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.
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.
Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:
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!
Maybe leave a link
Apparently https://plebbit.com/
Neat but it loads really slow and there doesn’t seem to be much content beyond bitcoin stuff so far
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
If it is selfhosted, and text only, why use IPFS?
Because this way 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, plebbit full nodes are customized IPFS Kubo nodes, and running one is as simple as downloading the Seedit client desktop app (available on github) and keeping it open. It runs the node automatically, and seeds content automatically as you browse it. It runs on a raspberry pi, so we expect to see a lot of plebbit users running their own full node.
“no no, you download this black box binary and run it all day. Trust me brah”
There’s just so much to unpack
All the code is fully open source on github.com/plebbit
How do you share data between nodes in a decentralised manner? IPFS is just a DHT so you can’t communicate solely using it?
we use IPNS for mutable data (like upvote counts, reply counts, etc) https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/ and gossipsub for an author node to communicate their publication to a community node https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
