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.
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,
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have 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.
The code is fully open source on
Yet more cryptotrash.
Incoming ASCII CSAM
*AI generated ASCII CSAM
( . )( . )
) . (
( * )…
edit I can’t get the line formattin right but you get the gist
This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.
How does removing images change anything? Any file can be transmitted by text, as we used to do with e-mail, and you don’t need to use images to make illegal or just intentionally offensive content.
Something tells me the “I don’t host CSAM I just host posts that embed/link to CSAM (from other hosts)” argument won’t hold up in court.
Happy cake day!
Doesn’t it tho? That was part of the issue with Lemmy federating suspected csam content as the actual content ended up on their servers.
Edit:Should probably be clear, I mean legally, not ethically or morally lmao.
Lemmy has moderators and admins which remove CSAM. Plebbit was intentionally built in such a way that no one can remove anything. Extensive discussion of this at the OP’s original post https://lemmy.world/post/23704373. Ctrl-F for “censorship”
no one can remove anything.
They have a concept of moderators, which are chosen by community owners and have the power to remove content within the communities they moderate.
At least that’s what the whitepaper says, I don’t know what the actual implementation does.
Kinda missing the point, the fact it got posted at all on lemmy necessarily means it was potentially federated and hosted on various servers, hence opening them up to legal troubles even if moderation is done.
From my non-lawyer understanding from what I’ve gathered online, THAT is the legal issue, as opposed to unintentionally hosting links, what actually matters legally is where the content is hosted.
… Ain’t that just a website?
It sounds like jest plain simple website/forum BUT with specific protocol making it more discoverable/searchable?
Allowing to post comments anonymously… sound like a bad idea in the long run, but who know, make me eat my words.
Allowing to post comments anonymously… sound like a bad idea in the long run, but who know, make me eat my words.
How so? Reddit and Lemmy do just that. There’s nothing tying my username to me, and I’m guessing there’s nothing typing yours to you.
No! bUt ThEy HaVe Ur EmAiL!!!
But they don’t. I have never given my email to Reddit or Lemmy. If I did, I’d use a throwaway email.
Hold up plebs (hah), this alternative to dns (domain name system) called ens is actually more centralized.
The pros listed here over federation: no central http endpoint, database or dns are a lie. The whole point of having federated instances is that they’re not a central thing. Yes, individual instances can be knocked out. It’ll be just the same for plebbit except no one can moderate trolls creating scummy or phishing domain names.
Whomever came up with the idea to charge people gas fees is a billionaire now. Ignoring that bit, this blockchain based domain system looks cool, but an unmoderatable free-for-all is an absolutely terrible idea
unmoderatable free-for-all
I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say “adminless,” but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.
So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it’ll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.
If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you’ll be more right than wrong.
On an unrelated topic, I’m working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn’t have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it’s fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Just because moderation doesn’t look similar to what you’re familiar with doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. We’ll see if Plebbit works out, but I’m still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn’t have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.
In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Wouldn’t this just create an impenetrable filter bubble/echo chamber where you see nothing else than content you 100% agree with?
For many users, probably. I do have plans to have a “moderation queue” or something where you can opt in to seeing stuff that was hidden and adjust your moderation preferences.
On Reddit, the recommendation was to upvote constructive comments even if you didn’t agree, and downvote unconstructive comments even if you do. People didn’t do that, so we got echo chambers.
On mine, I plan to have four responses to a comment:
- relevant
- flag (irrelevant, spam, or distasteful content)
- agree
- disagree
Users could adjust the weights of each, but by default “relevant” and “flag” would be much more highly weighed than “agree” and “disagree.” You can also block users. All of those are taken into account by the moderation graph to decide which content to show and in what order.
You misread, the unmoderatable free-for-all is about the domain name system alternative. Not the hosted platforms they point to
Good to see they’ve got some moderation tools for the platform regardless tho!
domain name system
What do you need moderation for that for? All a domain name service needs is some kind of reputable link between two things (e.g. domain name and IP), and Plebbit seems to be using it to reserve community names (so name -> public key, or maybe the other way, I haven’t looked into it). The reputation comes from the blockchain, which dramatically increases the barrier for an attacker to change an entry. Instead of a central authority, you have a group of individuals (ETH is based on proof-of-stake now, and I assume ENS is as well) who verify claims before it becomes part of the blockchain.
To me, it’s the least problematic part of it, I’m more concerned about communities having owners, and thus communities can die if the owner decides to stop hosting it or decides to dramatically change the rules (or moderators, etc). One of the major points of decentralization is to remove the power of individuals to change/break things, and Plebbit doesn’t do that. The most problematic part, IMO, is ties to cryptocurrency, which seems to be its profit motive, so the moment it takes off, the creator gets rich (because they hold a ton of PLEB token), and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of the project.
That said, we’ll see how it works out. I think it has some interesting ideas, and I’m all for alternatives to the established players in the social media space.
Have you been living under a rock? Just allow me to register plebbbit.eth and make it simple steal user accounts then redirect to the actual website. This, and plenty of other tricks need to dealt with
You could do the same with DNS, nothing is stopping you from registering a similar domain name and doing the exact same thing. ENS doesn’t change anything with the attack, it merely exchanges registrars for a block chain.
Except dns requires proper registration, and has a place to report abuse, and those reports are actually acted upon. Moderation here is not preventative, it’s reactive.
Stop trying to justify this approach, a blockchain is cool but you’re really just monopolizing domain registration
Oh, I think the approach is problematic, I just don’t think ENS is a major concern here. I don’t think you need DNS/ENS for this kind of service, nor do you need any form of blockchain.
My point is a blockchain DNS system isn’t significantly worse than the current system, where we already see a ton of similar abuse. The proper solution, IMO, is to avoid the need for DNS at all.
From the whitepaper it seems like you cannot comment at all? Or each comment is a post also, so you need a server, you need to host it to be able to reply? I don’t see a mention how an upvote/downvote system could work.
How this is even similar to reddit? From what I could find it’s much like a topic based microblogging, and it’s a very one way communication. As it’s similar to IPFS and torrent, which are also very one way communication. Seems like an interesting idea, but I don’t see why it was compared to reddit.
Personal opinion, IPFS clones are reinvented about every year, and because they sound very good on paper, but noone could figure out a legit usecase - maybe except piracy - they fail after a while. Maybe if we would become an actual InterPlanetary species with colonies on Mars they could be useful, but until I don’t really see a point trying it again and again and again…
So in what way is that better than Lemmy?
From reading the whitepaper, you basically replace instance admins with community admins, and your P2P peers will cache some of the content so you don’t hit the community admin all the time. Benefits:
- lower hosting costs - you only need to pay for storage for your community, plus some transfer as comments/posts get updated on your “instance”
- risk is limited to whatever communities someone is hosting, not an entire instance
- user accounts aren’t centralized, so if a community goes down, you still have your user account
- some protection against doxxing IP addresses, whereas w/ Lemmy you need to trust your instance admins
Other differences:
- moderation is selected by the community admin, there are no instance admins
- trust mechanisms (captcha and whatnot) is managed at the community level, since there is no instance level
Potential downsides:
- no ActivityPub, so it won’t interact w/ the fediverse whatsoever
- affiliated w/ their own crypto token, and has ties to Ethereum NFTs and whatnot
- lots of different interfaces (4chan clone, Reddit clone, etc), which could cause distraction for devs
- uses public-key addressing instead of content addressing, so it could be slow (they propose a mitigation)
I think it’s a step in the right direction in some areas, but ultimately there’s just a bit too much association w/ cryptocurrencies for it to really be a long-lasting service. We’ll see though, maybe my fears are unwarranted.
The ideas sound solid. One of Lemmy’s issue is different instances hosting the same community and frequently posting the same content. But too much centralization leads to lemmy.world admins controlling everything. Still there might be abuse such as people claiming every community name.
Yeah, name squatting could be an issue, depending on if they rely on ENS or if it’s merely an option. The whitepaper claims communities are merely a public key someone controls, and the name is supplementary, so you could conceivably have duplicate communities. So in theory, squatting wouldn’t be a major issue, but discovery could be (i.e. if ENS is used for discovery, then it’s de-facto authoritative).
I haven’t looked at the implementation, just the website and whitepaper, so I don’t know the specifics. But in theory it looks to have many of the same problems Lemmy has, with the major difference being reducing hosting costs and some dox protection.
Without some level of beneficial dictatorship all projects are doomed if moderation is required.
I don’t think that’s a given, I just think we haven’t found a good solution yet. I’m working on one such solution, where moderation is personalized to the individual user. I think this should be good enough to hide most of the slop, while outliving any BDFL. It’ll probably fail, but hopefully it helps someone else come up with a better implementation that won’t.
Oof. No Activity Pub is a death sentence
Does it need to be better? Can people just share things they find interesting or that they made?
I think it’s the same in most aspects, just less developed. However, it looks like the devs lie about the benefits and use a less secure alternative to dns.
It’s garbage with a funny name
…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..
Greetings, fellow geezer! And yes, I’ve been there too. My first foray on the web was with Lynx, a text based browser. Left me pretty underwhelmed. But once I actually tried Mosaic, I was instantly converted.
…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…
I like the concept, and truly hope it takes off, but holy fuck is it slow to load content on any of the first 2 web clients off the main website, plebbones took forever just to load the interface so I left.
As of right now, if it’s taking 2-3 minutes just to load the content of the tiny user base, I don’t see how it’ll be “infinitely scalable”
I really like that dev is ambitious here and have my fingers crossed 🤞🏼
The more self hosted alternatives we have the better, maybe someday I’ll need one 😁
