Seedit is a selfhosted peer-to-peer Reddit Alternative using IPFS
doesn’t rely on any servers or instances .
We mainly use 3 technologies, which each have several protocols and specifications:
IPFS (for content-addressed, immutable content, similar to bittorrent) https://docs.ipfs.tech/ https://specs.ipfs.tech/
IPNS (for mutable content, public key addressed)
https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/
Libp2p Gossipsub (for publishing content and votes p2p)
https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
They also have a youtube channel where they cover how most of their tech works:
https://www.youtube.com/c/IPFSbot
the problem with federated social media is that each federated instance is just a regular centralized sites. They can censor each other, they can get taken down at any moment, and they are hard to run and manage. Whereas on p2p tech like bittorrent or bitcoin or plebbit, the p2p nodes don’t require domains, they just work straight out of the box. On plebbit, you open the app, and you’re instantly receiving p2p connections right away, just like a bittorrent client, no domain or server required. Users connect to your node directly, p2p, and nobody can stop you. P2P also scales infinitely, which is the reverse of centralized websites like federated instances: the more users there are, the faster it gets. And it’s impossible to censor at scale.
Seedit is not Nostr
nostr isnt p2p, the relays can censor you, the relays can run out of money and shut down, the relays can get DDOSed, they earn no money to serve your content.
the people running the relays are probably legally obligated to censor you by their jurisdiction. for example in the UK you go to jail for mean tweets. the person running the relay with mean content would probably go to jail if they set foot in the UK.
CP
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the protocol is text only, to embed media, you need to host it on the regular ( Centralized ) internet, and then you link to it like https://example.com/image.jpg, and the host will stop hosting that image and report your IP.
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the community creator can assign mods, mods can remove posts from that community. if a community is badly moderated, the user will never see it, it wont be recommended to him. the user can visit bad communities directly just like you can visit a bad website directly, but it’s not recommended to you so it’s safe to use.
it’s the same as bittorrent , this p2p tech can’r prevent people from sharing stuff, but on seedit you can’t share media, it’s text-only so the liability falls to the centralized provider of the embedded media from the link the user shares as text. Also being p2p, seedit is not private, so it can’t really be used for illegal activity
About ActivityPub
the problem with federated social media is that each federated instance is just a regular centralized sites. They can censor each other, they can get taken down at any moment, and they are hard to run and manage. Whereas on p2p tech like bittorrent, p2p nodes don’t require domains, they just work straight out of the box. On seedit, you open the app, and you’re instantly receiving p2p connections right away, just like a bittorrent client, no domain or server required. Users connect to your node directly, p2p, and nobody can stop you. P2P also scales infinitely, which is the reverse of centralized websites like federated instances: the more users there are, the faster it gets. And it’s impossible to censor at scale.
Also the code is fully open source
except we already figured out how to encode images (or any file) as text when E-Mail was created. That is how images in E-Mails, attachment or embedded, are done. I can easily imagine a userJS script that will render them in the browser, but even if not you just copy the text and decode.
Ah… so you’re guaranteed to have a dark CSAM subculture on there at some point.
As if that has ever stopped anybody. See all the people that got caught for sharing it on the clearnet. Or on Signal, Telegram or similar, where you have to enter your phone number, which is personally tied to you.
All in all - Great way to adress the concerns, by admitting they are in fact possible. “Hurray crypto” or whatever.
This seems kinda harsh.
CSAM distribution is possible on pretty much any platform.
As long as the platform isn’t obfuscating a user’s IP address then I don’t see how it’s any worse than any other platform.
A few weeks ago everyone in this community was fawning over some dev’s new anonymous zero-knowledge file sharing platform and no one seemed to care that it would be overrun with CSAM.
They claimed there will be no CSAM because of the given reasons.
I wanted to highlight that those reasons do not actually prevent it.
My tone might be harsh (the sarcasm at the end definitely is) because I see this as a marketing push for their crypto platform. “marketing” - as in they will be making money from users, so it is in their interest to tell lies or ignorant half-truths, to make more users come over.
Any normal platform tackles this problem with proper moderation. Platforms that make money, often hire moderators.
Sure ok. If this is some crypto BS then that’s reason enough to avoid the platform.
I just didn’t think the CSAM angle is much of a criticism, even if they did try to minimise it.
If it’s not obfuscating your IP address, then you’re open to getting targeted by anyone you interact with on a reddit-like platform. That sounds like a circle of hell I’d rather not visit.
you can’t encode base64 images on seedit, each fiels has a character limit. Obviously centralized links, from which media is embedded, will be taken down by the relative centralized website.
Kids… You ever wonder how “rar” came about?
Usenet had limits on its text only post size as well.
Then use decentralized links or hashes, which is what IPFS uses to identify content. A character limit doesn’t solve this problem fundamentally. Indeed, it’s been a tough problem to solve for decentralized services.
So it’ll be distributed more like Usenet as I understand it