Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people.

Plebbit only hosts text. Images from google and other sites can be linked/embedded in posts. This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.

it has no central server, database, HTTP endpoint or DNS - it is pure peer to peer. Unlike federated instances, which are regular websites that can get deplatformed at any time,

ENS domain are used to name communities.

Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy. Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.

The code is fully open source on

https://github.com/plebbit

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    3 days ago

    From reading the whitepaper, you basically replace instance admins with community admins, and your P2P peers will cache some of the content so you don’t hit the community admin all the time. Benefits:

    • lower hosting costs - you only need to pay for storage for your community, plus some transfer as comments/posts get updated on your “instance”
    • risk is limited to whatever communities someone is hosting, not an entire instance
    • user accounts aren’t centralized, so if a community goes down, you still have your user account
    • some protection against doxxing IP addresses, whereas w/ Lemmy you need to trust your instance admins

    Other differences:

    • moderation is selected by the community admin, there are no instance admins
    • trust mechanisms (captcha and whatnot) is managed at the community level, since there is no instance level

    Potential downsides:

    • no ActivityPub, so it won’t interact w/ the fediverse whatsoever
    • affiliated w/ their own crypto token, and has ties to Ethereum NFTs and whatnot
    • lots of different interfaces (4chan clone, Reddit clone, etc), which could cause distraction for devs
    • uses public-key addressing instead of content addressing, so it could be slow (they propose a mitigation)

    I think it’s a step in the right direction in some areas, but ultimately there’s just a bit too much association w/ cryptocurrencies for it to really be a long-lasting service. We’ll see though, maybe my fears are unwarranted.

    • geneva_convenience
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 days ago

      The ideas sound solid. One of Lemmy’s issue is different instances hosting the same community and frequently posting the same content. But too much centralization leads to lemmy.world admins controlling everything. Still there might be abuse such as people claiming every community name.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, name squatting could be an issue, depending on if they rely on ENS or if it’s merely an option. The whitepaper claims communities are merely a public key someone controls, and the name is supplementary, so you could conceivably have duplicate communities. So in theory, squatting wouldn’t be a major issue, but discovery could be (i.e. if ENS is used for discovery, then it’s de-facto authoritative).

        I haven’t looked at the implementation, just the website and whitepaper, so I don’t know the specifics. But in theory it looks to have many of the same problems Lemmy has, with the major difference being reducing hosting costs and some dox protection.

        • geneva_convenience
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 days ago

          Without some level of beneficial dictatorship all projects are doomed if moderation is required.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            3 days ago

            I don’t think that’s a given, I just think we haven’t found a good solution yet. I’m working on one such solution, where moderation is personalized to the individual user. I think this should be good enough to hide most of the slop, while outliving any BDFL. It’ll probably fail, but hopefully it helps someone else come up with a better implementation that won’t.