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.
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.