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.

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,

ENS domain are used to name communities.

Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have 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.

The code is fully open source on

https://github.com/plebbit

  • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    29 days ago

    According to OP’s previous comments the dev of this has spent 600k of their own money on this. If that claim is legitimate then feel free to draw your own conclusions about why someone with 600k to burn would spend it on an NFT crypto reddit, but without images.

  • i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    28 days ago

    This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.

    How does removing images change anything? Any file can be transmitted by text, as we used to do with e-mail, and you don’t need to use images to make illegal or just intentionally offensive content.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      28 days ago

      I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse. I guess it’s a sizeable amount of content, but it’s not really all that popular and has a host of its own issues. I think people like the idea behind it more than the actual implementation.

      That said, I’m working on a similar project (distributed Reddit clone), and one of my goals is to eventually connect it to the fediverse to get access to content. That said, a distributed service isn’t directly compatible w/ a federated one (there are no servers in a distributed service, only simple relays), so I’d have to build a bridge to get it to work, and bridges are notoriously awkward to deal with in the best case (see Matrix bridges), and adding P2P on top of that makes things even more awkward.

      • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.

        Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          27 days ago

          But we’re still at the mercy of the admins of the large instances. Most of the popular Lemmy communities are at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works. Eventually the admins of those instances will either turn evil (I argue that has already happened on lemmy.ml) or stop hosting the service, and then we’re still screwed. I don’t know mastodon well enough, but I’m guessing they have a similar problem with a handful of instances hosting a disproportionate portion of the content.

          I don’t know that I can do better, but I can try something different. Plebbit is trying something different as well, so hopefully someone will find a good mix of tradeoffs.

          I’m on Lemmy because it’s the least bad option at the moment for what I’m looking for, but I think it’s fundamentally flawed. Apparently the Plebbit devs do as well (or they think they can get away with a grift), and I hope there are lots of others out there quietly plunking away at their own project. I believe Lemmy will die eventually, and I’d really like to have an alternative ready.

          • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
            2·
            19 days ago

            I agree with your sentiment that it’s very bad that you can’t even move communities to a new server if the admin wants it, not to talk about if they didn’t want to.

            I really like how matrix implemented it, you can start a public room, other people can make aliases, if your server is gone everything is still accessible through the aliases.

      • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
        3·
        27 days ago

        “Lemmy” is actually not a platform like Reddit, it’s software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is “getting fascisty” you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That’s the beauty of ActivityPub!

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            26 days ago

            Hi folks, I’m the mod @GreenKnight23 is complaining about.

            I removed four of his comments for incivility, out of the eight he had posted in the thread at the time. I chose those four and only those four because they consisted pretty much entirely of insults and accusations against another user. I omitted the other four because, while some of them contained incivility too, they also contained valid arguments and/or weren’t as egregious.

            The comments removed were:

            The contents of these comments are visible in the !fuckcars modlog:

            https://lemmy.world/modlog/3902?page=1&actionType=All

            He then proceeded to post the paranoid unhinged rant attacking me that he copied above, basically leaving me no choice but to ban him. After some waffling over the duration (which you can also see reflected in the modlog), I chose to temporarily ban him for 1 day, the shortest interval possible.

            The contents of that removed comment are not visible in the !fuckcars modlog.

            Later, he wrote the comment here in !selfhosted I’m now replying to (which I noticed because it showed up in my inbox due to the username mention) and I read that he claimed that all of his comments in the thread were removed. At first I thought it was just a blatant lie and began writing a rebuttal, but then I realized that he’s right: all of them are gone, and there are no entries in the modlog detailing why they were removed or who did it.

            I think what happened was that when I banned him, I checked the “remove content” checkbox thinking that it removed the comment I was banning him for, but it apparently removed all of his comments in the thread instead. Worse, it doesn’t record in the modlog that that’s what it did. On top of that, unbanning him doesn’t undo the comment removals, which is unfortunate because testing that possibility and then re-banning him afterward reset the timer to the full 24 hours again.

            Anyway, I’ve looked through the thread and attempted to individually restore the comments I never intended to remove. That in itself is difficult because I can’t see what the original text was until I restore it, and the comment IDs apparently change(!) when the original text is overwritten or when they’re viewed in context or something (I haven’t quite figured out the reason yet), so I can’t just match the numbers in the URLs. Nevertheless, the state of his comments in the thread should be as intended now. Also, I learned something new about how moderation works, so that’s nice I guess.

            P.S.: I’d like to give a special shout-out to this comment of his…

            …which I not only didn’t remove initially but also went to the trouble of restoring, even though it almost certainly deserves removal, just because of the minuscule chance that the deleted comment it’s replying to contained something that somehow justified it. That’s how lenient I’ve intended to be this entire time, and had still been in practice at the point @GreenKnight23 posted his rant.

            P.P.S. I’m not actually colluding with any other users, BTW.

        • qevlarr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          27 days ago

          I also wouldn’t know what they mean. Fascist takeover sounds like something I would notice?

    • kolorafa@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      It sounds like jest plain simple website/forum BUT with specific protocol making it more discoverable/searchable?

      Allowing to post comments anonymously… sound like a bad idea in the long run, but who know, make me eat my words.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        Allowing to post comments anonymously… sound like a bad idea in the long run, but who know, make me eat my words.

        How so? Reddit and Lemmy do just that. There’s nothing tying my username to me, and I’m guessing there’s nothing typing yours to you.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            28 days ago

            I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The difference between 4chan and Reddit is pretty small, and abuse certainly happens on both platforms. It’s pretty easy to swap out a pseudonym (I used to do it every 2-3 years on Reddit), so the difference between that and completely anonymous posts is pretty small.

            If you tie accounts to a persistent identity (e.g. Facebook), you have an opportunity to address abuse, but you open yourself up to even more tracking by the service and your government, which I think is worse.

            For me, tying online accounts to actual identity (e.g. government ids) is a no-go for me, so the abuse problem needs to be addressed another way. For lemmy, that’s centralized moderation (per community and instance). For a P2P service, that means users opting-in to moderation (e.g. something like a web of trust), which should prevent them from seeing abuse in the first place since they won’t see untrusted content.

            • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              28 days ago

              The difference between 4chan and Reddit is pretty small

              I’m sorry, but I sincerely doubt you’ve been on 4chan recently.

              Reddit All Hot:

              Reddit All New:

              4chan /b/

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                28 days ago

                I don’t see abuse in any of the pictures you posted.

                My point isn’t that 4chan and reddit are the same in every sense, just that the difference in abuse (specifically targeted abuse) isn’t all that different between completely anonymous and persistent pseudonymns.

  • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    Hold up plebs (hah), this alternative to dns (domain name system) called ens is actually more centralized.

    The pros listed here over federation: no central http endpoint, database or dns are a lie. The whole point of having federated instances is that they’re not a central thing. Yes, individual instances can be knocked out. It’ll be just the same for plebbit except no one can moderate trolls creating scummy or phishing domain names.

    Whomever came up with the idea to charge people gas fees is a billionaire now. Ignoring that bit, this blockchain based domain system looks cool, but an unmoderatable free-for-all is an absolutely terrible idea

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      unmoderatable free-for-all

      I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say “adminless,” but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.

      So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it’ll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.

      If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you’ll be more right than wrong.

      On an unrelated topic, I’m working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn’t have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it’s fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).

      Just because moderation doesn’t look similar to what you’re familiar with doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. We’ll see if Plebbit works out, but I’m still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn’t have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.

      • kchr@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).

        Wouldn’t this just create an impenetrable filter bubble/echo chamber where you see nothing else than content you 100% agree with?

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          27 days ago

          For many users, probably. I do have plans to have a “moderation queue” or something where you can opt in to seeing stuff that was hidden and adjust your moderation preferences.

          On Reddit, the recommendation was to upvote constructive comments even if you didn’t agree, and downvote unconstructive comments even if you do. People didn’t do that, so we got echo chambers.

          On mine, I plan to have four responses to a comment:

          • relevant
          • flag (irrelevant, spam, or distasteful content)
          • agree
          • disagree

          Users could adjust the weights of each, but by default “relevant” and “flag” would be much more highly weighed than “agree” and “disagree.” You can also block users. All of those are taken into account by the moderation graph to decide which content to show and in what order.

          • kchr@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            2·
            19 days ago

            I really like the idea of relevant + flag as additional (more weighted) attributes compared to just agree/disagree, as you might disagree with a poster but still want to mark the comment as valuable for the discussion (which can’t be done on Reddit since you’ll downvote them to the gutters).

            I’m hoping it won’t result in too much micromanagement of different attributes for each post, but am curious to see how it turns out.