Aether is not designed to be so secure that it can protect you against state actors
I disagree with several things you say and claim, but this is really the core of the issue.
Unfortunately, state actors are precisely the threat which those who wish to engage in truly free speech have to worry about. Which means Aether is useless for protecting free speech. The technology is fine for discussing state approved opinions and trivialities. But it is not suitable for topics which are subjected to political persecution.
Not only does it fail to protect your identity, but it makes it easier to uncover it. You don't even need to be a state actor, contrary to their repeated claims. Anyone with sufficient motivation and time could stand up a few dozen nodes on cheap VPS or cloud services and use them to unmask and track users on the network over time. To obtain similar information from a traditional website you would need a subpoena.
That is not better protection. It is worse.
I am not sure why you think Aether deliberately makes it difficult to use with TOR
Because they say so themselves. On the page you link to yourself:
"Not only that Aether does not primarily serve a user base that would require Tor as a pre-requisite for using Aether, it _especially_ does not serve people who need graphical UI tools to configure Tor support"
Inconvenience by design. Illogical rationalization. Sketchy.
Your node will only need to know one IP address to connect to the Aether network.
That is not true and doesn't even make sense. That would make it centralized. It is explicitly a decentralized P2P network. You may only need the IP of one peer for the initial connection to the network. But, once that is established, you will connect to other peers and exchange content.
Talk.lol is not distributed, and unfortunately, like searchvoat.co, its days are therefore numbered.
Aether is ephemeral. Content is pruned constantly. Talk.lol has already outlived everything that was on Aether when it launched.
If posting Aether links helps people get used to using it, then I think that is OK.
It's not OK at all, because people shouldn't be using it. At least not for anything they wouldn't post on Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
You don't mind people posting .onion links, do you?
I would actually mind that. Same as I mind people who only post archive.ph links without providing the real link.
Forcing your favorite toy on other people, or else barring them from the content you are baiting them with, is narcissistic and creepy. Put your super extra special link in the description if you like. But the main link had better be something universally accessible, without any artificial barriers.
GloryBeckons 1 points 3 years ago
I disagree with several things you say and claim, but this is really the core of the issue.
Unfortunately, state actors are precisely the threat which those who wish to engage in truly free speech have to worry about. Which means Aether is useless for protecting free speech. The technology is fine for discussing state approved opinions and trivialities. But it is not suitable for topics which are subjected to political persecution.
Not only does it fail to protect your identity, but it makes it easier to uncover it. You don't even need to be a state actor, contrary to their repeated claims. Anyone with sufficient motivation and time could stand up a few dozen nodes on cheap VPS or cloud services and use them to unmask and track users on the network over time. To obtain similar information from a traditional website you would need a subpoena.
That is not better protection. It is worse.
Because they say so themselves. On the page you link to yourself:
"Not only that Aether does not primarily serve a user base that would require Tor as a pre-requisite for using Aether, it _especially_ does not serve people who need graphical UI tools to configure Tor support"
Inconvenience by design. Illogical rationalization. Sketchy.
That is not true and doesn't even make sense. That would make it centralized. It is explicitly a decentralized P2P network. You may only need the IP of one peer for the initial connection to the network. But, once that is established, you will connect to other peers and exchange content.
Aether is ephemeral. Content is pruned constantly. Talk.lol has already outlived everything that was on Aether when it launched.
It's not OK at all, because people shouldn't be using it. At least not for anything they wouldn't post on Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
I would actually mind that. Same as I mind people who only post archive.ph links without providing the real link.
Forcing your favorite toy on other people, or else barring them from the content you are baiting them with, is narcissistic and creepy. Put your super extra special link in the description if you like. But the main link had better be something universally accessible, without any artificial barriers.