A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.
The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.
But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.
Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:
– Plebbit is serverless. – There are no global admins. – It does not rely on any central server. – It can’t be censored or taken down. – It works like BitTorrent, but for social media. – No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.
Every subreddit (called a “subplebbit”) is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.
And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.
It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.
Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.
If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.
I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.
Decentralized? Zero administration or censorship? Blockchain? No governance or oversight? Absolute freedom? No approval from anyone?
Plebbit contains child porn. Has to, there’s no way it doesn’t.
When? Probably the day after it went online, and every day following it.
You believe with zero shadow of a doubt that 8chan, motherless and Anonib all have cp, but Plebbit doesn’t?
mmmhm
Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren’t hosted anywhere on the protocol.
Images are just bytes. Just encode an image via base64 and now you can send it via text. People will find ways.
The default limit on comments size is 40kb, and each subplebbit (community) can configure that to be even lower. Hardly doubt people will find a way to embed 40kb images
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media.
I found your problem.
It’s a terrible analogy, I think of Plebbit as the Bittorrent of social media.
I also think that’s more a disadvantage than other thing.
It can’t be censored or taken down
I know nothing of Plebbit, however, even as a huge privacy and freedom of speech advocate, I have issue with uncensored social media. There is a huge difference between freedom and freedumb. Total freedumb equals total chaos. Freedumb seems to be trending, and if all the freedumb loving people want to congregate in one place to spew their bile and hatred at each other, fine…I won’t engage. The problem occurs when freedumb loving people want to export that hatred and bile to other social media thinking just because they fly the freedumb flag, everyone else should too. I ‘helped’ beta test Gab when if first started, and immediately dropped it. It was clear early on who their clientele would be: Hate mongering racists.
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism. LBJ, tho he had his own issues with racism, said a truth that still stands today in that, if you give a man someone to hate, they will bend over and willingly spread their cheeks for your amusement. No one slipped me a note up in the slot while I was in utero and asked me what I wanted to be when I got out. Hmmmm…lets see…oh WHITE definitely. It’s stupidity of the highest order to hate someone for their skin pigment when I myself, like them, had no choice in the matter. It’s probably not a popular opinion but these things should be censored.
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism
You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Plebbit is not pure chaos, it’s a p2p protocol that allows communities and users to connect if they really wish to with no intermediaries.
Maybe because you tried to backdoor a sales pitch into a community where it wasn’t quite on topic, and the community members didn’t appreciate it?
No they made people up that got mad. It’s just sympathy bait. It’s most likely an ad to fake interest in a hopeless project
I’m going to post it again.
For anyone else looking for a reason to stay away from plebbit- uh, look at their X account https://x.com/getplebbit
It’s 4chan crypto hashwashUh! Plebbit, crypto and nft. I’ll stay as far as I can.
we have nothing to do with 4chan, not sure why you mention it here.
We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
Homie, you used 4chans logo in your shitty nft drops
https://x.com/getplebbit/status/1516387903177383948
That’s an NFT collection made by an independent artist. It’s not a representative of the project’s ethos
I’m not doing this for approval.
Okay. Go away and do it then.
I like the concept. But something without any central admins is probably going to be full of all kinds of awful stuff, and I don’t want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed, because if my client happens to cache anything illegal then I’m now potentially distributing that illegal content P2P which is a huge problem.
The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it’s basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.
I don’t want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed
You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else labels of spam/nsfw/etc.
because if my client happens to cache anything illegal
Plebbit is text-only protocol, also it is end-to-end encrypted. Also you could set your own node to never seed anybody else’s content.
The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it’s basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.
We’re not a crypto project, we do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
My question is… What does this do that ActivityPub and ATProto doesn’t do? That’s the angle you should approach this from (and be ready to defend… People on Lemmy seem adamant that ActivityPub is perfect and unbeatable…). We’re technical people here, sell it as a technical solution to a problem rather than using buzzwords or comparing it to Bitcoin.
You’ve mentioned serverless many times, but ultimately I need to send content somewhere and ask someone to send me content. I can’t just throw my posts into the wind and expect someone else to get them. So how do I make a post if not by sending it to a trusted person?
It’s not serverless, of course. Each peer is a server and the peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things. You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server. Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow.
ActivityPub is not perfect, but this is just a channer wanting some freeze prach space he can control.
Each peer is a server That’s not true, you can be a peer in the network without posting or seeding anything to the network.
peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things If you create your own community, you will be able to moderate it, yes. Why would people create communities when it can’t be moderated?
With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server If the community node is down, but other peers in the network are online and providing the community’s data, then people will still be able to read and navigate the community in read-only mode. They can’t publish new votes/comments/edits to it, because all updates has to come from the community node.
Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow Not true, try the desktop app of Seedit and you will see for yourself.
With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
I mean, that’s true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.
Difference is it’s a pure p2p network with no need for anyone to set up their own DNS/TLS/etc, so that brings the barrier of entry for running your node way lower. When you download the desktop app of Seedit for example, you’re essentailly running a full p2p node in the background.
That is way more censorship resistant than say, Mastodon or ActivityPub-based socials
Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.
How do I:
- Locate bob given a name or some other ID
- Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
- Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
- Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.
Plebbit is text-only, images are not hosted on the protocol anywhere. Although you can embed a link to an image within your comments or posts. Eventually we will think of a design for p2p image hosting but it’s not high priority right now, also it could be abused easily.
Locate bob given a name or some other ID At the moment we use key-value trackers similar to bittorrent trackers, Bob in this sceneario would post their content CID (content identifier, similar to hash) with addresses they can be reached through (quic, webtransport, websocket, https, etc).
If we assume Bob in this is a community with human name like
cats, then the backend of Plebbit will resolve the text records of the domain to find its IPNS address, which then can be queries from trackers to find Bob, or anyone else who has the content of Bob’s community.Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
Plebbit uses IPFS for its backend, which is based on content-addressing. You always get what you ask for.
Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am Each comment/vote/edit published by users to communities is signed with ed25519 keys.
Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
Depending how you connected to Bob, if you connect over a websocket or any encrypted protocol it will encrypted and nobody can snoop on you.
It still looks like you’re relying on IP addresses, which means if you want to host a Plebbit server (sorry, “always on peer”) you need one of the following:
- Use a hosting provider, which is something you want to avoid according to your pitch.
- Serve it from your own personal network under your own IP. Given that you’re worried about censorship from even the DNS system, I imagine this is something you absolutely don’t want to do.
if you want to host a Plebbit server
Did you mean a community (subplebbit) here? Or did you mean running your own client instance, like Seedit?
Use a hosting provider, which is something you want to avoid according to your pitch. Running a community is very cheap on terms of computing resources, it’s on par with running a bittorrent client, you can probably run 50+ communities on a single raspberry pi or a $5 VPS. No need for DNS/TLS, and I suspect many people will opt to host communities themselves.
If you still wanna host it with someone else, you could have the address of the community be a blockchain name system tied to a wallet you own, and then give the hosting provider your database (which contains your IPNS private key). The hosting provider will receive and publish updates on your behalf, but in the case they went rogue, you can update the text records of your domain to point to a new IPNS you fully own.
So even this way, the hosting provider doesn’t really have a lot of power over the community owner.
Serve it from your own personal network under your own IP. Given that you’re worried about censorship from even the DNS system, I imagine this is something you absolutely don’t want to do.
You can use relays/tor/vpn to obfuscate your real ip address. The peers in the network won’t know necessarily that IP address <x> is running these specific communities, just in the same way you don’t know if a random bittorrent seeder is person who originally created the file and uploaded it.
Wait until regulations hears about your decentralized social media not regulating CSAM content sharing. Pure decentralization is a libertarian wet dream. We are not into that here.
Also plebbit is text only protocol, there are no images hosted on the protocol.
Libertarian police
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
I wanted to coldremoved the guy.
God, Lemmy’s word filter is so asinine.
From my end I still see the word c0ck
Feels like P.K.Dick, but actulized with current day terminology.
Good work
Lol that’s very good satire, thank you for that
Despite everything. I was considering giving it a try, just to see.
But your right, if there’s a CSAM community on there I would inevitably host it to.
So I will not be trying plebbit
What is there to regulate? We the devs aren’t hosting anything. Is the Bittorrent founder responsible for regulating data transmitted on his protocol?
We are not into that here.
they say on a decentralised social media platform.
Any instance not moderating csam quickly gets defederated and reported…
To be pedantic, lemmy is federated, rather than decentralized (e.g. a direct p2p architecture).
With decentralization, moderation is much harder than federation, so many people aren’t a fan.
If you run a community on Plebbit, you’re responsible for its own moderation, or you can assign somebody else to moderate it.
I took a look through the twitter, which someone mentioned in another thread.
Given the 4chan like aestetic of your twitter post, I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used.
Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.
I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either.
No, I’m good. I think I’ll stay far away from plebbit.
I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used. We have no control over that as the devs, but you as the user can choose to filter by tags/keywords/NSFW etc. If you go to the settings in Seedit you will find the option.
In its early days the internet was used mostly for porn as well, it doesn’t make sense to dismiss a whole project based on disagreements with people using it.
Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.
That is up to the sub owner, they can mandate a SMS challenge or any kind of KYC challenge if they would like. Users who get banned will automatically be disregarded by the of the swarm.
I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either. The moderation is on the community level, there are no global admins. If you run a community, you can moderate it however you like, or assign somebody to moderate it for you.
Perhaps @mehdi_benadel@lemmy.balamb.fr was trying to say de-regulated; which is what libertarians do get hot and wet for. They have been cheering it on in Argentina and importing that as DOGE, but that is another matter.
This is not pure unregulated decentralization. Learn the difference.
Sounds like a real haven for “free speech extremist” types. Personally, I’m not searching for social media with more hate, slurs and conspiracy nonsense. I’d go back to twitter if I wanted that.
You can filter your feed by tags/keywords, and eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else blocked keywords.
In centralized social media, there’s only a single entity deciding what’s allowed, with Plebbit that decision is pushed to the edges of the network. So each node can decide what it wants to see, nothing is pushed on the end user.
So every user is their own moderator… which just sounds like a ton of extra work vs something like Mastodon where I can pick a server whose moderation practices I agree with, is already decentralized into countless servers and allows the user to spin up their own instance.
Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find “clever” new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.
Meanwhile, you’re pitching this thing as “uncensorable” which automatically appeals to the worst elements available. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll be the perfect format for internet discussion, but I’m going to have to see that actually happen before I jump on board.
So every user is their own moderator… which just sounds like a ton of extra work
Once we have the labeling services it will be easy and a single click to use someone’s else labeling.
Also each community moderate however they see fit, as a community owner you’re incentivized to keep their community free of spam and derailing posts etc.
Mastodon where I can pick a server whose moderation practices I agree with, is already decentralized into countless servers and allows the user to spin up their own instance.
P2P is superior to federation in many ways though
Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find “clever” new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.
I agree, but it’s not just keywords, it’s community-based labeling services, so you could have 10+ people labeling on a single content-labeling extension. You could also have AI agent sifting through the network and labeling content with minimal human intervention.
Meanwhile, you’re pitching this thing as “uncensorable” which automatically appeals to the worst elements available. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll be the perfect format for internet discussion, but I’m going to have to see that actually happen before I jump on board.
I mean… I guess I don’t really see the point, but I absolutely encourage you to go ahead. I always enjoy being proven wrong when I’m being negative.
If you want to participate in Plebbit, then do that. Have fun. You do you. It shouldn’t matter whether anyone here approves or not.
I think there’s such a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of crypto currency, even in comparison, that even a whiff of a relationship generates negative reactions. As you say, much of it is based on no actual knowledge about the topic. It doesn’t help that there are some truly deplorable people associated with cryptocurrency, a great many bad actors, and proof-of-work was in retrospect a terrible design decision by Satoshi.
Blockchain isn’t cryptocurrency, and vice-versa, but most people can’t distinguish between the two. If there’s any mention of blockchain on the site, or especially if you mention bitcoin (as you did) you’re going to get crusaders.
Plebbit is not built on top of blockchains, it’s a pure p2p network akin to Bittorrent. We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
Sure; I’m saying that there are trigger words that are guaranteed to generate negative comments: blockchain, crypto, crypto currency, and Bitcoin.
You said that you can’t understand the negative feedback. I’m giving you one reason why you might be seeing it. Lemmy and Mastodon (the AP FediVerse in general) is not cryptocurrency-friendly. If you mention “Bitcoin” in the post, you’re going to get brigaded. If someone sniffs around on the repo documentation and sees the crypto link, they’ll mention it in the comments and you’ll get brigaded.
I agree crypto has a bad rep, which is why we’re not associating with it. Our goal is to replace both web2 and web3 socials with a p2p solution that actually scales to the masses. Using blockchain for some aspects of it might raise some eyebrows, but it’s worth it imo
Naw, there are several good use cases for blockchain. Ask a blockchain hater how to implement an auditable change log, and they’ll re-invent blockchain and claim it’s not.
I’m only saying: you specifically mentioned Bitcoin, and then later said design goals included cryptocurrency integration. I’m not opposed to crypto, conceptually - I’m just giving a possible reason why you may be garnering downvotes.
They’re not hated. They’re very fragmented and confusing for the layman.
What do you mean fragmented?
Never heard of plebbit before. Looks interesting!
