Selfhosted

Yeah, I lost interest at 'blockchain'.

Did they pay devs to build it for them?

I'm working on a similar project, but I'm 100% bootstrapping it. I'm using Iroh (similar to IPFS, but hopefully faster), and there will just be the one UI until someone makes another. I haven't done authentication yet, but I might end up using blockchain for that, idk, I need some form of trusted directory.

I'm going to be looking through this, because it sounds very similar to what I'm working on, and I'd love to just join a project instead of doing all the leg work of getting traction myself. The things I'm particularly interested in are:

• moderation - I plan to use something like a web of trust, but with transitive trust; you select people you trust, and whether you see something depends on how those users moderated
• persistence when users go offline - I use a local first approach, so a post is cached locally if you either authored or viewed it, and peers will pull from you if you're the closest source; caches would need to expire so we don't blow up everyone's storage
• communities operate in a single namespace (so fix the main complexity w/ federation) - you create a community by posting to that namespace, and it gets mixed w/ other users who post to that same namespace

I'm also interested in building an ActivityPub bridge, so this network can act like an "instance" of sorts and push/pull content from the rest of the Fediverse. This is mostly to seed content in the early days, and I'll decide whether it's worth it once everything else works.

I don't know if Plebbit does any or all of this, hence the interest. That said, someone spending actual money on it seems a bit... odd, since I don't see how this could be monetized.

It sounds like jest plain simple website/forum BUT with specific protocol making it more discoverable/searchable?

Allowing to post comments anonymously... sound like a bad idea in the long run, but who know, make me eat my words.

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.

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.

unmoderatable free-for-all

I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say "adminless," but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.

So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it'll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.

If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you'll be more right than wrong.

On an unrelated topic, I'm working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn't have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it's fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn't manually handled, it's handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I'm deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).

Just because moderation doesn't look similar to what you're familiar with doesn't mean it's ineffective. We'll see if Plebbit works out, but I'm still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn't have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.

Unfortunately for the fediverse, most regular users want to use their twitters and facebooks and instagrams and whatnot. I don’t see regular users switching over. And if they did, you know the big guys would come up with something to compete.

I don't think that it's that you can't comment at all, it's almost rather that you can only comment.

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.

You can link to other things and embed them in a text post using code, but there is no ability to upload anything, so the content really is all just text (since links are created using text commands).

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?..

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.

*AI generated ASCII CSAM