Rinse - Plebbit Dev

Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy

The token is not forced upon anyone, and even if we start including it in the clients somehow, anybody can fork the clients and remove any token related stuff out of it.

Tokenizing your own project is a great way of supporting development without selling shares to VCs who only care about hyper growth, regardless of the ideals of the project.

Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.

Not sure what you mean by that, everything we do is out in the open.

Yeah I don’t mind having an account on Bluesky, and will be making one shortly.

Ideally hosting your node should be easier, it doesn’t seem they care about it that much which concerns me

But then who’s hosting my content and till when they’re hosting it?

If somebody does something illegal, it’s up to the government to act on it. Also users of clients can choose to omit certain communities or keywords from their feed. This is a healthier approach than letting a few dudes in Silicon valley telling us what to see/think

Sure, I’m just worried it’ll have similar problems as reddit, just without global admins to fix/enforce things

I disagree, I think Reddit ruined their own subreddits. If you’re a community owner, you know your community best and know how to moderate it. They’re the most invested in it after all.

Plebbit doesn’t support media or images, only text. If a user links to an image they have to provide the URL, which is never hosted on the community owner’s node. Also, if somebody posts an illegal link or something like that the community owner can choose to purge their comment from their node.

Plebbit nodes are very cheap and easy to run, we’re very similar to Bittorrent in that regard. The next update we will have full p2p capabilities in mobile as well.

Is it a problem though? There are thousands of email providers you can choose form, and they still work fine for sending and receiving email.

An email provider as well as mastodon provider can:

• Read incoming messages
• Block me from sending messages to specific people
• Block me from fetching content I want

Can I choose another email provider that will let me do what I want? Yeah maybe I can find one, or maybe I can run my one, but then these big email providers they’re gonna start blocking or throttling self hosters making it infeasible or extremely incovienet to run your own email instance.

Not to mention, there’s a financial + time cost to setting up your own email/mastodon instances that most people won’t bother with.

Look at Bittorrent or Plebbit as an example, running a full p2p node is literally a single click and nobody can censor you. The barrier of entry for self hosters is much lower.

One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.

Mastodon social controles a big chunk of the network, that’s not healthy imo. That’s a huge power of the network.

imo moderation of the network should never be at the center, rather it should be pushed to the edges of the network (users). I like Bluesky’s model of subscribing to someone’s labels of the content, and maybe we’re gonna have something similar in Plebbit as well. In Plebbit currently you can choose which communities you subscribe to, and you can also filter by NSFW and other tags, so you’re not really forced to see content you don’t like.

Also community owners set the rules for their own communities and enforce it however they like, there are no global admins.

Elaborate

Each community (equivalent of subreddit) is essentially a keypair, and whoever runs the community and has access to the keypair can do whatever they want. They can ban people + assign moderators + etc, there are no global admins.

Enjoy, it’s a bit buggy but we’re always looking for feedback and help if you’re interested. All code is open source and GPL v2

Our core problem with mastodon design is the same issue we have with email, eventually big hosters consolidate and they start banning people they disagree with. Now, in contrast you have a full p2p protocol like Bittorrent where you can download anything you want as long as you can find people to download it from. This is the model we’re going for in Plebbit

A global DHT unfortuantely is extremely resource intensive, and part of our design requirements is full p2p capabilities for both mobile and web browsers. This cannot be achieve with a DHT, although if a DHT design emerges with support for both, we will consider using it.

Next update for plebbit-js will have full p2p capabilities including gossipsub using libp2p/helia in browser/mobile! We’re excited to ship that.

I’m personally planning to set up a bluesky account soon, but running a selfhosted instance doesn’t look easy yet

Feel free to check out Seedit, it’s the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we’re working on it every day to make it better.

We’re still working on it and getting very close to releasing MVP

I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.

Plebbit is not a ledger, it’s a P2P protocol and has no DHT. Peers find each other by coordinating over HTTP routers, which are similar to bittorrent trackers. HTTP routers are essentially key-value stores so they’re very easy to deploy.

If we could achieve bittorrent decentralization along with their usage numbers, I’d consider it a success

Plebbit is not a blockchain, it’s P2P and all content on the network is content addressable. There’s nothing to “sync”

Not true, it’s free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js