Anonymous Reddit without servers

by vyrotek • 11 years ago

207 102 11 years ago

sktrdie• 11 years ago

This has been on a couple of times. It's an interesting concept but user's reputation isn't really stored anywhere. It's just a synch of data between peers. So someone can very easily simulate many points, or upvote content several times.

hellbanner• 11 years ago

Was it namecoin? I can't recall the name of the project but the idea was you mined (ala bitcoin) coins for your "name".. so if you had a year's worth of processing behind your name then you were an established identity vs someone with 0 seconds of processing.

darkmighty• 11 years ago

Yea namecoin would work just fine.

If the issue was authentication, even vanilla signatures (GPG) would be fine, but people want to associate identities with short names, so a name resolution system is needed.

harigov• 11 years ago

I like the idea. However, instead of using processing, it would be nice to use "activity" i.e., up votes, down votes, quality submissions and comments as the reputation. We already know what happens in a truly anonymous systems with no moderation - it doesn't make an ideal community.

Leon• 11 years ago

Wouldn't that end up as the person with the most money has the biggest voice?

yesco• 11 years ago

If it is only going to rely on community votes for moderation, how will it deal with spam?

austenallred• 11 years ago

Getting to a high level of traction while requiring people to download a client is incredibly difficult. I can't see it happening.

bgilroy26• 11 years ago

Based on the aether's name and your comment, I thought this discussion was about Ethereum.

An app built on Ethereum would also check off the 'decentralized' box for people who are angry at Ellen Pao.

https://www.ethereum.org/

natrius5• 11 years ago

To me, decentralization isn't just about avoiding control. I think that the network effects that decentralization yields are the only way to compete with an established network. It's hard to get people to agree on which centralized alternative to use, but if structured correctly, there can be just one decentralized alternative with several benevolent forks with different features, but a shared data store. No one's in control, and everybody wins.

ultimape• 11 years ago

And it is more than possible! Eris Industries inception project was effectively a reddit clone running on etherium.

userbinator• 11 years ago

That wasn't a problem with Napster, Limewire, BitTorret, and all the other P2P apps that existed before... people will download and run things if they believe in the value of doing so.

inoop2• 11 years ago

This isn't the 90's. Downloading and installing software really isn't a thing anymore for a lot of people.

JD557• 11 years ago

The first sync is taking a long time, is this normal?

(They recommend you to launch it at boot, so I guess it is)

cordite• 11 years ago

Reminds me of Bitcoin in 2012. Haven't experienced it since, though.

charlag• 11 years ago

I am syncing for about 30 minutes already. I don't think it works

mjs2600• 11 years ago

It works, eventually...

ryr2• 11 years ago

I'm having the same problem. Does anyone have an alternate ip and port to bootstrap from?

take-take• 11 years ago

This post on reddit[1] has a lot of IP addresses to bootstrap off of. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/getaether/comments/3c1802/aether_as...

ryr2• 11 years ago

Thanks. Here's mine 71.30.200.42:59005

swagv• 11 years ago

digg 3.0

charlesism• 11 years ago

Is that meant as a compliment or an insult?

wemysh• 11 years ago

If it would be a browser based solution, the number of people who try it would be 1000x higher.

narrowrail3• 11 years ago

You mean browser-based, as in provided by a server (aka centralized)? Perhaps there is a way to daemonize the process and run it headless on a server with web access, but the whole point is no central server to depend on.

Edit: I guess I don't understand how this project, which makes one of its key features to be be web server less, would be accessed by web browser without doing what I suggested above. Could you explain?

nl3• 11 years ago

WebRTC let's you build server less web apps.

natrius5• 11 years ago

Browser-based, serverless apps are what Ethereum is all about. You run a daemon on your computer that maintains a blockchain, messaging system (Whisper), and content storage system (Swarm). That daemon exposes an RPC interface so local processes can get data from it. The most common result is an HTML, CSS, and Javascript bundle that is a full-fledged application without a server, because its backend is peer-to-peer.

Web apps aren't a requirement—you could build a traditional desktop app that talks to the Ethereum daemon as well. But using the application runtime that everyone already has installed lowers the barrier to entry, so it's what most successful projects will choose.

nly• 11 years ago

What's wrong with that? Federation makes a lot of sense.

curiousjorge3• 11 years ago

what about a chrome extension? or a firefox extension?

I'm still lost as to how the whole blockchain thing that is supposed to store pseudonyms and their reputation thing works, I blame my fear of math and calculus to really be able to dive deep into how such algorithm/processes work.

pakr• 11 years ago

Is anyone using it ?

natrius5• 11 years ago

Persistent pseudonyms seem to be required for voting-based communities to work. Without them, what is a vote? Whose votes do I trust?

Distributing reddit is a hard problem, but making it anonymous is even harder. It'll be easier to start with cryptographic identities and add anonymity later. In the meantime, users can generate new identities for every action. They will be ignored by other users, since reputation is the easiest way to separate signal from noise.

Building this system will be much easier if you investigate the toolkits for building distributed systems that have been built since Aether started. Ethereum has three building blocks for distributed systems: a blockchain for storing data that requires consensus, like the identities of the creators and moderators of a community; Whisper, a messaging system for sending data that doesn't require consensus, like broadcasting the existence of a sub-forum; and Swarm, a distributed data store for things like discussion archives and the HTML, CSS and Javascript that such a discussion system could be built from to run on every device that every user owns. (For an example of an application with this sort of architecture, see Augur. http://augur.net)

Besides the development speed gained from using these tools, your system will gain benevolent forkability. You want developers with ideas about decentralized communities to write forks that effectively don't steal users since everyone's using the same data sources to read from and write to. But using a homegrown distributed system makes that less likely. If it were built on Ethereum's toolkit, even if a developer disagrees with most of what you've done, it's in their interest to use the same data source even if they rewrite everything. The userbase of benevolently forkable distributed systems never needs to be split, which is a powerful characteristic for growth.

Aether is fantastic, and it's where the web is heading. Good luck!

curiousjorge3• 11 years ago

Ethereum is super interesting but I'm kinda turned off by seeing "Licensing" and looks like it's aimed at some sort of profiteering, which I don't think is compatible with the sort of architecture we are going for, but I might be wrong here, please feel free to correct me.

natrius5• 11 years ago

The licensing page lists three buckets of free, open source licenses for various parts of the project. I don't understand.

https://ethereum.org/licensing

dogma11383• 11 years ago

Nothing wrong with licensing, cryptocurrencies on the other well meh...

All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace.

With the amount of compute power required to perform any operation mining will end up being handled by a couple of big players which the rest will use a proxy.

BitCoin already is pretty much centralized with mining becoming an operation which requires you to setup a bloody data center to get into the game, yes allot of those are some weird complexes in the middle of no-where China, but they are still bloody huge and expensive.

And there isn't much you can do about it, if you build a network which establishes "trust" based on "effort" the effort cannot be trivial, or to be more exact the amount of trust one will have in such network is tied directly to the amount of effort one has to put into it to perform a given task.

vyrotek2• 11 years ago

I stumbled onto this while discussing with some friends the possibility of someone creating a "distributed Reddit". I thought it might bring the opportunity to discuss some Reddit alternatives.

Does anything similar to Reddit but with a model more like Wordpress exist? Perhaps there's interest in offering independently hosted sub-communities that can be centrally linked to for discoverability? Could it provide subdomains such as programming.newreddit.com which pointed to an externally hosted community?

Is what I'm describing what Diaspora was attempting to create? I haven't honestly looked into it very much. Many people have suggested trying out http://voat.co which looks like is open source. Someone may be able to leverage that.

sanswork2• 11 years ago

Reddit itself is opensource and much less of a disaster of a codebase than voat.

vyrotek2• 11 years ago

Well, there you go. Why is the voat codebase a disaster?

derefr• 11 years ago

Does anything similar to Reddit but with a model more like Wordpress exist? Perhaps there's interest in offering independently hosted sub-communities that can be centrally linked to for discoverability? Could it provide subdomains such as programming.newreddit.com which pointed to an externally hosted community?

I was just talking to a friend about setting this up.

1. Take the reddit codebase, strip off all the subreddit stuff so you've got one "subreddit" per site, and set up a WordPress.com-like site to allow people launch instances of that in a cloud somewhere, with a profit margin to you;

2. (optional) create an "aggregation" API for the instances and an "aggregator" site+app that lets people sign-in to subscribe to conformant sites (y'know, like an RSS reader), then spits out a reddit-front-page-like index. All the links and votes and such are API calls back to the originating servers; the aggregator is just a read-only consumer of the sites.

kordless• 11 years ago

You'll need to tie the deployment to a payment mechanism to achieve this for a subset of users without giving control to a single entity. I have some ideas how to do that.

_up2• 11 years ago

This sounds like a more complicated version of disqus. Disqus lets you integrate the discussion thread on your website. And also agregates some recommended content on their own site. They even do voting. So it is basicly all there.

I am currently working on a feedly alternative that also integrates the ranking of the aggregated site and design wise looks a bit more like Medium. But the main Goal would be to implement something I would call a smart group courating feature. I am yet undecided if I really should integrate dicussions. They seem like a lot of work with little reward.

tumblen• 11 years ago

http://www.telescopeapp.org is sort of what you're describing. WordPress for vote-based online communities.

aoeu33315• 11 years ago

Anyone heard of freenet project, this seems like a bad copy.

sova• 11 years ago

with a more interesting interface =D

dghughes2• 11 years ago

Bad, bad stuff on there.

No way.

tete2• 11 years ago

Only if you dig deep enough for it. There are certain subreddits that are pretty bad as well.

smaili• 11 years ago

Anyone in the Bay Area is serious about building a Reddit alternative, let me know - me (at) smaili (dot) org

TrevorJ3• 11 years ago

I think the next 'reddit' needs to be an evolution and innovative in some ways. Cracking the comment thread organization would be a good place to start, that seems like something that could really be improved on. Also, as a few other people have mentioned in here, decentralizing/decoupling the central 'brand' from the individual 'sub sites' seems important from both a technical and business standpoint.

_up2• 11 years ago

I am working on a feedly alternative that also ingests the voting/ranking of other sites like Reddit and Hacker News. Do you think implementing discussions that can be integrated via Javascipt a la disqus would be a good solution? Building voting/raking ingestion and also discussion ingestion could also be done via an Open Protocol so all Feedreader could benefit.

papul1993• 11 years ago

https://voat.co

rev_bird• 11 years ago

Honestly, most of the functionality I need from Reddit is replicated from active message boards that I frequent. Yeah, there often isn't any kind of "voting" mechanism, but the part I love most about the smaller subreddits is the discussion. Popular threads always stand out.

This particular project seems to be more about the mechanics behind having a distributed system and not as much about the community-building aspects, but to be honest when I hear "Decentralize Reddit! Host the subs elsewhere!" my first thought is, "you're describing the internet."

vilhelm_s• 11 years ago

Hm, downloaded on my MacOS 1.8.5 machine, but the app crashes on startup.

Vendan2• 11 years ago

urm, a bit of a bad decision to have it say "Open this website in a desktop computer to download Aether, or join the mailing list, so you'll be reminded." with the desktop computer part bolded and italicized, like I'm an idiot that needs to be walked through these things. I'm using firefox on linux. I get that there may not be a linux client, but do your client sniffing better.

Edit: Wait, no, you have linux binaries, your github says so, so why don't they show up on the main site?

Vendan2• 11 years ago

wait, why the downvote? Literally no download link even though I can actually run it: http://i.imgur.com/LVY5I9W.png

anaolykarpov• 11 years ago

Now imagine this protocol used to command and control a botnet.

paragon_init• 11 years ago

Happy to see that it's open source, too.

https://github.com/nehbit/aether-public

Qantourisc• 11 years ago

Anyone else worries about: "Whatever you post disappears after six months." ? On one side you might wish to keep posts, like for example questions. And on the other side, people can just copy the posts or make a client that keeps a copy forever locally. And thus such claims cannot be guaranteed.

tete2• 11 years ago

I think it might mostly be a question of capacity. One can save stuff though, so that fact isn't hidden at all. It's also mentioned.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

Rebuilding Reddit in a better way is not a technical problem.

ionwake2• 11 years ago

I built http://www.sagebump.com

It brings across and merges your sub reddit preferences, slashdot feeds & stackoverlfow feeds.

It then removes bias, ranks and merges the articles together.

I mentioned it on reddit but got absolutely no traction.

I think it might have been because you don't post directly on the site.

I can do that but it was meant to act as a tool to merge accounts rather than enable native posting.

Anyway, if anyone likes what they see and want to help me either develop it or get it exposure, then I am happy to collaborate. Whether it be a co-founder or investor.

crummy• 11 years ago

I like this a lot. Some feedback:

- Can you remember that I've visited so I don't need to see the intro again?

- The intro does a pretty poor job of explaining what the site is. Even just a header saying "Sagebump: Aggregated social news feeds"

- Do the filters work in Settings? Also the word filter is ambiguous here; I'm not sure if I'm filtering in or out.

ionwake2• 11 years ago

Hi, yes the pop up was a quick hack yesterday I will add this on.

I will add your header - thank you !

The filters do work - I may need to double check them incase I broke them !

Thank you for taking the time to look at it and for your feedback .

bshimmin2• 11 years ago

It's slightly funny to read about a "moderated, distributed, and anonymous" forum system, as if these features were new and exciting, when we've basically had exactly that since about 1980: usenet.

thenomad2• 11 years ago

So, the obvious question is this: why aren't we seeing a massive influx of Usenet users from Reddit right now? And why didn't everyone move to Usenet rather than Reddit after Digg fell apart?

There's clearly something, or somethings, that are preventing Usenet from being terribly useful at present for the "Reddit-like" use case.

(I used to be a heavy Usenet user back in the '90s. Haven't touched it in more than a decade, though.)

bshimmin2• 11 years ago

It's been a good while, perhaps a decade now, since usenet was really a commonplace thing, so it's unlikely that anyone will ever flock there now.

Usenet's downfall perhaps in part stems from its legacy as part of the "nice" era of computing's history, when it was just sort of assumed that everyone using computers were friendly people in academia and thus we didn't need to worry about bad people doing bad things. Some people would date Usenet's downward spiral as starting with Eternal September, but I think really it was just spam and binaries that killed it (the latter making usenet very expensive - and risky - for ISPs to offer as a service; which meant then looking for a (probably) paid-for alternative news provider).

Once people stopped using it, it became hard to see why it was good in the first place - and everybody by that point was doing everything through their web browser, and there never really was a great usenet experience through the web (certainly Google Groups wasn't it).

davidgerard• 11 years ago

Is this where we start using NNTP again yet?

nathan_f77• 11 years ago

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.

Not a fan of this idea. I love finding new subreddits and taking a look at their top posts of all time.

thenomad2• 11 years ago

Ditto. Information on topic-specific subreddits is really useful, and not always subject to rapid bitrot.

(Context: I'm a filmmaker. There's plenty of writing about filmmaking from 30+ years ago that's still very useful. And filmmaking is a comparatively tech-driven, fast-moving interest.)

Anonymous Reddit without servers

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