🤔 Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my client not have some posts my friend does have on their client?

There can be a few reasons for this. The first and most likely reason is that the content your friend can see and you cannot was more than 2 weeks old when you joined the network first. Aether retains content for 6 months, but it only actively communicates content from the last 2 weeks. ¹

The other reason might be that the content might just have not arrived to you yet. This is the case where you don’t leave the Aether app running in the taskbar like an email client, and instead force-close it every time. Aether will still receive the content from the times where you were offline, but it might take some time.

The network does have a bootstrap node that every node connects when they detect that they’ve not been open for longer than 6 hours or so. That gives the app a way to fast-forward. Unfortunately, since the bootstrap node(s) are configured to provide this service, they will often be tracking from a little bit behind as a tradeoff. So even when you ‘catch up’ via a bootstrap node, you might need to wait for a bit to get that last bit of most fresh content.

¹ This is subject to change based on the observed network behaviour. There might be better values for this.