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.
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chanw, andhave 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.
I don't care what the protocol technically makes feasible, people don't use protocols they use software that interprets protocols. ActivityPub doesn't actually require DNS, but you (correctly) say it does because there's no software out there people will use that doesn't require DNS. The point is you still tied human readable names to the blockchain, something absolutely not optional for social media software. No one is going to be like "you should sub to p/nrlaoii2nsl2, the memes are 🔥".
Who is "we" here and why do they get to decide what's acceptable in my community ('subpleb' if you will)?
You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won't be compatible with our clients because we think that's a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it's controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.
DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.
For our clients, "we" means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There's no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).
"The whole DNS system is a complete scam" says the person advocating for crypto and NFTs
Imagine you buy a cheap domain name for $0.99 a year from namecheap to be lonefaerie.lol or something
Next year they ask for $19.99 because they can. If you set up an account with that name you can either pay more or have to change accounts
Why can't we just buy domain names for like 30 year periods?
You can. I think ICANN has agreed to limit it to 10 year maximum, to reduce domain squatting, though.
This is a HUGE problem in the IT sector... A lot of folks come up with "new, better, and more agile" systems for core tech, like DNS. What they fail to account for are all the lessons learned, and problems solved over the decades the system has been in use, and fail to understand a lot of the "complications" stem from people being complicated.
That's the problem, I want a personal domain like name.person for the rest of my life. I don't want it to expire and have to pay extortion rates for my email address
So, what you propose just isn't feasible.
Who is the one who gets John Doe? First come, first serve, and never again available?
It doesn't have to be your name. How about everyone gets a random phrase?
magneticdeerflyinginthesea.person
It's much easier to remember than like 7 numbers