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.
Comments and posts being ephemeral on Aether is essentially a moot point from a data preservation perspective, as it would be trivial for someone to backup the data.
The ephemeral nature of Aether is more valuable from a user convenience perspective as everything you subscribe to in Aether is stored on your device. Posts deleting themselves after a time means that your Aether data folder doesn’t grow too large.
To further my point: Lemmy server hosts would be a great group to backup Aether data for users that don’t want to have a large local data folder and for record keeping.
To me, Aether’s big thing is that it applies true decentralization and opt-in censorship resistant to reddit’s organic community growth and thread style.
The democratization of moderation on Aether is an extremely elegant solution that I don’t think translates well to Lemmy. Lemmy server hosts could ultimately overrule any moderator decision just as reddit did this past week. This is not possible in a top down way on Aether, but I still see Lemmy as a useful potential bridge.
I don’t know that much about aether, but I have a hard time imaging a voting system of governance that can’t be gamed.
True decentralization is nice but not a big deal for me. Given the open nature of Lemmy, the bar to moving instances is significantly lower than leaving Reddit. It would of course be very inconvenient, but so, it sounds, is aether.
Ultimately, to be accessible to average users, you need some amount of centralization it seems. Everything else is pretty science-projecty.
If you could migrate a community from one instance to another and have subscriptions update automatically, it makes the rogue instance admin a little less scary. But still a risk of course.