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

https://github.com/plebbit

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    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.