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.
No sane person wants to run anything on the internet where they can't delete or block comments/users/other instances
Sounds like freenet, though the obvious downside of freenet is that you have to have it running as a program before you access its sites.
You can do all the things you mentioned. If you're a user you can opt to block communities from showing on your feed, although eventually we're gonna have tags so people can mark SFW, NSFW and political, etc so devs can make clients that filters based on that.
Also if you're a community owner you can ban people from your sub, you're in full control of your community.