I’m here to address some FUD and questions from people who think Plebbit won’t succeed. Let’s talk about why peer-to-peer is better than all those other social media platforms
list of reason why P2P is better than:
- mastodon / lemmy / activitypub
- Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances. It’s too difficult to run your own instance, you need to buy a domain name, server, DDOS protection, set up SSL, etc.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- bluesky
- Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own instance is difficult, your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won’t be able to reach your users.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- nostr
- Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own instance is difficult, your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won’t be able to reach your users.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- farcaster
- Hubs cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own hub is difficult (long sync time, lots of bandwidth/storage/ram), your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won’t be able to reach your users.
- Hubs in general cannot scale infinitely as they keep growing forever, like a blockchain.
- Must pay $5 on optimism to be able to post, most users don’t want to pay. Also can be censored by the optimism RPC or USDC.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- steemit
- Blockchain RPCs cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own blockchain node is difficult (long sync time, lots of bandwidth/storage/ram), your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won’t be able to reach your users.
- Blockchains in general cannot scale infinitely as they keep growing forever.
- Must pay blockchain transaction fees to post, most users don’t want to pay.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
plebbit solves each problem:
- instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community, because there are no instances, it’s directly peer to peer. a community node can be run from home on consumer internet, no server, domain name, SSL, sync time, etc. it’s as easy as running a bittorrent client.
- it can scale infinitely because there are no historical ledger like a blockchain or hub, it’s like bittorrent, if a community no longer has any seeds, it stops existing. (this is also a downside of plebbit, but scaling is more important, not scaling makes the system useless)
- it has no cost to publish, like bittorrent, because is has no historical ledger that each node must sync. users seed their communities for free while they use it, like bittorrent.
- a community node can communicate a challenge to a user to post to his community (like a minimum user account age, or karma, or a captcha, whitelist, etc), because it’s directly peer to peer, the community node is the instance, so it can gatekeep it however it wants. (this is also a downside of plebbit, a community node must be online 24/7, but it’s also possible to delegate running a node to an RPC/instance/hub, you just lose some censorship resistance, so it’s not inferior in this regards, it’s strictly superior because of the optionality).
We already had p2p reddit. It was called Aether. It failed due to lack of users.
This again? Stop marketing your shitty crypto scam infused lemmy rippoff
What is this scam and why is it still here?
Man this shit is cringe.
instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community
Why would I want that? That sounds genuinely awful.
Edit - And the plebbit homepage talks about making a 4chan equivalent, and along with this post, there are pepe images everywhere. No thanks. Plebbit can fuck right off
You want that if you strongly believe that your hate speech counts as free speech
Hadn’t heard of it before. But based on the cheesy meme, how desperate this post sounds, and the fact that the platform seems like a chan imposter, I’ll pretend like I still haven’t heard of it.
bullish comment, every successful project was misunderstood at the beginning
It only takes a single example of a project that presented a clear goal to prove you wrong.
haveibeenpwdn duckduckgo google photobucket email dropbox twitch kickstarter
However… plebbit is just garbage, and it’s obvious
[Lemmy has] no mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
Hey mods, you can do the funniest thing right now:
My post on using Tailscale on my servers gets removed but not this crap?
yeah, and mine about ripping dvd’s on a server, if that broke the rules wouldnt this do that more?
I remember your post. How is that not related? And also lemmy is so small where else should we post? I messaged them for my post and they never responded
instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community
Great! I was looking for a social media platform without the possibility of moderation. 🙄 /s
Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf
The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email
Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation
Eyy, someone who actually reads! Last time a post like this popped up it was like arguing with someone who was just reading of a list of “top 10 most popular buzzwords”
I think you’re going to have more luck with a more right wing, more immature humor, more toxic masculinity kind of crowd.
not true
It’s basically 4chan and OP keeps begging people to join it
But with blockchain!
And zero moderation!
Rotten to the core
block user indeed
Nah, people need to know to stay away from this
I think a peer to peer model could work for social media, but if you’re trying to sell it using a pepe meme, I’m not interested…
But fundamentally… Why not implement what you’re thinking ontop of ActivityPub or ATProto than rolling your own thing? None of the issues you’ve described facing them are particularly insurmountable. They just need a bit of devwork.
You duplicated Bluesky’s entry for Nostr. Could you address nostr’s weaknesses? Keeping in mind that as long as you don’t federate with the main Nostr nodes, you won’t be swamped with the CryptoBros - its biggest downside.
