Aether sounds really really neat.
e should seriously setup OAG there too, survive on Poal for discussions, and use Aether for boner culture games, game reviews, and such and pics
anyone really literate in p2p wants to give Aether a look and give their two cents?
eg. how private it actually is etc.
Programmer here (but not an expert on security).
Aether is a floodnet, which means that when you post a message it sends the message to other users, and they also send the message to other users, so the message will very quickly "flood" through the network so that way everybody ends up with the same messages.
Since every user sends every message to every other user, you can't know whether you received the message from the original poster, or whether you received the message from somebody else who is forwarding it, so you can't know which IP address posted the message.
However, it takes time for the message to flood through the network. So if somebody (such as the government) controlled the majority of the network, they can simply figure out which computer sent out the message the earliest, and that's most likely the computer which posted the message.
But that only really works if Aether is small. Since the users are the network, the more people that use Aether the more secure it becomes. Hypothetically, if there were only 2 Aether users, it would be very easy to determine which of the 2 users posted the message. But if there are a million users, it becomes a lot harder.
Of course if you care about privacy at all (even a tiny bit) you should always use a VPN (ideally a non-pozzed one), and possibly Tor as well. Since it's possible to combine Aether with Tor, that would make it exceptionally hard (basically impossible) for somebody to track your IP address.
The biggest risk to privacy is going to be if you accidentally reveal your real identity (e.g. your e-mail address, or your name, or your username on a different site, etc.) So don't do that, be very careful to keep a strict separation between your shitpost accounts and your normal accounts. And if you use a VPN/Tor, make sure that it's always enabled, since Aether always runs in the background, so you need to remain secure 24/7.
BTW, is there an option for word wrap on Poal?
Poal has formatted your post so that the sentences continue well off of the screen for me.
since Aether always runs in the background
There's no way to turn it off?
BTW, is there an option for word wrap on Poal?
It wraps for me, do you have some sort of custom styling or something? A browser extension, maybe?
There's no way to turn it off?
You can... but that defeats the point. It's P2P, like torrents. The posts aren't stored on a server, they're stored by regular people like you. So you are downloading posts from other people, and also sending posts to other people. So the network requires people to upload posts to others in order for it to work (just like torrents require seeders).
(post is archived)