275

Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by Plebbitor@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

63 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 69 points 2 months 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 41 points 2 months 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 19 points 2 months 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 11 points 2 months ago

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

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 60 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

[-] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 41 points 2 months 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 11 points 2 months 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 2 months 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)

[-] rimu@piefed.social 27 points 2 months ago

Human-readable names are a critical feature.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

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

[-] missingno@fedia.io 27 points 2 months ago

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

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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)?

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won't be compatible with our clients because we think that's a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it's controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.

DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.

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

For our clients, "we" means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There's no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).

[-] lone_faerie 31 points 2 months ago

"The whole DNS system is a complete scam" says the person advocating for crypto and NFTs

[-] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 4 points 2 months ago

I mean, that's the one thing he is right about. Also, it's far from being secure. I somehow made the DNS system break someday, as I was able to "buy" an already-registered domain. The domain ownership was overriden and the original owner couldn't do anything. I have not been able to replicate the bug on any other target, but understanding the bug and finding an exploit is basically unlocking god-mode on 99% of computers as you can mitm all you want with this

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Imagine you buy a cheap domain name for $0.99 a year from namecheap to be lonefaerie.lol or something

Next year they ask for $19.99 because they can. If you set up an account with that name you can either pay more or have to change accounts

Why can't we just buy domain names for like 30 year periods?

[-] flamingos@feddit.uk 18 points 2 months ago

DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.

There are other alternatives to DNS that don't require you to boil the oceans, e.g. GNUnet has their own thing.

In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There’s no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).

This isn't decentralising the whitelist/default subs, it's shareholder-ising. It's also just recreating the notion of admins in ActivityPub, or replay controllers in notstr. You still have a set of privileged users able to make decisions for others, albeit less privileged than AP admins.

[-] priapus@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

I'm not saying nor do I believe crypto is the future, but this project seems to use Etherium and Solana, both of which are proof of stake and will not be using huge amounts of power.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] sarahduck 3 points 2 months 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.

[-] RandomVideos@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

You have to pay to upvote something?

[-] missingno@fedia.io 39 points 2 months ago

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

[-] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 months ago

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

[-] FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 2 months ago

right in the home page I spotted a link to a so-called plebbit token.

[-] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

There is indeed a token. Probably an illegal security in the US

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 3 points 2 months ago

"ENS domain"

IPFS is also strongly related to several blockchain stuff (not a blockchain itself though)

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Because they didn't want to turn off everybody immediately

[-] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 28 points 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 23 points 2 months ago

https://github.com/plebbit

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Nostr is not really federated because the servers just send data for you. Nobody calls the internet federated because the switches transfer your data

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 months 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.

[-] ludrol@bookwormstory.social 16 points 2 months 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 7 points 2 months 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 2 months 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months 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.

[-] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Plebbitor@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months 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.

load more comments (3 replies)

[-] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] einlander@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

Text only?

Wait till people start making browser plugins for base64 images.

load more comments (2 replies)

[-] tht@social.pwned.page 7 points 2 months ago

Maybe leave a link

[-] mvirts@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Lol to the cookie notice on plebbit.com

Sounds interesting

load more comments (1 replies)

[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 months 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 2 months ago

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

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months 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.

load more comments

this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024

275 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

65819 readers

5297 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world