Technology

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.

I didn't see the word "blockchain" anywhere.

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

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!

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 ~~differ~~ compare 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.

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.

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.

what? No crypto / ai is mentioned here?

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.

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

Apparently https://plebbit.com/