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.
It’s democratized representational moderation.
Only members of a community that have been there for a while can become moderators. Moderator elections are held from time to time, and only long standing members of each community may vote on their moderators. A moderator is not removed unless they are inactive for a long period, or the community disagrees with their decisions enough to impeach them.
Any user on Aether is free to blacklist any other user, preventing that users content from ever touching their computer. (This feature is present on Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse also)