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.
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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. Plebbit is not built on top of a blockchain, it’s a pure p2p network
I’m not doing this for approval.
Okay. Go away and do it then.
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
This whole thing is just another crypto bro angle and it’s fucking cancer. Whatever the technical merits of the decentralization techniques used, people won’t buy into tech with crypto and crypto bros involved because they don’t want to deal with financial fraud
That’s the real problem. Crypto bros can take something genuinely interesting and kill it by association. IPNS is a really neat idea. Self-certifying name resolution over a DHT swarm would be fun to play around with, but if pushed by the bros isn’t going to get any adoption.
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.
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.
They’re not hated. They’re very fragmented and confusing for the layman.
What do you mean fragmented?
