‘It’s Fairly Similar to Reddit, But It Doesn’t Have a Server Somewhere’ – Burak Nehbit, Aether Dev

Burak Nehbit is the San Francisco-based developer of Aether, a peer-to-peer, open source protocol for posting and discussion.
CoinTelegraph: What sets Aether apart from Reddit?
Burak Nehbit: Aether doesn’t at all have privileged users such as moderators or admins to allow for manual moderation. Therefore, all judgment you face comes expressly from your peers. This is what is meant by Aether being ‘community moderated.’
It’s also distributed. All information on Aether is distributed across all its users’ computers. This makes it very hard to block. Removing information that’s been published is comparable to removing a drop of ink from a glass of water after it’s been dropped.
Aether is also anonymous. Usernames are not unique – multiple people could post under the same username, or the same user could change his username as many times as he wishes.
If somebody could wiretap all the cables between all Aether’s users, he would be able to figure out where a post first appeared, thereby pinpointing its origin. To prevent this, connections between users are encrypted, so wiretapping would only result in a bunch of garbled bits. Needless to say, all this is done automatically by the protocol.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2014-10-27.