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
So in what way is that better than Lemmy?
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...
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:
Other differences:
Potential downsides:
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?