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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.

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[-] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 28 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

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

[-] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] ludrol@bookwormstory.social 15 points 6 days ago

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

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 6 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] kittenzrulz123 15 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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

[-] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] faeempress@groups.ymirc.com 2 points 6 days ago

I din't see any benefit over our existing decentralized options. Neat idea though.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

The downside is big instances decide which content to show their users. If lemmy.world defederates some instance that's content I would never know existed.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

So what is it now, P2P or IPFS?

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 66 points 1 week ago

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?

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] not_IO 18 points 6 days ago

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?

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

"In theory" is not used to refer to a specific existing named theory

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 56 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

From the FAQ linked on the site:

Q: Is this running on ETH? A: the token is on ETH, the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, but the app will use several blockchains, tokens and NFTs to recreate all the features from reddit, like usernames, subplebbit names will be crypto domains like ENS (and other chains), awards will be NFTs, tips and upvotes will earn tokens (can set them to your own token or any coin of your choice in your subplebbit)
[…]
Q: What role does the PLEB token play? A: The base protocol doesn't use tokens, which lets people who don't have interest in cryptocurrency (yet) use it for free, but optionally you can use any tokens to do many things, for example you can use names.eth (ENS, which are non fungible tokens) to represent a username or subplebbit name. You can use NFT images as avatars. You can use fungible tokens and NFTs (any token or cryptocurreny of the subplebbit owner's choice) to vote, curate, reward, tip, incentivize and/or as spam protection (instead of using captchas, require users of your subplebbit to own, stake, burn or pay a certain amount of a token/NFT of your choice to post/upvote). A subplebbit's name like memes.eth (becomes /p/memes.eth) could be owned by a DAO, and owners of the DAO's tokens could vote on chain for who gets to be admin and moderator of the subplebbit, i.e. a smart contract/DAO can be owner of a subplebbit.

This sounds fucking awful. You want a peer-to-peer network, but decided to tie critical features to the blockchain, something arguably less decentralised than APub software.

[-] RandomVideos@programming.dev 5 points 6 days ago

You have to pay to upvote something?

[-] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 week ago

Leave it to cryptos to make simple things stupidly difficult. This whole piece you quoted was hilarious, but this part especially stuck out for me:

The base protocol doesn't use tokens, which lets people who don't have interest in cryptocurrency (yet) use it for free

[-] brsrklf@jlai.lu 8 points 6 days ago

"You don't know it yet, but deep inside you're already a cryptobro like us."

Ah ah they wish.

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn't use tokens. Meaning, there are no critical features tied to any blockchain.

The crypto features we implemented in our clients are not required by the protocol. The protocol works perfectly fine without them. We implemented them in our clients because they are nice, and they are:

  • readable names using crypto names, instead of having to see long alphanumeric IPNS public keys as addresses
  • NFT profile pics tied to a user's plebbit account, because we whitelist the specific NFT collections to prevent NSFW profile pics
  • tipping, which is an upcoming feature, to provide a fully decentralized alternative to Reddit awards/gold (plebbit users will actually make money, so will the community owners and admins since they'll be able to tax tips in their community; and there's no corporation/global admin that gets a cut)
[-] sarahduck 3 points 5 days ago

Deeply, deeply ironic that the developers claiming to "give control back to the people" won't even let them chose their own profile picture.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 27 points 1 week ago

Human-readable names are a critical feature.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Not really, most of the time people post on 4chan without them even though they exist.

[-] missingno@fedia.io 27 points 1 week ago

All of this just sounds worse and worse. NFTs, seriously?

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn’t use tokens.

I don't care what the protocol technically makes feasible, people don't use protocols they use software that interprets protocols. ActivityPub doesn't actually require DNS, but you (correctly) say it does because there's no software out there people will use that doesn't require DNS. The point is you still tied human readable names to the blockchain, something absolutely not optional for social media software. No one is going to be like "you should sub to p/nrlaoii2nsl2, the memes are 🔥".

NFT profile pics tied to a user’s plebbit account, because we whitelist the specific NFT collections to prevent NSFW profile pics

Who is "we" here and why do they get to decide what's acceptable in my community ('subpleb' if you will)?

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[-] missingno@fedia.io 38 points 1 week ago

From what I've gathered, this appears to be an unusably slow 4chan for crypto bros.

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[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago
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[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

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.

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[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

If it is selfhosted, and text only, why use IPFS?

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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