make copies of the content and keep it longer if they want to, but you won't be able to sync anything older than 6 months form other clients.
#3 Where did you get this from?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:23PM
Excuse my comment for #3, I read back again and see where you got it from.