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.
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.
‘freeze peach’
TIL. Never heard the phrase
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.
Just the 1 person?
they can assign mods as well
Sooo, they act as an admin and can assign mods instead of using someone else’s node and being a mod?
Aside from what I understand as an inability to actually remove bad content that gets in, how does that differ from something like hosting a fedi site?
They loophole it by not “hosting” anything other than text. Link to something and someone else is accountable right? Just ignore that data is data and any image or video can be expressed as a sequence of “text” :)
To me the idea of temporality of communities and no instances is interesting. It’s definitely something new
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?
How is the hosting changed when needed (e.g., a different IPFS address)? What happens in a coordinated attack by someone with 51% of the seeds, can they overwrite all of the content? Is there any cryptographic way to ensure the content hasn’t been maliciously altered?
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.
You can do all the things you mentioned. If you’re a user you can opt to block communities from showing on your feed, although eventually we’re gonna have tags so people can mark SFW, NSFW and political, etc so devs can make clients that filters based on that.
Also if you’re a community owner you can ban people from your sub, you’re in full control of your community.
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
White list? How did you build that list? How do new people get in the white list? Who controls the white list? When the white list goes away, do the racist or illegal posts return?
The whitelist is used by the communities we run, but anybody can run a community and they can ignore the whitelist. It’s totally opt-in. Also, it’s only temporary till we figure out a good sybil resistant challenge design with great UX
> “most dezentralized”
> hosts on ShitHubI see someone doesn’t understand what GitHub is lol
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?
You’re thinking in federation, it’s a p2p network. Every user is equal to each other in terms of posting to each other communities.
If I’m hosting community <x> then yes I can ban you, or assign mods who can ban people
Ok so your original statement that I quoted is just 100% a lie lol. Off to a great start.
I think it’s like this:
Imagine Reddit, but every user stores a random piece of reddit in an instance on their device. They’re all still normal users, so they can’t block users from Reddit or from specific subs, even though their instance contributes to the whole. Their instance doesn’t represent the entirety of Reddit, or even the entirety of a single sub, it’s just a random chunk of Reddit.
BUT a user can be made a sub mod, which now gives them extra power over other users, but only in that one sub. It doesn’t matter whether any portion of that sub is stored on their instance, all that matters is that they’re a sub mod.
So you, as a pleb, have no control over what’s stored on your instance, but a mod has full control over their community (which may or may not partially exist on your instance).
That’s my interpretation, at least.
So it’s exactly the same moderation as Reddit and Lemmy then, complete with all the power hungry mod bullshit.
Shit name
what’s wrong with it
You want to be a pleb? Go join your other plebs there, lmao.
At least put the name through ChatGPT and check if is sounds like an insult, in any language.
It’s a social network for the plebs instead of corporate overlords. Sounds good to me
“Pleb” is generally used as a pejorative and is roughly equivalent to calling someone a peasant.
