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Is Lemmy Federation with Aether possible? (linux.community)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Censorship is good in certain instances. Whether it be doxxing, revenge-porn, CP, having things ephemeral and unremovable by any means is bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ya, on Lemmy's end there'd still be control over the removal of content.

Though I do wonder if it even makes sense for interop to come from Lemmy's side? After all, Lemmy's just one of many implementations of ActivityPub. Kbin, Mastodon, and other softwares can freely traverse Lemmy with varying levels of usability. Instead of implementing Aether interop from the Lemmy side and give Lemmy access to Aether content, it seems more sensible to make Aether interoperable with the ActivityPub protocol. Of course this isn't exactly feasible without a maintained fork.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It does make more sense the other way around you are right, and the issue really is that it is unmaintained

Aether is based on Scuttlebutt I think? Maybe I should poke around upstream and see if any bridge exists already.