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
Yet more cryptotrash.
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.
yeah…the fediverse is Reddit 2.0
Lemmy has been getting a little more…fascisty lately. each community has basically been infiltrated by power-tripping mods from Reddit that honestly have no business being mods.
it’s good to have things different than Reddit and Lemmy.
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
I also wouldn’t know what they mean. Fascist takeover sounds like something I would notice?
Yeah I do.
@grue@lemmy.world in !fuckcars@lemmy.world applies the rules to everyone but his friends.
I had a hottake, https://lemmy.world/comment/14282775, yesterday. you might not be able to read it since he removed all my comments and banned me, so here it is.
I’m all for protests, but please don’t block major roadways or interstates.
emergency services use the same roads and your protest will kill someone. pile up on the sides of the road, throw paint balloons in the streets, throw your shit at cars passing by. I really don’t care.
just keep the streets clear for emergency services.
his buddies started to attack me after I gave them real world examples to back up my opinion. they were rude and condescending and I responded in kind.
when I got back on all my responses were deleted for being “uncivil”. so I reported all their comments that were uncivil and condescending or mocking. waited like 3 or 4 hours. zero response. so I called him out on it, https://lemmy.world/comment/14291055
since he removed that I’ll post it here too.
hey f***face, if you’re going to apply the rules you better apply the rules for everyone equally, not everyone except your friends like @ReadMoreBooks@lemmy.zip or @leftytighty@slrpnk.net
I know it was you that deleted my comments because you made this comment after you removed them for being “uncivil”.
how’s this for uncivil, go back to Reddit you corrupt piece of shit.
in case you didn’t realize it this is sarcasm.
yeah, it broke rules, but my anger was justified. dude is clearly abusing his mod powers.
all their “uncivil” and condescending retorts are all still there though. and here I am banned from the community because he got pissy that he got called out.
I reached out to another mod on there but they haven’t been active since July.
TBF this isn’t the only instance of “Reddit mod bigmad” I’ve experienced on here. the communities aren’t a problem, it’s the power-tripping mods from Reddit that got kicked out that will destroy Lemmy/fediverse.
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:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/14285074
- https://lemmy.world/comment/14288217
- https://lemmy.world/comment/14288405
- https://lemmy.world/comment/14285112
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…
…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.
“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!
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.
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.
What would be the possible alternatives to block chain?
Federation.
I thought Blockchain was how the protocol knew how to federate, e.g. where to find other users. (?) I don’t really remember how Blockchain works but iirc it is a way to verify trust, e.g. this person really is /u/sem because our shared document says they are.
I know DNS is an alternative but it kind of sucks. Bluesky is inventing it’s open DiD thing for identity and it is centralized in practice but might be a good system. And I have no idea how it works.
Projects with blockchains work like BITtorrent to find peers. That’s why bitcoin was called BITcoin.
Federation doesn’t require blockchain. Blockchain was created for a very unique solution to storage of digital cash transactions that’s not relevant in almost any other system’s storage.
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
unmoderatable free-for-all
I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say “adminless,” but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.
So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it’ll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.
If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you’ll be more right than wrong.
On an unrelated topic, I’m working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn’t have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it’s fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Just because moderation doesn’t look similar to what you’re familiar with doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. We’ll see if Plebbit works out, but I’m still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn’t have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.
You misread, the unmoderatable free-for-all is about the domain name system alternative. Not the hosted platforms they point to
Good to see they’ve got some moderation tools for the platform regardless tho!
domain name system
What do you need moderation for that for? All a domain name service needs is some kind of reputable link between two things (e.g. domain name and IP), and Plebbit seems to be using it to reserve community names (so name -> public key, or maybe the other way, I haven’t looked into it). The reputation comes from the blockchain, which dramatically increases the barrier for an attacker to change an entry. Instead of a central authority, you have a group of individuals (ETH is based on proof-of-stake now, and I assume ENS is as well) who verify claims before it becomes part of the blockchain.
To me, it’s the least problematic part of it, I’m more concerned about communities having owners, and thus communities can die if the owner decides to stop hosting it or decides to dramatically change the rules (or moderators, etc). One of the major points of decentralization is to remove the power of individuals to change/break things, and Plebbit doesn’t do that. The most problematic part, IMO, is ties to cryptocurrency, which seems to be its profit motive, so the moment it takes off, the creator gets rich (because they hold a ton of PLEB token), and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of the project.
That said, we’ll see how it works out. I think it has some interesting ideas, and I’m all for alternatives to the established players in the social media space.
Have you been living under a rock? Just allow me to register plebbbit.eth and make it simple steal user accounts then redirect to the actual website. This, and plenty of other tricks need to dealt with
You could do the same with DNS, nothing is stopping you from registering a similar domain name and doing the exact same thing. ENS doesn’t change anything with the attack, it merely exchanges registrars for a block chain.
Except dns requires proper registration, and has a place to report abuse, and those reports are actually acted upon. Moderation here is not preventative, it’s reactive.
Stop trying to justify this approach, a blockchain is cool but you’re really just monopolizing domain registration
Oh, I think the approach is problematic, I just don’t think ENS is a major concern here. I don’t think you need DNS/ENS for this kind of service, nor do you need any form of blockchain.
My point is a blockchain DNS system isn’t significantly worse than the current system, where we already see a ton of similar abuse. The proper solution, IMO, is to avoid the need for DNS at all.
In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Wouldn’t this just create an impenetrable filter bubble/echo chamber where you see nothing else than content you 100% agree with?
For many users, probably. I do have plans to have a “moderation queue” or something where you can opt in to seeing stuff that was hidden and adjust your moderation preferences.
On Reddit, the recommendation was to upvote constructive comments even if you didn’t agree, and downvote unconstructive comments even if you do. People didn’t do that, so we got echo chambers.
On mine, I plan to have four responses to a comment:
- relevant
- flag (irrelevant, spam, or distasteful content)
- agree
- disagree
Users could adjust the weights of each, but by default “relevant” and “flag” would be much more highly weighed than “agree” and “disagree.” You can also block users. All of those are taken into account by the moderation graph to decide which content to show and in what order.
I really like the idea of relevant + flag as additional (more weighted) attributes compared to just agree/disagree, as you might disagree with a poster but still want to mark the comment as valuable for the discussion (which can’t be done on Reddit since you’ll downvote them to the gutters).
I’m hoping it won’t result in too much micromanagement of different attributes for each post, but am curious to see how it turns out.
I’m curious too. Hopefully I can come up with a design that feels natural and encourages the kind of interaction I’m after.
