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.
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.
Somewhere, a black hat master of ASCII art is cracking his hands.
It’s still misleading though, it takes away control from instance controllers, which in today’s world, also makes it so that it is easier to swamp it with bot accounts, misinformation, and even be an unwilling decentralization participant. Looking behind the curtains, it’s basically built by and around NFT (even the user avatars have to be NFT for no good reason), and already has a market for it, so don’t be surprised if there is a blockchain rugpull behind this. And it also doesn’t fix the inherent problem, rather, because of its design, it makes communities all the more authoritarian because whoever controls the NFT controls the moderation.
If you use it, you will no longer have the recourse of admins when its the moderators messing up and acting in bad faith. That problem isn’t due to instances, it’s due to the more generalized problem of people in position of authorities more interested in representing themselves than a community or their obligations, this does nothing to, say, provide for alternative moderation groups if you are unhappy with how the current one is moderating it. It does protect your account to some degree, but it also protect the accounts of the terrorists running around spreading hate speech, and you will feed a small part of it due to its decentralized nature.
Personally, the whole platform, https://plebbit.com/introduction , just seems a monetization strategy to monetize reddit-like communities into the NFT market. Expect the inevitable drama and subsequent crashes. But also, don’t expect it, it will depend wholly on the NFT holder, which means the community will go to sh-t if it gets lost or the administrative moderators of that community become out of reach, presumably because they sold it for millions to the nearest troll farm while they went off to the Bahamas. But hey, maybe it will pull the dumb and those just interested in monetization into their eco-system.
Nice essay, strong fud but we have safe guards against this. Users can back up or copy any subs they want, so if a sub owner goes insane, users can simply restore it, to exactly how it was. Sure the name will be slightly different since the previous owner owns the name, so p/games might now be p/videogames. But that’s a minor inconvenience. In fact multiple users can own a community which further safe guards it.
We will also remove communities that are toxic from our recommended subs list and replace it with the non toxic one. Alternatively users can create their on recommended subs list and share it round. Plebbit is open source so if we act nefariously, people can just fork it
I think you missed a lot of my points. What’s fud, the monetization of your platform? Went to give it a look, that’s what a lot of those “recommended” topics are showing users are looking forward to on some of the clients. You explained something I wasn’t complaining about, but now that you have, that opens up so many attack vectors as well. People can try to copy popular communities to set up fake “grassroots” communities, and it sounds like they can copy and simulate user participation along with it.
And no, how a community identifies itself is not a minor inconvenience, it has literally fueled the domain name market, it is what people linked to, what people see in archives, and where people will go. The elephant in the room you are forgetting to mention is how the whole community will suddenly coordinate so well and won’t just split itself off into several.
Communities can defend against bots using captchas, minimum karma limits and whatever else they can think of. We’re constantly improving this aspect.
People can make up Communities and purposely fill them with bots and astroturfing, however they can already do this on your typical social media. Its upto the user to spot this and move to a better community. We of course will do what we can to discourage astroturfing.
In terms of monetisation and building it around NFTS. All of that is optional. Communties can choose to only allow users to have NFT profiles or allow them to have whatever image they want. The tipping is optional. The domain name is a valid point, however its the most decentralised, non censorable option. We intend to allow domain names from different blockchains so if games.eth is taken people can use games.Sol.
About your point concerning community splits, this sort of thing happens in reddit all the time. A few communties get created in the splinter but eventually everyone moves to the one with the most activity and decent mods. And as we said we will facilitate the best ran subs gaining prominence from our side by adding it to the recommended list.
In terms of monetisation, the dev has spent $600k of his own money on this and is still spending. He doesn’t care to make any of it back. Plebbit is a non profit company. Any money made from plebbit via pleb domains or donations or plebbit gold will go to funding devs or other aspects of plebbit, but profit isn’t the goal.
The internet sorely needs a fully decentralised social media. Most of the social media has been taken kver by corporations, speech is stifled, what you see is controlled by shady algorithms. Plebbit gives all that control back to the community. Lemmy is a good stepping stone, but Plebbit is the end all be all. Improvements are always happening but a P2P social media is such a simple yet novel idea its surprising its not been done before.
Lol this this the biggest load of copium I have ever seen. I wasn’t going to try it but now I will. Moderator and instance owners are the fucking bane of cyberspace. Never in all my time have I ever endured such a bunch of petty nosy manipulative busybodies that are positively infecting every form of human interaction left and the world cannot be rid of their stench soon enough. DOWN WITH THE PRIESTHOOD!
Like it or not, instance owners and moderators do perform maintenance, it’s just that they inevitable become an inner subcommunity within the community that can and does eventually abuse its authority. I don’t care as long as I have choice. For instances I do, allowing me to participate in the same threads regardless of which one I choose. When it involves the mod team, however, because of how much it is centralized to a mod team and how much it leeches from any competing subs, it’s not viable. We should be able to choose a moderator group for our communities the same way we are able to choose instances, as long as there’s ample choices the problem is addressed.
I have just timed and 60 seconds wait time is atrocious for 8 text posts.
IPFS is nice but it doesn’t make sense for things that are under few of mb
IPFS has been breaking for a few years, it’s just slowly degrading, trying to staple something like this on top of it will just drag the DHT to a standstill.
I’m all for decentralized community-based hosting for large media files such as video, but i guess for text/structured databases it wouldn’t work due to synchronisation issues.
Bad idea.
The closest to a good idea IMHO is NOSTR. By the way, there is a standard for moderated communities for it, I don’t know whether anything implements it yet.
In general, not in fact.
Curious, I thought IPFS was completely empty. I have the desktop client and there’s just nothing
I used once to download a book that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Like 2 years ago. I stumbled onto some kind of “library” where they had stored a lot of books.
I missed the link though.
I mostly remember it because it was how i learned about ipfs.
So what is it now, P2P or IPFS?
The moment I read “no transaction fees”, I immediately wondered why that would be listed as a feature. Turns out it’s because it uses crypto, though I don’t understand why. Free domain names?
It doesn’t need crypto, it only needs IPFS (but we could change underlying protocol in the future, if someone creates a better alternative to IPFS).
“no transaction fees” is listed as a feature because blockchain-based social media exists, and unlike them a plebbit full node doesn’t have to sync (because it’s a IPFS node), it just runs immediately like a BitTorrent node would, and it runs on 4GB of RAM even on a raspberry pi, on consumer internet (consumes less bandwidth than YouTube) and it only uses a few GBs of storage. Blockchain social media fundamentally cannot scale because of node requirements, that is if you want the platform to be “decentralized” (enough full nodes).
We do have crypto features, as an addendum. Mainly, we use crypto domains such as .eth (ens.domains) end .sol (sns.id) to resolve plebbit author/community addresses to readable names, because they are IPNS public keys (very long and impossible to memorize, e.g.
12D3KooWMLCgrZT8Ucaw2DWnv1HsQianf9tVi8sK6JCbCod3XK8T). Unlike DNS, crypto domains are censorship resistant. They are cryptographic property, you hold them in your wallet, which means if you change the address of your plebbit community to one such domain, you are tokenizing your community. In theory, the more users your community has, the more people have saved your domain, the higher its value. Compare that to Reddit for example, where all subreddits are owned by Reddit, they can ban your community with millions of subs, because it’s not your property, it’s theirs.What about LBRY or Arweave ?
(but we could change underlying protocol in the future, if someone creates a better alternative to IPFS).
TAHOE-LAFS?
so you host individual communities instead of servers on lemmy?
In theory, the more users your community has, thw more people have saved your domain, the higher its value
Why would i want a community to have value? and how would people saving something make it more valuable? What Theory?
“In theory” is not used to refer to a specific existing named theory
From what I’ve gathered, this appears to be an unusably slow 4chan for crypto bros.
I didn’t see the word “blockchain” anywhere.
Because they didn’t want to turn off everybody immediately
“ENS domain”
IPFS is also strongly related to several blockchain stuff (not a blockchain itself though)
right in the home page I spotted a link to a so-called plebbit token.
There is indeed a token. Probably an illegal security in the US
Great work! I’ve always considered lemmy to be an interim solution as it doesn’t resolve the core issue of mod centralization. How does your solution
differcompare to something like nostr, which is more decentralized than ActivityPub, and not P2P, but also seems to eliminate the mod issue and enable “direct” subscribing to users.Would your goal be to shard/raid data across IPFS nodes at scale? If not, what would the local nodes size be with millions of users and years of history (e.g. Reddit’s scale)?
My next hope is a fully decentralized and distributed internet archive + piratebay using IPFS over I2P.
Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.
The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don’t have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS’d, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.
Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there’s nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you’re always reachable by any user on plebbit.
Reading the white paper you find the “serverless” has servers. Each community needs to be always online to serve captchas to posters. The system is federated on community level, instead of instance level, and uses DHT instead of DNS.
Nostr is not really federated because the servers just send data for you. Nobody calls the internet federated because the switches transfer your data
Nobody calls the internet federated because the switches transfer your data
Actually, a lot of people refer to the internet as federated, because most all of it is very decentralized, and independently managed.
Take IP routes… The BGP table is a giant exercise in federation. Any transit provide can blackhole your traffic, or just refuse to accept the announcements (ie, a lot of places reject North Korean BGP announcements, for example).
DNS is another example of a federated system, a number of countries operate the root servers, who merely hold pointers to where to get answers for a TLD, which in turns just provides answers on who can provide answers for a domain.
You can even create your own TLDs, and use them!
Its a giant, federated system. The apps sitting on top of it are not so much anymore.
How does one create their own TLDs ? Do you have any guides or example videos on it ?
Technically all you need is a DNS server.
No computer knows where <whatever.tld> is located, unless that route is hard-coded in a host file somewhere. It always has to ask a DNS server for that information. If that DNS server doesn’t know, it will probably try asking some other DNS server, and so on up a chain. Eventually, it reaches a master DNS server that either has the answer on-hand somewhere in a database, or it says, “lmao, that doesn’t exist”. All the DNS servers and your PC down the chain take that answer. They might memorize it for a little while and hand it out to anyone who asks them, but after a while they’ll ask their way up the chain again to see if the answer has changed since the last time they asked.
In order to “create” a TLD, all you have to do is make a DNS server that doesn’t ask up the chain. Just pre-program the list of valid domains yourself. You can make them anything you want. You can even “steal” existing domains and make them point to anywhere you want. Nothing is stopping you. Your DNS server will confidently report its pre-programmed answers to anyone who asks.
The catch is that any Internet-enabled device that you want to be able to use your fancy new custom domains needs to be configured to ask your DNS server in particular. People would have to manually set your DNS server as their master server to ask, or they’d have to set it to ask some other DNS server that is itself pointed through some chain up to your DNS server. This is an explicitly opt-in system, and getting a significant mass of people to do that voluntarily is practically impossible. But it’s not technically impossible.
The only reason you don’t have to do this manually with every single device you buy is because most devices either come from the manufacturer with a hard-coded list of DNS servers they should trust by default, or a device on the local network whispers in their ear and tells them who the local DNS server is and the device just goes along with it. It’s still technically an opt-in system; devices are simply either already “pre-opted in”, or there’s a system running on your network that auto-opts-in every device that connects, and most devices are designed to accept that auto-opt-in the moment they detect it.
Provided you manage to get the devices you want to listen to your DNS server, you may additionally want to set up a root certificate authority. The thing that makes the little padlock show up in your browser URL box to let you know the connection is secure. Kind of like the DNS server thing, this is also very simple–just run a cheeky little OpenSSL command or two and you can be a root CA in no time–but it suffers from the same “opt-in” problem. You have to manually configure any device you want to use your system to trust your certificates. Most devices just come with a list of “acceptable authorities” built-in, and those defaults are all most people are using. But nothing is stopping you from adding anything you want to that list at any time. You’re just limited to doing it on a device-by-device basis.
At my company, we’ve set up our own custom DNS server and our own root CA. We serve internal websites at a custom TLD we made up, and we sign them with our custom certificates to keep the connections secure. But that only works because we’ve manually configured our workstations to ask our internal DNS server for DNS requests, and we’ve manually configured all the workstations to trust our root certificate authority. A random device that connects to our network that isn’t configured with either of those things will not resolve any of our custom domains, nor will it securely connect to them. It also breaks if the configured devices aren’t on the local company network, since the DNS server isn’t reachable from the public web. Which is fine for us, since those internal websites aren’t reachable on the public web either. But yeah, that’s an example of the limitations.
If you want to create a TLD that will be auto-accepted by everyone who is already running the default chains of trust (which is probably what most people actually mean when they ask something like this), you have to seek out the big daddy at the root of that chain of trust and ask them to poof your TLD into existence for you. That would be ICANN, and they probably won’t do anything like that without a big fat check and a lot of corporate lobbying.
tl;dr - The tech is built in such a way that nothing is stopping you from making your own toy, and anyone can play with your toy without needing to do much. But if you want your TLD to “just work” for everyone in the world without asking every single one of them to explicitly opt-in, which is probably what you actually want, then no, you basically can’t do that.
You spin up a root zone for your tld, and you point your machines at it, and whomever else is interested in using your TLD. Or, you pay ~50K to ICANN, and meet some technical requirements (Last I checked, its like 8 zone servers, in 5 different geographical locations, response time maximums, etc).
Alternativley, you can also work with OpenNIC to do this, as they already have a number of OpenNIC resolvers, root zones. For this, your name servers you run need to meet their Tier I requirements.
There’s an XKCD for that, although i do think ActivityPub could be improved.
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Well if you see ActivityPub as the standard way of using decentralized social media…
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smells like mastodon, only with worse content searching, worse scalability, worse moderation and less content reliability.
awesome.
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worse content searching
It’s pure p2p so it can’t have content searching straight out of the box, but it can easily have indexes like 4chan archivers to search in known subplebbits. It’s entirely possible to crawl all active subplebbits and archive them all in a central database, and use that for search. This will happen, and plebbit clients will probably implement multiple such archivers to run search in them. And search engines will be able to index.
worse scalability
It’s orders of magnitude better scalability than regular sites such as federated instances. Because it works like torrents, except you always seed, so plebbit nodes will inevitably improve the network speed more and more as more nodes join. And running a node works on a rasp pi. And all content is just text (including links from which media is embedded by the clients), so there’s no scalability issue relatively to storage, either.
worse moderation
It has way better moderation, because it’s just like reddit in that every community moderates itself, except there’s no global admins able to censor a community/node or impose global rules. Plebbit clients are simply static HTML tools to browse the p2p network to connect to each community directly. Every community is incentivized to moderate itself effectively, or they become unusable, and to enter the homepages of the clients they must get voted for by holders of the plebbit token, via a gasless governance system using pubsub it’s this page, you’ll be able to vote for communities, i.e. downvote communities that aren’t well moderated to remove them from the homepage for everyone). Right now, this homepage default list is centrally controlled by the developers, it’s the only remaining centralized part of the project.
the comic itself is stupid
The comic isn’t so much a criticism as it is a comedic observation of what happens in the real world.
At least that’s how I interpret it.
It’s not a competing standard, it’s a whole new approach to decentralize forum-based social media.
ActivityPub is not fully decentralized, it’s a federated design, meaning it’s a network of instances, and each instance is just a regular website with servers. Anyone can run an instance, but it’s expensive, tiresome and you’ll get banned for it; they are regular websites.
whereas Plebbit is fully decentralized, it’s purely peer to peer, meaning it’s a network of peers where every peer can potentially be a full node by simply using the desktop app (or in the future, a non custodial public rpc on mobile), and you don’t have to run any site/domain for it, it’s censorship resistant just like running a torrent with a BitTorrent client.
Also to be clear: like ActivityPub is a protocol with clients, such as Mastodon and Lemmy, Plebbit is a protocol with clients, such as Seedit and Plebchan.
Reading these comments about your work must be so hard. I remember getting this kind of feedback for my projects from know-it-alls who never completed anything themselves. Keep up the good work, decentralize everything!
So technically Plebbit is distributed then ?
Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:
How does it compare against let’s say Steemit ?
Steemit is A, it’s a regularly centralized website with global admins, claiming to be “decentralized” simply because it’s built on a blockchain. Whenever you are asking yourself whether something is “decentralized” or not, ask “how can I run a full node”? “What are the hardware requirements”? Steemit admins won’t answer those questions. Whereas you can easily spin up your own ActivityPub (Mastodon or Lemmy) instance (even though those instances work like regularly centralized websites, at least you have the option to run your own).
On Plebbit, just using the desktop app of a client (like Seedit’s desktop app you can download here means you are running a full node already. The app runs an IPFS node in the background, seeding all content you browse automatically, thereby improving the speed of the network for everybody else. The more nodes there are, the more decentralized the network is, so if all users can easily run a node and are incentivized to do so, then the network is properly decentralized/distributed. On Seedit, you can’t run a community if you don’t run a full node (the community is the node, acting like a server, and users connect to it P2P). There are no global admins.
Get out of here with the crypto nonsense, we dont need more tech bro spaces for people to talk about AI automation and why the grind is more important than workers rights.
What’s wrong with Crypto ? It’s an interesting technology, unlike you
_
what? No crypto / ai is mentioned here?
ENS domains ?
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Sounds promising except the fact that IPFS runs like hot garbage.
I’m running my own IPFS stuff and unless I explicitly add my servers as peers I get about a 1 in 50 chance of finding something I pin somewhere else.
If it is selfhosted, and text only, why use IPFS?
Because this way 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, plebbit full nodes are customized IPFS Kubo nodes, and running one is as simple as downloading the Seedit client desktop app (available on github) and keeping it open. It runs the node automatically, and seeds content automatically as you browse it. It runs on a raspberry pi, so we expect to see a lot of plebbit users running their own full node.
“no no, you download this black box binary and run it all day. Trust me brah”
There’s just so much to unpack
All the code is fully open source on github.com/plebbit
How do you share data between nodes in a decentralised manner? IPFS is just a DHT so you can’t communicate solely using it?
we use IPNS for mutable data (like upvote counts, reply counts, etc) https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/ and gossipsub for an author node to communicate their publication to a community node https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
So you use IPDS for mutable data, and need to tell people (well software) where you stored it.
Can you tell how this author node works? Is it like that IPFS “CID” (IIRC) ?
People here might be interested by my related side-project, a distributed and blockchain-less search engine for IPFS. Note that the demo server is down right now
YaCy vibes
Nifty project. Definitely I could see this being useful for discussing things that would traditionally be censored on other more centralized or semi-decentralized platforms (piracy, anti-authoritarian discussions in an oppressive country, etc).
I gave it a try and the loading times are atrocious, though. I suppose that’s an unfortunate problem with running decentralized.
Definitely I could see this being useful for discussing things that would traditionally be censored on other more centralized or semi-decentralized platforms (piracy, anti-authoritarian discussions in an oppressive country, etc).
IPFS by default isn’t set up to work around censorship or anything of the sort. Protocol Labs (creator/maintainer of IPFS and Filecoin) have always honored copyright takedowns, etc. on their own infrastructure and have done a fair amount of work on content blocking within the default IPFS clients and such.
e.g. https://blog.ipfs.tech/2023-content-blocking-for-the-ipfs-stack
