Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by Plebbitor@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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.

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

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[-] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months 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.

[-] watson387@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I lost interest at 'blockchain'.

[-] loppy@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

Where are you seeing "blockchain"? Looking through the (scant) documentation on GitHub, they explicitly do not use blockchain: https://github.com/plebbit/docs/blob/master/docs/learn/intro.md "Running a full node takes a few seconds, since there is no blockchain to sync."

Another link someone gave: "We propose solving the data problem by not using a blockchain..." https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2

[-] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

From that same discussion thread:

We plan on supporting any token/nft/coin for tipping, awards, curating, less captchas, etc. Each subplebbit owner should be able to create their own tokens or nfts to monetize their effort and incentivize their users to participate. Avatars will also be curated NFTs.

The protocol does not use blockchain for data, but the web service itself looks like it would use crypto and NFT to manage aspects of user identity, spam prevention, and monetary incentive.

[-] loppy@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

Ahhh, ok. Thank you, my fault for not reading carefully.

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

ENS stands for Ethereum Name Service

[-] watson387@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

1000003091

They say no blockchain transaction fees, so I assumed it was some crypto bullshit. Still not positive it isn't.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Did they pay devs to build it for them?

I'm working on a similar project, but I'm 100% bootstrapping it. I'm using Iroh (similar to IPFS, but hopefully faster), and there will just be the one UI until someone makes another. I haven't done authentication yet, but I might end up using blockchain for that, idk, I need some form of trusted directory.

I'm going to be looking through this, because it sounds very similar to what I'm working on, and I'd love to just join a project instead of doing all the leg work of getting traction myself. The things I'm particularly interested in are:

moderation - I plan to use something like a web of trust, but with transitive trust; you select people you trust, and whether you see something depends on how those users moderated
persistence when users go offline - I use a local first approach, so a post is cached locally if you either authored or viewed it, and peers will pull from you if you're the closest source; caches would need to expire so we don't blow up everyone's storage
communities operate in a single namespace (so fix the main complexity w/ federation) - you create a community by posting to that namespace, and it gets mixed w/ other users who post to that same namespace

I'm also interested in building an ActivityPub bridge, so this network can act like an "instance" of sorts and push/pull content from the rest of the Fediverse. This is mostly to seed content in the early days, and I'll decide whether it's worth it once everything else works.

I don't know if Plebbit does any or all of this, hence the interest. That said, someone spending actual money on it seems a bit... odd, since I don't see how this could be monetized.

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[-] mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Yet more cryptotrash.

[-] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 months ago

Looks interesting. But I don’t see what the point is unless you connect to fediverse or can attract a critical mass to keep it self sustaining.

[+] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago

each community has basically been infiltrated by power-tripping mods from Reddit that honestly have no business being mods.

Do you have examples? I follow !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com quite closely, and except the usual Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world power tripping the vast majority of communities seem okay

[+] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months 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...

https://lemmy.world/comment/14285516

...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.world 1 points 3 months ago

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

[-] Corgana@startrek.website 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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!

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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.website 1 points 3 months 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.works 0 points 3 months 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.

[-] ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 points 3 months ago

So...

Start alternatives, on a host ypu maintain, and then everything can be ran perfectly how you want it to run

Problem solved.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That saves the service, but the communities are still dead. The problem is the single source of failure, and that isn't solved.

[-] ubergeek@lemmy.today 1 points 3 months ago

There is no real need for the kind of permanence you think you need.

Imagine if a building could only be a bar, for perpetuity, and nobody opened any other bars, because that first bar existed.

Bars would suck for like.... 99.99999% of the human population, huh?

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago

Sure, but that analogy only makes sense when talking about real estate. With a distributed system, there isn't really a limit to what you can store, as long as someone wants to store it.

If someone can just take something down that you value, that sucks. You should never be forced to preserve something you don't want to, but you should also be free to preserve something you value. Communities should come and go naturally, not because someone decided to stop paying for a server.

[-] ubergeek@lemmy.today 2 points 3 months ago

All communities work like that...

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago

Communities naturally come and go, and they change over time. That's fine. I'm talking about artificial deaths of communities because the nature of the platform changes (Reddit's closure of the API, a self-hosted platform disappearing due to cost/interest, etc).

[-] ubergeek@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago

How do ypu think communities "naturally" come and go?

Communities don't have heary attacks, or get a new child or something...

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago

People lose interest and move on. That's how it works in in-person communities, and that's also how it should work in online communities.

[-] ubergeek@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago

Thats... literally what happens. Like when the owner of a bar calls it quit, and leaves.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

That's different.

If I create a book club and lose interest, the rest of the group should continue on without me. I certainly shouldn't be obligated to continue hosting, but in a digital book club, nobody needs to host. That book club could continue as long as people are interested.

[-] i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months 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.

[-] Godnroc@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

... Ain't that just a website?

[-] kolorafa@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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.works 0 points 3 months 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.

[-] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 months ago

There's more abuse potential with full anonymity vs persistent pseudonyms

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months 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.com 0 points 3 months 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.works 0 points 3 months 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.

[-] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 months ago

I think it's pretty well studied that pseudonyms are much better for human interaction than true anonymity. I'm not a social scientist though so I don't have the references offhand.

It can be fun to be anonymous but there's a reason Yikyak shutdown, 4chan, 8chan are how they are, etc. they just don't tend to work well long term.

With pseudonyms ban evasion is possible but registering an account is at least some friction deterring some bad behavior, and mods have more tools. And on the other side you do have some reputation building that occurs when people have stable usernames.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago

Oh sure, there are absolutely benefits to pseudonyms for the reasons stated, I just don't think serial abusers change their behavior much either way. As long as the barrier to creating a new account is pretty low (i.e. consequences are minimal), toxic people will keep being toxic.

My issue is that moderation is a flawed concept, at least in the way Reddit/Lemmy do it. You either need strict rules (min karma, min account age, etc), all of which can be worked around, or you require very active moderation, which just attracts control freaks and power struggles.

I'm interested in distributed moderation. Everyone wants something different out of moderation, from content they agree with (echo chambers) to constructive content (challenge their opinions). And a distributed platform where content filtering happens on the client has a lot of potential for experimentation. This relies on steady accounts, but it doesn't require me to actually know who I'm trusting, and it can happen behind the scenes (e.g. begin to trust users that moderate similarly). If done well, I think it will sidestep power hungry moderation while providing most of the benefits, with the risk that users will accidentally silo themselves. But I really like the idea in general of something between full anonymity and persistent pseudonyms.

[-] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 months ago

Sounds like an interesting thing to try! I do think it might tend to group users into a groupthink / exclusion mentality, maybe, or maybe it won't, but definitely cool idea.

I've seen plenty of mod drama / trolls over the years, seems like a fundamentally human problem, kind of like good vs evil in a way, almost impossible for one side to win over the other.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, that's my concern as well, so I intend to have something like Steam's "discovery queue" to allow users to provide more information (which moderation decision do you agree more with?).

And yeah, we're dealing with a bunch of human problems here. Humans are tribal, possessive, and resist discomfort, so maybe there is no technical solution here, but I'd like to try.

[-] Boomkop3@reddthat.com 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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

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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025

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