Aether

Aether is the startup I’ve started working on in March 2018 and ran until now. For it, I’ve raised two rounds of venture capital funding and built a small team.

I was the primary designer for it through the entirety of its existence. Anything that related to design, in any form, from product design to branding and visual design, even illustrations, was my work.

Aether P2P

Aether P2P is an open-source, peer-to-peer social network that is roughly similar to Reddit.

Video 1a. Aether P2P native app, running on Mac OS.

The Problems for Aether P2P

Aether P2P was an attempt to solve the following problems.

Internet resilience. Today’s internet is largely built on a few focal points, large companies that serve crucial needs. This is very efficient, but it is also not the best in terms of safety — because in case any of them goes down, it takes with it a significant amount of functionality. For example, Google going down would render large parts of email system non-functional because Gmail is a centralised service hosted by Google. This is not the only way to provide services.

Platform ownership = control over discussion. In real life, there are clear rules on what one can do in public spaces and what rights one has. Likewise private spaces are also known, and the in them are clearly set by someone else.

On the internet, there are no public spaces, all space is private space that belongs to someone. For the most part this worked well because of cultural constraints (i.e. most people do not like to be told what to say). However, this is not a given, not without a truly public gathering place on the internet that belongs to no one.

Solutions I came up with

A public space owned by nobody. This is the ultimate goal of Aether P2P, in that it creates a decentralised space with no owners. It also does not incur any hosting or maintenance costs, so it can truly be free for all.

Sharp moderation tools. To temper this free-for-all and make it less a bar fight and more a thought-out space for discussion, we need to offer extremely well-made moderation tools. This is of utmost importance, because without moderation, the value of this open space is negative.

Consent of the governed. On the flip side, to ensure the moderators do not end up tyrants, moderators need to be elected from the community on a continuous basis, and an individual user can have their own moderators list that he or she trusts. The app then locally re-renders the social network based on only those moderators' decisions.

Design

Image 1b. The primary segmentation in Aether P2P is communities. On the left, the communities this user has subscribed to is listed. A community usually, but not always, signifies a group of people interested in the same topic.

Image 1c. Posts are threaded, so the thread remains easy to understand even when there are multiple discussions happening on the same subject.

Image 1d. Aether brings the more important content to the front, so you are required to read much fewer posts. The importance is determined by signals provided by users, two of which are upvotes and downvotes cast by members.

Image 1e. This is how you start a discussion. Aether is for longer, deeper conversations that won't fit into Slack or Discord text boxes.

Image 1f. The users choose which communities they want to sign up for based on their location or interests. They can also choose to get email notifications about new threads, posts, or when they are mentioned.

Image 1g. 'Popular' is a good place to catch up with your communities. Most up-votes posts rise up, so you can see most interesting discussions.

Image 1h. Your discussions double as easy-to-search documentation with no additional effort. All posts support Markdown and code highlighting.

Image 1i. User profiles is where you go to find the user's past conversations. This makes finding and linking to older decisions easy.

Aether Pro

Aether Pro is a group communication app, similar to Slack or Discord. Early on it was a largely business-focused tool, but later into its lifetime, we’ve found that our values match more with private communities rather than businesses, so it has become a tool that serves Aether P2P users that happen to need a private group for their friends.

Image 2a. Aether Pro came out of the need for having a private, invite-only version of Aether for business use, and for communities that prefer to be non-public.

The Problem(s)

Chat killed email in the workplace, without filling its use as a long-form discussion tool. This causes chat to be forced into a long-form discussion tool, however, when more than 3 people are having a conversation, it is very difficult to make sense of the conversation flying by at warp speed.

The current chat tools generate a notification waterfall of boundless proportions, and they have no business incentive to fix this. Every internal communication tool is aimed at generating the maximum number of viable notifications to maximize the time spent in the app, and by proxy, its daily/weekly/monthly active users. This causes the users to be bombarded with notifications with very little ability to restrict the influx because having ‘notify-all all the time’ as the default creates the cultural expectation of ‘respond instantly at all times or be seen as slacking’ as a result.

Chat is ephemeral and it’s almost impossible to reference some chat conversation or even find it a few weeks after it has happened. It has no way to store information for the long term, nor to structure it to make it easier to understand. This is a result of the nature of chat, and it is the downside of it being easy and ‘light’. Discussions made this way mostly remain only in the fading memories of the direct participants, and no one else can make sense of it if they were not there at the time it was happening.

Solutions

Watercoolers and meeting rooms. A tool that provides both short-form (chat) and long-form (forum threads) communication, with integration between them. This is a way to relieve chat of its ill-fitting duty as the long-form discussion system.

Allow easy email-like thread creation from chat, and that can be done retroactively: a chat user selects a few chat messages, and selects ‘create new thread from chat discussion’ from the hover menu. That is all it takes to carry a discussion over when it starts to get serious.

Long-form discussion supplemented by internal wiki. Design an internal email-like forum and wiki, so threads created from chats have a permanent place to be archived and searched.

On top of what we already had from Aether P2P, build features where certain messages can be marked as the ‘solution’, to render a message the canonical response, or to end a thread with a conclusion.

A notification system that enforces hygiene. A system where chat messages do not generate notifications unless mentioned, and only ‘forum’ threads do. This system primarily enforces the ephemerality of chat, intending to render the chat a ‘water cooler’, a good way to start a discussion, but not the place to make a decision.

Design

Image 2b. New on the web version is a multi-universe selector that allows the users to switch between multiple teams they are active on.

Image 2c. Also new on the web version is chat — now every channel has both a 'subreddit' (forum) and a chat inside. Chat messages on hover reveal actions that are available to them.

Image 2d. Aether UI kit enables complex interactions such as markdown previewing, popovers based on the app state, and input validation on content entry fields.

Image 2e. Different types of notifications allow for easy scanning and different notification rules based on the type.

Image 2f. Aether's search is capable of returning multiple types of content at the same time such as a thread, a post, or an individual chat message.

User feedback

Branding

Image 5a. Excerpt from Sketch. Our base logo, adapted for multiple products, light and dark backgrounds, black/white use cases in light and dark, for print work.

Image 5b. Excerpt from Sketch. Asset exports for native and web apps.

Press & Recognition

The Verge (Article)

Aether aims to be a Reddit for the privacy conscious

Google hires creator of Aether encrypted social network

ZDNet (Article)

Google poaches encrypted social network creator

The New Stack (Article)

Aether: A Decentralized Reddit with Self-Moderation and Privacy

Internet Archive (Talk)

Decentralized Social Media

NODE (Print magazine)

Tools for the Decentralized World

Our Networks (Conference)

Aether: Distributing Social Networks Without Distributed Consensus

Metagovernance Seminars (Conference)

Introducing Aether

Twitter Bluesky Reports (Report)

Ecosystem Overview

Redecentralize (Newsletter)

Redecentralize April 2021