Excellent intro. Do you all see my slides? Yes. Okay. Great. So Acer is fundamentally about having communities in one place online. So you may ask, well, what does it mean? Are our communities in many places? Yes. Of course. If you go to a popular subreddit, you'll often see that there are links to a Discord or Twitter or some Slack, because we're basically stitching a bunch of tools together to, enable the type of interruptions that we want online. We have sync synchronous conversations in chat and usually longer form conversations in, some async platform like emails or, Discourse. And these are, like, really important tools to help us make decisions together. In person, we can walk over to someone's desk and have a in sync and have a sync conversation and then, like, pass documents around to to have longer form conversations. But in the online world, we often need different tools for this. So what Ether is is a single identity system that allows these different tools to, be employed as the community needs. We can have real time conversations in chat and structure structure discussions and also ways of engaging members of the community that's more respectful of people's attention, such as newsletters and email announcements. So you can see here in the web app, we can have some real time conversation in the chat and then a a threat way of organizing discussions. But let's take a step back. How do we get here in the first place? So it goes back to 2018 when my cofounder, at that point, I wasn't involved with the projects. He released a peer to peer Reddit. So this is, it's like Reddit. You can see on the left side, there there are communities like subreddits. And it's interesting because there is no centralized server. We run a single, Bootstrap server, and that supports the entire community of now 5,000 people. And there's some interesting properties about our peer to peer network and especially in in data distribution and the way the way that moderation could work in in this, like, admin adminless community. So this is what I wanna focus on today to talk about this peer to peer network, ephemeral content and subjective moderation, two concepts that I wanna talk about today. So first, persistence. When we think about content, we always, try to keep them and archive them forever online, it seems. But is this necessary? If we think if we think about the cost of storing data, it's constant over time, but the value of data is not necessary like that. If we're talking about financial records, like like in Bitcoin, yes, we want to have the entire history, of course. But if we're talking about social data, how often do we search back a year into our check history? So the curve doesn't look the same. So maybe we can get away with a content network that doesn't require blockchain. So the top is what a blockchain looks like. Everyone needs to validate everything, and it's necessary to have consensus on all the blocks. But in Ether, nodes don't need to have consensus. They just need to independently validate things that come in. There is a mechanism for signatures to to prove authenticity, but there doesn't need to be a, like a like a proof of work mining everyone mining the same block type of proof, which gives us a lot more flexibility. And the way that ether works is in the in the network head, the two weeks of data is actively distributed across the network, and then the six months is kept. Anything else is for is forgotten by the network. Individual nodes can, of course, like, archive all the history. You can always, like, back up your hard drive. But the network as a whole forgets all content. So that's the ephemeral part of the network. The other part is what I call application level concerns. So these are, like, things that are at the application level that concern a discussion platform. For example, spam and moderation in different types of devices, user identities, that stuff. So what is spam? So if you have a peer to peer network and there's no protection mechanism, someone can just make a bot, and your entire network becomes congested. The way that ASR handles that is to, require that every action, you close content, you vote on content, you have a mod action, all these are minted. So if I if my node gets something that doesn't have this, proof of work, then I'm not going to accept it. I'm not going to broadcast it. So it doesn't live on the network. Moderation is kind of like spam protection, but not for the computer, for us, for our attention. If you don't have moderation, you're basically you're basically losing attention to irrelevant contents. But this is a highly debated topic. Like, how should moderation happen? The way that current platforms usually do it is, you have your platform admin, like the Reddit people who work for Reddit. And then you have your subreddit having their mods, and then you have the users. And these layers don't really get to influence each other except in one direction, except the top down direction. The the admin has absolute power over everything in the end. The way that Aether thinks about this, especially in a peer to peer network, is, mods should be elected or impeached by the users. So we can run a community that's democratic. And the other interesting thing is user actions should override the mod actions at the individual level. So if I choose to ignore one mod, I should be able to unsubscribe to it, and I should disable all the mod actions by that mod, but only for myself. So this is what we call subjective moderation. And in a peer to peer network, there's no concept of admin. So that's, in general, how we're thinking about this. So we can look at moderation as this traditional moderation that we talked about with Reddit scores. And then there's democratic moderation that that has to do with holding elections for mods and the subjective moderation where the user is prioritized, essentially. Let's see. Oh, that's twenty two minutes. So the next thing I wanna talk about is the current state of the network. Right now, we are right now, we are, not having elections rolled out yet because we don't have, critical mass. And this is a common problem with, democracy. We have only 2,000 active users on a monthly basis and about 5,000 total. It's too easy to hijack, in the election. So we're basically accumulating users. So it's interesting that we're now in the phase of this social experiment where we in a peer to peer network, what happens without any moderation features? Our only moderation now is the person who created a sub is the moderator. And so when in a case where the moderation that the moderator isn't there, what happens? So this is what happens in a science board. It basically got taken over by anti vax and mind control posts. And a lot of community members are complaining about this. We gotta do something about science. Well, there's not much we can do in a peer to peer network. So the thing that I did was I created another stuff called anti science. We basically post a thing that I love what science is talking about, which I would consider as scientific. So a bunch of people did indeed move to anti science tunnels to start talking about science, what I call science. And other members had another proposal that, hey, if you want science to be not flooded with that stuff, why don't you why don't we make more content? Why we should post more in science to to to dilute that content? And they have indeed done that. So if you end up wandering into the ether or peer to peer universe, I encourage you to check out these two subs. They're amusing. So let's let's imagine we do have all the moderation features and governance features we talked about, and we can even think about integrating more event systems like like delegated democracy, all of the stuff that Metacorp is thinking about, into Azer. What can we do with this? Because Azer already has a concept of cryptographic identities, and we we can we can vote cryptographically. This is not so different from proposal driven processes in DAOs, like, the the snapshot tool that people use in the Ethereum ecosystem. So there's a proposal, and then token holders can vote, and then this leads to a proposal being passed or not. We can start thinking about online communities managing a collective treasury and have a way for members to participate in how to spend that money. So this might lead to more sustainable online communities that can scale with some financial buffer. And this is not necessarily a cryptocurrency only thing. We can build a system like this based on membership on external systems such as Open Collective. And this is where just open things that we're thinking about. And that's it. That's the Ether. We have two websites, the hosted version is on our website, the first website, and then the peer to peer app is on the second. So if you're interested in this, please come and talk to us. Thanks.

Yeah. It's a it's a flood network. Okay. So, essentially, everyone holds the entire network, and it's text only right. That that that's why it has to be us, Six months. And and

Yes.

Mhmm. So in the pure peer to peer world, you can get an identity and then all your actions assigned with that identity. And then in the so so it's also, pseudonymous because you don't actually provide email address or anything. So, basically, you open the app and then and it creates an identity for you. In the hosted universe, you do put an email address in, and that's the the that's your email identity tied to the cryptographic key. We're thinking about how to join these two worlds because we started thinking about peer to peer and hosted as just two different back ends. There are some use cases that are better for peer to peer where you may want to remain pseudonymous. And if if you're doing, like, some sort of activism, political organizing stuff where you might be at risk of censorship, it might be better to back the back your community with a peer to peer back end. But if you're doing, like, a like a company workplace or, like, open source projects, maybe you can use a hosted version that that that that does more feature for you, essentially, because we haven't figured out how to chat in the peer to peer worlds yet. Sorry. That was, like, a lot of information.

Yeah. The the way the way we see the peer to peer universe is it's like this long running social experiment. There's a place that we can experiment with governance, and it's being actively talked about in the community. In the meta sub, people are constantly talking about, like, what they like, what they don't like. A lot of ideas emerge from there. For example, one one discussion was about how can I if there's, like, some just really terrible content I don't want on my hard disk, how do I eject that? How do I not broadcast that? And currently, there's no way of doing that. But a lot of nice ideas came out. What if people can independently, put content, like, let's say, I don't want this. I don't want the these fingerprints of content. And you can have follow lists where I trust that, Nathan, whatever Nathan censors and doesn't want to broadcast, is probably aligned with me. And you can have this relationship of that like, delegated non broadcast, I guess. And and and the other question is, what what is the UX? How will if I'm trying to fetch that content and 20% of the network doesn't broadcast that content, is it slower? Do I get broken contents? We don't know yet. What if, like, 90% of the network stop broadcasting that that that contents?

blower. There are other people who raised another point that I never thought about. They actually want the content to be visible but not as prominent. They want, like, a no notify content. How are you?

That's that's that's about it. Yeah. So I I I I just made it to add. I understand that you do struggle now with the number already of of users in the in the current form. But, I mean, it's it's you have it I mean, do do you imagine that other people will fork it and you may remain interoperable nevertheless? So that's the that's the direction this question on targeting.

There are a few angles I want to answer this. So first, if anyone's, like, familiar with SecureSkeletalBAD, the the thinking around Skelobat is, there are many small islands where conversations happen within those social bubbles. Ather is in a way opposite to that. It's it's not so Skelobut is more, like a personal profile, whereas Ather is more a platform for open debate. And it's better that more people participate in the same network, where, essentially when you install Ether, you're essentially saying, I want to have these discussions with a diverse group of people, people that I agree with and people I don't agree with. And I want to have and I want and I'm willing to share part of my heart this to host this platform. So it's like this global common platform thing. So there's, like, not a lot of incentive for people to to fork the code in the first place, except we do have a mechanism. We have multiple mechanisms, but one of them is a block list. So we do manage a centralized block list to censor any illegal content because we are a registered a a registered company in The United States. There are some people who don't agree with this. They they want complete free speech, and the source is open the the code is open source, and people can fork this. If this is the reason, we don't believe that free free speech is is the right direction. So so there's that. And then another angle is private communities. People started asking for private communities after the 2018 launch, and that's why we have the the host of universes at all right now. Because we know that we can't do private communities where, essentially, is, I'm sharing my heart with you, but I can't see the actual stuff. Only the people in that group can see it. This would probably lead to a left network fork that doesn't have private communities because people don't wanna care carry that weight. So we didn't end up doing that. Yeah.

No. Thanks. I I think that's a it's a it's an interesting perspective that you you say that you you you don't you you won't carry those private communities in a way. And then because maybe a full as a follow-up, you it means you do require people to store content actively on their hard drives. Right? So if I if I am basically, I'm I keep increasing that on on my own. Like, if I if I'm okay. Every six months, apparently, post will be deleted. But but before that, if I'm, like like, reading a lot of content and liking a lot of I mean, I I I start I keep accumulating that. Although, probably, that's not a very high weight in terms of memory. Okay.

Yeah. So with the private communities, we host them on AWS. So to to be clear, the the the public, peer to peer network, is completely open. There's no concept of private messages in the on the peer to peer network. Right? Because otherwise, if we bundle, like, the all these private communities onto the peer to peer network, then we're essentially, like, squalling your Huddl's for, like

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Uh-huh. Okay. Thanks.

Mhmm. To be honest, I haven't thought a lot about, like, where the where the integration boundary is with with, like, on on the governance side. I've thought more about on the collective treasury side. I think both are very important. These are, like, two things that, go hand in hand. Because if you don't have the right governance system, you can't do a collective church or treasury. And the let me just talk a bit about this collective treasury thing. So we're thinking about integrating with Open Collective or with with a monthly stake DAO because because then you can we can actually have a community that can manage finances and and can and can grow and make it really if we integrate with Open Collective, it makes it really easy for communities to get started because they don't need to start forming this legal organization to, like like like to do all their accounting. So the the link that I shared is kind of the in progress conversation that we have with with OC. And there's some mention of Medigov in there as well because the other point then is how do we how do we enable the right types of governance models in? And, obviously, Medigap has done a lot of thinking into this and implementation as well. I think that would be the next thing that that that I want to look into, how to is is it by API integration or, like, we implement the API in the native app, but the interface is consistent. Yeah. That that kind of yeah. I I think these are, like, the two most exciting integrations to me. Does that does that answer?

Yeah. I'm I'm actually quite curious how the Open Collective and Medigap integration is because, like, I'm always thinking about this as, like, like, we need a discussion platform to do the kind of mod and governance stuff, and Open Collective doesn't have that internally. Right? So is it is it through the admin system, like, the people who approve funds and that's where the democracy is?

I see. I see.

Yeah.

Mhmm.

Yeah. So one thinking is because because your sensors are essentially subscription based, you are so United States can be one sensor or filter. So all all people in The US are required to subscribe to that, for example. And then if you're in another jurisdiction, that country can have another sensor authority, and people can subscribe to them. Perhaps this is this is the default setting when people do the download. And then if people decide to opt out of that, they are, like, individually deciding to operate out of the loss of that jurisdiction. If this is, like technically, this is what's possible, I don't know enough about all the legal implications of of having having to switch to opt out of of of the state sensors. And it it regardless of what we influence, it's possible that people may fork it and, like, just disable this feature altogether. So there's no answer to this, but this is our current thinking.

questions?

What what's what's what's happening for the rest of the year? We we currently focus on getting more people to use the the hosted platform. We just launched that in June. We we want to so so one thing we've hosted one thing with peer to peer is it's really hard to build something on a peer to peer platform. And also, everything requires a download to update, so the network actually needs to choose to upgrade their stuff, Whereas the hosted web app so so the hosted stuff is on a web app. That's on a it's much faster to iterate the u the UX on that. So the road map is most likely that we'll focus on the hosted platform, do everything up to democratic elections on that. The only thing we we might not be able to do at all is the subjective moderation because because then that that that's more because when we operate the service, we can't be responsible for, like, all all the content. So that's kind of the direction we're going. And right now, we're thinking, hey. Like, what other usability polish that that is needed to get the to get the hosted stuff used by many communities? Yeah. And after that, as you can see, the the heck MD I shared, we're thinking q '1 would be when we start seriously implementing the treasury stuff with Open Collective. So now we're pretty early in all of those discussions.

Another another thing is we're writing a lot about how we think about the current digital platforms. We think they're mostly authoritarian states because this hierarchy of yeah. But but but then, like, we really want to communicate that to a general audience. We've been writing blog posts. If you go to, like, getaso.net/blog, or maybe it's the other domain, aso.app/blog, you'll see a few long form articles that talks about this stuff. I think continuing to discuss about basically publicize this idea that another way of governance is possible online. I I I think that's what we wanna do in the next six months.

the same challenges Yes, please.

Can you send me an email? And and and anyone who who wants to talk more about this, please send me an email. On the content side, I definitely do want to collaborate more.

We also haven't implement any, any democratic election or anything in in the host. A lot of implementation is very bare bones at the moment, to be honest. Yeah. It's just, like, things taking time.

No. That that's definitely the plan. Okay. Right now is the person who created the universe, is benevolent dictator for life. Eventually, they can switch governance models.

There there's another piece here about hosted universes. The the per per channel or, like, per per sub permission. So if people wanna use this in a in a conference, you can have organizers, be in some organizer channel, but then you can have other people in other channels. Or, like, companies may want to have, like, internal channels and then, like, clients' contractors' channel. So, like, that whole permission system is in early developments.

Yeah. And and I and I think we like, in Ether, we didn't talk enough to, moderators. Like, just wallstreetbets or whatever high traffic subreddit that, the moderators, what what are they dealing with? Why are they doing this? Yeah. Yeah. That's an audience we haven't spoke to, enough. Did did did anyone here, like, have, like, access to that audience? Like like, talking to them about why do you do this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that's the that's the article that Philip shared. Thanks for that. There are two of them in the series. There should be more coming up.

Yeah. First thing is, take the web app and stick it into the Electron app, which isn't well, the code base diverged so much, so so that's where the work is. There's no, like, fundamental reason why it can't be done. A lot of stuff is really due to capacity. It's Barak and myself, and and I joined only earlier this year. So I'm also, like, getting up to speed on things and managing, like, a a pretty huge platform. So so it's just but but, basically, we're we're in the process of trying to scale up capacity and get to a place where we can ship things more consistently. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks to all the great questions too and all all the resources here. I'm gonna get a copy of the chat.