Hey Veloren community! I love this game passionately. I also love open source, decentralization and distributed networks.
I recently discovered Aether. It is a Reddit/Lemmy alternative.
What separates it from Lemmy is that Aether is distributed, whereas Lemmy is federated. I highly encourage any of you to consider joining the new Veloren sub on Aether. I want to elect some new mods other than myself!
A not from the getaether site on this difference between distributed and federated: Mastodon is a federated app, where there are Mastodon instances that talk to each other delivering content to each other that their users can follow. You can think of it as different, separate copies of Twitter talking to each other under certain conditions.
The problem with this is that not all content is accessible everywhere - these servers make explicit decisions on which other servers they want to peer with. The only content you get by default are the content that your server allows, unless you explicitly follow the specific person. But if you don’t get the content, you won’t ever see the person and won’t know s/he exists in the first place.
Aether is a distributed app. It gives everyone one single universe with the same content. All users exist in the same user swarm with the same history, containing the same data, with the same deletion policy. It has no servers, unlike Mastodon, which has federated servers. Every node is its own full sovereign entity. All data goes everywhere. Then it’s up to the user’s client to render that data, and filter out content based on the rules and signals received from the network.
In other, more technical terms, users are not required to care about network topology.
If you’re on a smaller Mastodon instance, you run the risk of your federated server provider one day deciding to just … shut down. (Or their basement floods and server was there, etc.)
Aether doesn’t shut down, because it’s not (only) an app, it’s a protocol. So long as there is another node talking Aether, it will be online. The data will be there. Every node carries with itself a full copy of the network.
Moderation actions are opaque, similar to centralised platforms, because these Mastodon instances are, effectively, centralised platforms that have a way of negotiating with each other. The ‘fun’ stuff runs in a box that you don’t control, therefore the owner of that box does have disproportionate amount of power over you.
In Aether, moderation actions are applied on your machine. You can inspect which actions arrive from the network, and what to do with them, including ignoring them. You are the ultimate sovereign, what happens on your computer is fully under your control.