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.

  • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
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      3 days ago

      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.