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.
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.
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.