this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Isn’t aethers big thing that everything is ephemeral? If you look at reddits value from my perspective, it isn’t that.
It’s that there’s a huge amount of actual human experience and information available to me through google. Sure there’s a lot of astroturfing happening, but if I wanted a quick glimpse of what people thought about a product, my google search was “$product Reddit” to get a pulse. And then join those communities if I bought the product.
I don’t care about censorship resistance. Though I think the governance model improvements are a great thing that Lemmy could implement.
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.