Why did development slow down?
We spent a long time debugging and stabilizing IPFS-related issues that affected content reliability. These fixes were essential before building new features otherwise the protocol wouldn’t scale.
Is the team big?
No, the project is small, and the current budget only allows paying two developers. Progress is steady but slower because everything is done properly instead of rushed.
How does anti-spam work?
Each community chooses its own challenge: captcha, crypto ENS, SMS, email OTP, or custom rules. This keeps spam protection decentralized instead of relying on a global, platform-wide filter.
Why not use Mastodon/ActivityPub/Bluesky/Nostr/Farcaster/Steemit/Blockchain
mastodon / lemmy / activitypub Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances.
Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities.
plebbit solves each problem:
instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community, because there are no instances, it's directly peer to peer. a community node can be run from home on consumer internet, no server, domain name, SSL, sync time, etc. it's as easy as running a bittorrent client.
it can scale infinitely because there are no historical ledger like a blockchain or hub, it's like bittorrent, if a community no longer has any seeds, it stops existing. (this is also a downside of plebbit, but scaling is more important, not scaling makes the system useless) it has no cost to publish, like bittorrent, because is has no historical ledger that each node must sync. users seed their communities for free while they use it, like bittorrent.
a community node can communicate a challenge to a user to post to his community (like a minimum user account age, or karma, or a captcha, whitelist, etc), because it's directly peer to peer, the community node is the instance, so it can gatekeep it however it wants. (this is also a downside of plebbit, a community node must be online 24/7, but it's also possible to delegate running a node to an RPC/instance/hub, you just lose some censorship resistance, so it's not inferior in this regards, it's strictly superior because of the optionality).
Is this running on ETH?
the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, it's a content addressed network like Bittorrent, built using IPFS/libp2p.
Last I ever was hearing this pushed around the fedi the big 'sell' was that mods/admins can't delete posts making it a 'freeze peach' platform.
The only people typically drawn to those are the people who tend to get banned for being intolerable on civilized platforms.
How do they deal with CSAM and other illegal material? (I'm guessing the answer is that they don't)
If I'm reading(skimming) the documentation right, it seems like anyone who can pass the challenge can download the full node and see the full record of interactions. IPFS is not a perfect privacy network, so user accounts can in theory be traced back.
So basically as with Fedi instances it is fully on the Node host to set who can get in based on the challenge, and what is hosted there is their liability. Only difference is Plebbit allows any user to spin up a new instance/community node ad-hoc and they aren't responsible for maintaining infrastructure beyond what is required seed the nodes they host.
Is that right? I'm not sure but hopefully someone better in the know will correct me if not.