Rinse - Plebbit Dev

You can filter your feed by tags/keywords, and eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else blocked keywords.

In centralized social media, there’s only a single entity deciding what’s allowed, with Plebbit that decision is pushed to the edges of the network. So each node can decide what it wants to see, nothing is pushed on the end user.

I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used. We have no control over that as the devs, but you as the user can choose to filter by tags/keywords/NSFW etc. If you go to the settings in Seedit you will find the option.

In its early days the internet was used mostly for porn as well, it doesn’t make sense to dismiss a whole project based on disagreements with people using it.

Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.

That is up to the sub owner, they can mandate a SMS challenge or any kind of KYC challenge if they would like. Users who get banned will automatically be disregarded by the of the swarm.

I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either. The moderation is on the community level, there are no global admins. If you run a community, you can moderate it however you like, or assign somebody to moderate it for you.

What do you mean fragmented?

If you run a community on Plebbit, you’re responsible for its own moderation, or you can assign somebody else to moderate it.

What is there to regulate? We the devs aren’t hosting anything. Is the Bittorrent founder responsible for regulating data transmitted on his protocol?

Plebbit is not built on top of blockchains, it’s a pure p2p network akin to Bittorrent. We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS

Each peer is a server That’s not true, you can be a peer in the network without posting or seeding anything to the network.

peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things If you create your own community, you will be able to moderate it, yes. Why would people create communities when it can’t be moderated?

With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.

You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server If the community node is down, but other peers in the network are online and providing the community’s data, then people will still be able to read and navigate the community in read-only mode. They can’t publish new votes/comments/edits to it, because all updates has to come from the community node.

Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow Not true, try the desktop app of Seedit and you will see for yourself.

Difference is it’s a pure p2p network with no need for anyone to set up their own DNS/TLS/etc, so that brings the barrier of entry for running your node way lower. When you download the desktop app of Seedit for example, you’re essentailly running a full p2p node in the background.

That is way more censorship resistant than say, Mastodon or ActivityPub-based socials

we have nothing to do with 4chan, not sure why you mention it here.

We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS

It’s a terrible analogy, I think of Plebbit as the Bittorrent of social media. Plebbit is not built on top of a blockchain, it’s a pure p2p network

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.