this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025

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Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by Plebbitor to c/selfhosted

136 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Looks interesting. But I don’t see what the point is unless you connect to fediverse or can attract a critical mass to keep it self sustaining.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I don't get why people are so interested in the fediverse. I guess it's a sizeable amount of content, but it's not really all that popular and has a host of its own issues. I think people like the idea behind it more than the actual implementation.

That said, I'm working on a similar project (distributed Reddit clone), and one of my goals is to eventually connect it to the fediverse to get access to content. That said, a distributed service isn't directly compatible w/ a federated one (there are no servers in a distributed service, only simple relays), so I'd have to build a bridge to get it to work, and bridges are notoriously awkward to deal with in the best case (see Matrix bridges), and adding P2P on top of that makes things even more awkward.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.

Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But we're still at the mercy of the admins of the large instances. Most of the popular Lemmy communities are at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works. Eventually the admins of those instances will either turn evil (I argue that has already happened on lemmy.ml) or stop hosting the service, and then we're still screwed. I don't know mastodon well enough, but I'm guessing they have a similar problem with a handful of instances hosting a disproportionate portion of the content.

I don't know that I can do better, but I can try something different. Plebbit is trying something different as well, so hopefully someone will find a good mix of tradeoffs.

I'm on Lemmy because it's the least bad option at the moment for what I'm looking for, but I think it's fundamentally flawed. Apparently the Plebbit devs do as well (or they think they can get away with a grift), and I hope there are lots of others out there quietly plunking away at their own project. I believe Lemmy will die eventually, and I'd really like to have an alternative ready.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So...

Start alternatives, on a host ypu maintain, and then everything can be ran perfectly how you want it to run

Problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

That saves the service, but the communities are still dead. The problem is the single source of failure, and that isn't solved.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There is no real need for the kind of permanence you think you need.

Imagine if a building could only be a bar, for perpetuity, and nobody opened any other bars, because that first bar existed.

Bars would suck for like.... 99.99999% of the human population, huh?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure, but that analogy only makes sense when talking about real estate. With a distributed system, there isn't really a limit to what you can store, as long as someone wants to store it.

If someone can just take something down that you value, that sucks. You should never be forced to preserve something you don't want to, but you should also be free to preserve something you value. Communities should come and go naturally, not because someone decided to stop paying for a server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

All communities work like that...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Communities naturally come and go, and they change over time. That's fine. I'm talking about artificial deaths of communities because the nature of the platform changes (Reddit's closure of the API, a self-hosted platform disappearing due to cost/interest, etc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How do ypu think communities "naturally" come and go?

Communities don't have heary attacks, or get a new child or something...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People lose interest and move on. That's how it works in in-person communities, and that's also how it should work in online communities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Thats... literally what happens. Like when the owner of a bar calls it quit, and leaves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

That's different.

If I create a book club and lose interest, the rest of the group should continue on without me. I certainly shouldn't be obligated to continue hosting, but in a digital book club, nobody needs to host. That book club could continue as long as people are interested.

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[–] mostlikelyaperson 3 points 2 days ago

Yet more cryptotrash.

[–] [email protected] 124 points 4 days ago (16 children)

According to OP’s previous comments the dev of this has spent 600k of their own money on this. If that claim is legitimate then feel free to draw your own conclusions about why someone with 600k to burn would spend it on an NFT crypto reddit, but without images.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Yeah, I lost interest at 'blockchain'.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (43 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

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.