I am sure many of you have seen this thread suggesting that voat may have no more than a month left to live. Of course this isn't the first time that we have had reason to be concerned about the longevity of this website.
We need some sort of backup form or message board. It wouldn't have to be a perfect voat replacement, it could even be a on a compromised service like reddit or discord. The idea being that if voat were to vanish suddenly, this community would have a place remain in contact with one another, and when a suitable replacement was found, the word could be spread through this backup site. With out a back up such as this, the sudden death of voat would cause this community to disperse and it may never find a common home again.
One possible idea for a site that could even be a full fledged new home is Aether as suggested by @RiverWind here. I don't know anything about that service myself, but it's the only suggestion I have seen so far a backup home.
What say you Goats?
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RiverWind ago
@FellowMan /u/FellowMan
Thanks! You should all look at Aether. Free Expression? You need a well engineered platform to support that, and Aether is it. You can't block it by an IP address, like you could voat.co, as the Aether network isn't centralized on a single point. Everybody who uses Aether is basically helping keep it online. This works as it uses a client and you connect through the client. You really should give it a look, and post some content to see how it works.
https://getaether.net
It is Free Software, so you can audit and change the code as you like. (AGPL)
No6 ago
Decentralized anything has the illegal content problem.
One bad actor posts terrorism instructions, child porn, threats against the president? You're all terrorist child raping assassins according to the law.
RiverWind ago
Thanks for raising this issue. It is worth investigating further. A couple of points related to this:
1) A centralized system like Voat suffers from the same weakness. If people are OK with what people might post on centralized Voat, they ought to be OK with the same stuff on decentralized Aether.
2) Like Voat, Aether is sub-divided into "Subs". (In Voat these are termed "Subverses".) If you don't want content about Assassins to appear, don't subscribe to /b/Assassins. (In Voat it would be /v/Assassins.)
3) Aether is engineered so that if the community object to the moderation of a sub, then participants can oust the mods and replace them with new ones. The mods have the ability to block content.
4) Aether's content is ephemeral by default. Unless people archive it or keep reposting it, it "goes stale" after 6 months, and is no longer visible.
5) Aether doesn't actually host content, like images, only text. It does permit thumbnails to appear if they are on the list of supported sites, which I think is imgur.com at the moment.
6) Currently, the Aether community is far more moderate than Voat's, so currently the opposite is more likely to be the issue.
7) Is there currently any discussion site in operation which doesn't have this weakness? Which ones?
All that said, you have raised an important question which any Free Speech platform ought to be able to address. Lets raise the issue at Aether and see what is said. In the meanwhile, please continue to examine Aether and see how strong it is by comparison with other potential sites, like https://notabug.io
No6 ago
On voat there is a lot of stuff but you can choose to not download it. In the case you describe, it still sounds like one person has the power to force a file to be distributed to everyone.
If you subscribe to /v/carebears/, which probably is not a real sub, and I drop in posting pages of a jihadi magazine, you still have to click pictures and save them to get them stored on your computer long term.
If the same things happens with a decentralized network, you might have them and not even know it if you weren't reading every single post.
RiverWind ago
Thanks for this, No6. @Tallest_Skil might be interested in this too. I am keen to find an answer. I think that it is surely OK legally, as the multi-billion dollar Ethereum blockchain would have been stopped long ago, as it, like Aether, also works on a blockchain and, like Aether, it permits people to write content, such as contracts. People with the Ethereum blockchain could be held liable for anything that is on it, in the same way.
At the moment though, I don't know how the law treats this situation.
Tallest_Skil ago
My problem with current P2P websites is that they don’t distinguish between content you’ve desired and the sum total of hosted content. Specifically, they’ll arbitrarily download parts of the website to your computer, including partial hashes of illegal material, if any. For example, I believe that courts consider “part of a child porn image” to be “child porn” under the law, even if that part doesn’t resolve into an image because it’s 1/10th of the raw code of a JPG file or something. And because it’s partial code (P2P sites treat all content like BitTorrent blocks), you’ll have no idea WHAT is on your computer unless you happen to have all of a specific image.
The premise of decentralized websites is great. We can’t trust banks, we can’t trust payment processors, and we can’t trust ISPs. But we can’t trust each other, either.
RiverWind ago
Have you tried telling that to the Ethereum community? The Ethereum blockchain contains content (contracts, for example) that might in theory be illegal. The whole of Ethereum ought to be dismantled, by this way of thinking. Since there are billions of dollars at stake on the Ethereum blockchain, I am sure they will have a robust response for you, though I don't have one.
Tallest_Skil ago
Ah, I’ve not done any research into the way Ethereum operates. Thought it was just “another cryptocurrency” that happened to use blockchain, and I figured they each used it the same way. Can you give an example of their business model?
In this case, it would be known by the way the full file resolves when served to a user by the website in question. To my memory, the bittorrent protocol (just an example) breaks files into tiny sections so that any one section may be up/downloaded by any user independently of the rest. Each file is given the equivalent of a “directory,” which tells the computer what each of the sections looks like (and how they go together) so it knows what to download and how to assemble it. Though differing images may have one or two identical section, it’s the way the site serves the section (with relation to other sections) that would determine whether it’s a good image or a bad image.
Now, I totally get what you’re saying. “How can someone be held accountable for an unresolvable portion of a CP image that doesn’t resolve to anything but junk data?” The answer is “kill all pedophiles.” The overwhelming and natural desire of human (read: white) society to see those who abuse children taken down has been thoroughly abused by governments to take down their political opponents. Did you know that a website can have a 1x1 transparent pixel advertisement injected into it that acts as an outgoing link? Did you that if the link resolves to CP, the mere VIEWERS of a webpage with said advertisement can be charged for it? That’s how they get you.