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Plebbitor

@ Plebbitor @lemmy.world

Posts
4
Comments
27
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • 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)

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • Plebbit doesn't use a blockchain, it's explained in the first paragraph of the whitepaper. Plebbit actually proves why a blockchain makes no sense for social media.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • 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.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • plebbit.com is just a landing page made by a member of the community, to explain the project. To use plebbit, you can check out its clients, like Seedit.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • worse content searching

    It's pure p2p so it can't have content searching straight out of the box, but it can easily have indexes like 4chan archivers to search in known subplebbits. It's entirely possible to crawl all active subplebbits and archive them all in a central database, and use that for search. This will happen, and plebbit clients will probably implement multiple such archivers to run search in them. And search engines will be able to index.

    worse scalability

    It's orders of magnitude better scalability than regular sites such as federated instances. Because it works like torrents, except you always seed, so plebbit nodes will inevitably improve the network speed more and more as more nodes join. And running a node works on a rasp pi. And all content is just text (including links from which media is embedded by the clients), so there's no scalability issue relatively to storage, either.

    worse moderation

    It has way better moderation, because it's just like reddit in that every community moderates itself, except there's no global admins able to censor a community/node or impose global rules. Plebbit clients are simply static HTML tools to browse the p2p network to connect to each community directly. Every community is incentivized to moderate itself effectively, or they become unusable, and to enter the homepages of the clients they must get voted for by holders of the plebbit token, via a gasless governance system using pubsub it's this page, you'll be able to vote for communities, i.e. downvote communities that aren't well moderated to remove them from the homepage for everyone). Right now, this homepage default list is centrally controlled by the developers, it's the only remaining centralized part of the project.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • Links have a character count limit, you can't link to a base64 image on plebbit.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • It's not a competing standard, it's a whole new approach to decentralize forum-based social media.

    ActivityPub is not fully decentralized, it's a federated design, meaning it's a network of instances, and each instance is just a regular website with servers. Anyone can run an instance, but it's expensive, tiresome and you'll get banned for it; they are regular websites.

    whereas Plebbit is fully decentralized, it's purely peer to peer, meaning it's a network of peers where every peer can potentially be a full node by simply using the desktop app (or in the future, a non custodial public rpc on mobile), and you don't have to run any site/domain for it, it's censorship resistant just like running a torrent with a BitTorrent client.

    Also to be clear: like ActivityPub is a protocol with clients, such as Mastodon and Lemmy, Plebbit is a protocol with clients, such as Seedit and Plebchan.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • 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.

  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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  • Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on The IPFS

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