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.
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chanw, andhave 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.
Get out of here with the crypto nonsense, we dont need more tech bro spaces for people to talk about AI automation and why the grind is more important than workers rights.
From the FAQ linked on the site:
Q: Is this running on ETH? A: the token is on ETH, the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, but the app will use several blockchains, tokens and NFTs to recreate all the features from reddit, like usernames, subplebbit names will be crypto domains like ENS (and other chains), awards will be NFTs, tips and upvotes will earn tokens (can set them to your own token or any coin of your choice in your subplebbit)
[…]
Q: What role does the PLEB token play? A: The base protocol doesn’t use tokens, which lets people who don’t have interest in cryptocurrency (yet) use it for free, but optionally you can use any tokens to do many things, for example you can use names.eth (ENS, which are non fungible tokens) to represent a username or subplebbit name. You can use NFT images as avatars. You can use fungible tokens and NFTs (any token or cryptocurreny of the subplebbit owner’s choice) to vote, curate, reward, tip, incentivize and/or as spam protection (instead of using captchas, require users of your subplebbit to own, stake, burn or pay a certain amount of a token/NFT of your choice to post/upvote). A subplebbit’s name like memes.eth (becomes /p/memes.eth) could be owned by a DAO, and owners of the DAO’s tokens could vote on chain for who gets to be admin and moderator of the subplebbit, i.e. a smart contract/DAO can be owner of a subplebbit.
This sounds fucking awful. You want a peer-to-peer network, but decided to tie critical features to the blockchain, something arguably less decentralised than APub software.
As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn’t use tokens. Meaning, there are no critical features tied to any blockchain.
The crypto features we implemented in our clients are not required by the protocol. The protocol works perfectly fine without them. We implemented them in our clients because they are nice, and they are:
- readable names using crypto names, instead of having to see long alphanumeric IPNS public keys as addresses
- NFT profile pics tied to a user’s plebbit account, because we whitelist the specific NFT collections to prevent NSFW profile pics
- tipping, which is an upcoming feature, to provide a fully decentralized alternative to Reddit awards/gold (plebbit users will actually make money, so will the community owners and admins since they’ll be able to tax tips in their community; and there’s no corporation/global admin that gets a cut)
As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn’t use tokens.
I don’t care what the protocol technically makes feasible, people don’t use protocols they use software that interprets protocols. ActivityPub doesn’t actually require DNS, but you (correctly) say it does because there’s no software out there people will use that doesn’t require DNS. The point is you still tied human readable names to the blockchain, something absolutely not optional for social media software. No one is going to be like “you should sub to p/nrlaoii2nsl2, the memes are 🔥”.
NFT profile pics tied to a user’s plebbit account, because we whitelist the specific NFT collections to prevent NSFW profile pics
Who is “we” here and why do they get to decide what’s acceptable in my community (‘subpleb’ if you will)?
You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won’t be compatible with our clients because we think that’s a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it’s controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.
DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.
Who is “we” here and why do they get to decide what’s acceptable in my community (‘subpleb’ if you will)?
For our clients, “we” means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There’s no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).
Not really, most of the time people post on 4chan without them even though they exist.
Leave it to cryptos to make simple things stupidly difficult. This whole piece you quoted was hilarious, but this part especially stuck out for me:
The base protocol doesn’t use tokens, which lets people who don’t have interest in cryptocurrency (yet) use it for free
There’s an XKCD for that, although i do think ActivityPub could be improved.
This is not a standard. People overusing these xkcds for fucking everything are driving me CRAZY
Well if you see ActivityPub as the standard way of using decentralized social media…
Not in the context of that xkcd (And the comic itself is stupid, should we have not invented Unicode because it’s yet another standard?? Should we not innovate?) Also ActivityPub is not serverless/peer-to-peer and the OP even says themselves it’s not a lemmy competitor!!
It’s not a competing standard, it’s a whole new approach to decentralize forum-based social media.
ActivityPub is not fully decentralized, it’s a federated design, meaning it’s a network of instances, and each instance is just a regular website with servers. Anyone can run an instance, but it’s expensive, tiresome and you’ll get banned for it; they are regular websites.
whereas Plebbit is fully decentralized, it’s purely peer to peer, meaning it’s a network of peers where every peer can potentially be a full node by simply using the desktop app (or in the future, a non custodial public rpc on mobile), and you don’t have to run any site/domain for it, it’s censorship resistant just like running a torrent with a BitTorrent client.
Also to be clear: like ActivityPub is a protocol with clients, such as Mastodon and Lemmy, Plebbit is a protocol with clients, such as Seedit and Plebchan.
Reading these comments about your work must be so hard. I remember getting this kind of feedback for my projects from know-it-alls who never completed anything themselves. Keep up the good work, decentralize everything!
Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:
Great work! I’ve always considered lemmy to be an interim solution as it doesn’t resolve the core issue of mod centralization. How does your solution differ compare to something like nostr, which is more decentralized than ActivityPub, and not P2P, but also seems to eliminate the mod issue and enable “direct” subscribing to users.
Would your goal be to shard/raid data across IPFS nodes at scale? If not, what would the local nodes size be with millions of users and years of history (e.g. Reddit’s scale)?
My next hope is a fully decentralized and distributed internet archive + piratebay using IPFS over I2P.
Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.
The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don’t have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS’d, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.
Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there’s nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you’re always reachable by any user on plebbit.
Nostr is not really federated because the servers just send data for you. Nobody calls the internet federated because the switches transfer your data
