Only members of a community that have been there for a while can become moderators. Moderator elections are held from time to time, and only long standing members of each community may vote on their moderators. A moderator is not removed unless they are inactive for a long period, or the community disagrees with their decisions enough to impeach them.
Any user on Aether is free to blacklist any other user, preventing that users content from ever touching their computer. (This feature is present on Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse also)
Very fair point, and all perfect examples of the value of circumstantial censorship.
To Aether’s credit: something can’t be both ephemeral and unremovable; being ephemeral suggests that it will be removed automatically given enough time. To my understanding: the moderation policy on Aether prevents users from downloading content that moderators have hidden. It is only if a user goes out of their way to view hidden content that they risk exposure to it.
If federation from Aether to Lemmy were technically possible, surely it would be within the capabilities of Lemmy to only pull and display data that the moderators of an Aether instance deem appropriate. It would of course be up to any Lemmy server host whether they accept the federation, and if they feel the need to blacklist any Aether communities.
Comments and posts being ephemeral on Aether is essentially a moot point from a data preservation perspective, as it would be trivial for someone to backup the data.
The ephemeral nature of Aether is more valuable from a user convenience perspective as everything you subscribe to in Aether is stored on your device. Posts deleting themselves after a time means that your Aether data folder doesn’t grow too large.
To further my point: Lemmy server hosts would be a great group to backup Aether data for users that don’t want to have a large local data folder and for record keeping.
To me, Aether’s big thing is that it applies true decentralization and opt-in censorship resistant to reddit’s organic community growth and thread style.
The democratization of moderation on Aether is an extremely elegant solution that I don’t think translates well to Lemmy. Lemmy server hosts could ultimately overrule any moderator decision just as reddit did this past week. This is not possible in a top down way on Aether, but I still see Lemmy as a useful potential bridge.