Aether has such a compelling pitch that I was going to install it despite the Electron bloat it'd introduce on my system, but then saw that you used snaps, which was really unfortunate.

Have you considered something like AppImage instead? While not ideal, it minimizes your effort while also being compatible with every other distribution without requiring your users to install a large, complicated piece of software/package manager like Snap.

Aether is a Go app, we use Electron just for the GUI. We do no processing in it - we do the processing in the go backend daemon. It’s pretty snappy and light.

I tried AppImage first, it didn’t work.

If you're interested, I think it would be really wise to have our DIY P2P communities chat more often. It's great to all get together at events like Dweb camp, but since we're all working on similar problems maybe more communication is better?

Yes! I’m chatting semi-regularly with a bunch of SSB people over Twitter, but I would love to chat / help out more. SSB is a much bigger project than Aether so I’m sometimes at a loss who to talk to since I don’t know the project structure or who the core developers for certain features are. My email is in my HN profile, please do reach out.