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
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.
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.
Instances cannot block a user
You’ll find very little support here then haha.
You can block and ban people if you’re the community owner though, the point is there’s no federated instances that block people arbitrarily. Every community owner is in full charge of their community.
So, if I’m on programming.dev and you’re the owner/manager of lemmy.world, I can post on lemmy.world but you can’t block me at all, is that right?
Buddy are we gonna do this every 6 months? We know you’re a crypto-grifting 4channer.
Shit name
what’s wrong with it
Last time I checked it out there was a lot of racist spam. It seems better now. Maybe it was one bad actor or the spam filter is better.
Yes we had a lot of spam a few months ago but we cleaned it up by adding additional challenges and a white list for the time being till we get to MVP stage
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.
You can block and ban people if you’re the community owner, the point is there’s no federated instances that block people arbitrarily. Every community owner is in full charge of their community.
How do they deal with CSAM and other illegal material? (I’m guessing the answer is that they don’t)
The community owner does. Every community owner is in full charge of their community.
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.
‘freeze peach’
TIL. Never heard the phrase
To me the idea of temporality of communities and no instances is interesting. It’s definitely something new
Although true, the existence of mods is an attack vector the criminally corrupt will always exploit, and every anti-authoritarian should not oppose these systems because they’re currently exploited by the corrupt.
Fascists are buying up all media and social media explicitly to silence opposition, control the narrative, and propagandize (the thing they claim everyone else is doing to them, while being the most blatantly criminal of perpetrators).
I can’t remember the specific protocol, but the one I saw which was most interesting relies on you subscribing to individuals, and building trust through that “social graph of trust”. It’s best to view it as someone owns a domain and you’re subscribing to their rss feed, except they’re identity is cryptographically verified, and the people they engage with have more weight in your feed than those that don’t… as opposed to whatever some technofascist algorithm, oligarch-beholden journalist or corrupt mod (who may very well be a paid operative) deems valuable or worthy of your attention; basically mimicking the way people build relationships in real life (without third party oversight).
The system formerly known as Freenet has a module known as the web of trust that uses a similar model. It’s interesting but runs into a problem of forcing users/hosts to propagate content and messaging they don’t wish to be associated with.
There’s a reason places like gab or hexbear end up isolated islands, the general population has no desire to be preached to be the lunatic fringes.
What happens when the lunatics own the media and social media? Let them remove all evidence of genocide and corruption? Just accept the insanity and authoritarianism?
Then you get things like the platform you’re on where in my case it resides in my house and lets me be that big scary admin/mod. Having the ability to purge bad content and actors from a central space is needed for anyone but the most thick skinned masochists to use a platform.
Plenty of people just want to go talk/post without wading through a swamp of the crap that one uncle brings up at Thanksgiving on a regular basis.
Intriguing.
What’s the mechanism for dealing with spammers?
In lemmy there’s a clear escalation path that will lead to either the spammer’s instance dealing with the issue or the instance itself being de-federated.
How would that work in a p2p system?
Each user having to individually block every spammer will work as well as it did for email back in the day.
Was NOSTR intentionally left out? Because it is way more decentralized than plebbit ever was.
Nostr still relies on federated servers, while Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer. It runs on IPFS, which works more like BitTorrent, basically pure P2P.
The problem with federated platforms is that their servers (instances) are not easy to set up, and regular users usually have zero motivation to run one. And even if they did, those servers aren’t really censorship-resistant at all. They behave pretty much the same as normal centralized sites.
Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get taken down by a DDoS attack, or cut off by the SSL provider, the datacenter, or even the domain registrar.
The normal guy who makes plebbit post is a grifter trying to shill crypto and blockchain so… Yes
Sounds cool. I always wondered whether something like Lemmy could work P2P or like a mesh network.
I don’t understand on the white paper how it can be “like P2P” and have community with users. I misunderstood maybe but it seems that A creates a node and asks B to resolve a challenge to post on the node. And then any client can get the content from the node… Isn’t that how every social platform works?
> “most dezentralized”
> hosts on ShitHubI see someone doesn’t understand what GitHub is lol
