Aether is a reddit alternative not dissimilar to Lemmy in that it is distributed and open source.

Some advantages to Aether over Lemmy are:

It is entirely decentralized rather than federated giving it superior censorship resistance and smooth horizontal scalability. Each user on the Aether network acts as a node operator allowing other users to connect and view the communities that they subscribe to.

Moderators within each community are elected by, are impeachable by, and their decisions can be individually ignored by the users of each community. All mod actions are public information and, as mentioned, each mod action or moderator can be ignored by each user. This maximizes the accountability of the network and greatly reduces the chances of censorship.

The biggest flaw with Aether is that it is not currently maintained (to my knowledge). With such a massive migration of users to Lemmy and the Fediverse as large, I would love to see an increased interest in decentralized solutions like Aether.

Would it be technically feasible for Aether to join the fediverse through modified Lemmy instances? If so it could act as a silver bullet to enable horizontal scalability of the network at large.

I welcome any discussion on the topic.

At the moment there is slim pickings for other communities to join if this instance is chosen by a user to be their home server.

Presumably other instances have to approve linux.community federating with them before their subs can show up? Is it that this instance is new, or is there some other reason. u/nkukard can you chime in?

EDIT: A-ha! I was searching poorly! Once a member of a instance subscribes, it pulls it into that instance for easier discovery. Neat!