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Comment on Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community

Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

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watson387@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yeah, I lost interest at ‘blockchain’.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.
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- sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  What would be the possible alternatives to block chain?
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Assuming you’re talking about authentication:
    
    public key signatures - users sign every posts and broadcast their username/pub key combo
    
    centralized (could be multiple) auth authority - openid, oauth, etc; posts signed by some unique key from that auth service
    
    I’m deciding if the first is sufficient or if I actually need some form of blockchain to prevent tampering.
    
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    sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Thanks for your thoughts on this.
    
    I am not sure how Matrix handles keys but it is a real headache for end users. For me at least
    
    With openid, etc, it’s decentralized compared with centralized and distributed, so you wouldn’t get stuck with one openid provider.
    
    I don’t know much about any of these so thanks for developing for the rest of us.
    
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    catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The first is sufficient. You only need to see someone’s public key once, then you cache it and can authenticate all future signed messages.
    
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  - jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Federation.
    
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    sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    Cochise@lemmy.eco.br ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Reading the white paper you find the “serverless” has servers. Each community needs to be always online to serve captchas to posters. The system is federated on community level, instead of instance level, and uses DHT instead of DNS.
    
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  - Dragon@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Holochain is an interesting option I haven’t seen mentioned.
    
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- Plebbitor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  They pay the devs via bounties and meeting milestones.
  
  We tried iroh but it wasn’t fit for purpose. We have tackled the moderation exactly how you’ve described it. Allowing multiple people to control a community. We’re in the process of implementing it. Our version of this allows people to create multicommunities where it shows similar communities in one sub.
  
  Activity pub would be interesting but plebbit is so technologically different were not sure it would be technically possible. We forgo the concept of instances entirely allowing Plebbit to work closer to Reddit, where you just search a sub. Global admins don’t exist on Plebbit. Subs can still share ban lists if they wish but its optional
  
  Plebbit is always looking for new devs, join our telegram group @joinplebbit to discuss with the main dev about joining the project.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Ok, I read through the whitepaper, and it seems it works quite differently to what I’m working on. Main differences:
    
    communities
    
    plebbit - communities are public keys, and one person controls the private key, which basically makes them the admin (they choose the rules, moderators, etc); not sure why plebbit advertises it as "adminless"
    
    mine - communities are topics, nobody controls them, so the concept of “rules” doesn’t exist
    
    moderation
    
    plebbit - looks like moderators can delete posts, I suppose through rights granted by the community admin (i.e. they trust the moderator’s public key)
    
    mine - distributed moderation similar to a Web of Trust, but instead of explicitly trusting users, you build trust by moderating similarly to them; I’ll probably establish a default trust graph (the users and their trust weights) that new users can use, which will probably be based on popular trust graphs and will slowly go away as users participate in moderation; I’ll probably let users tweak the parameters to that trust model as well (i.e. how much weight to give votes vs reports)
    
    spam
    
    plebbit - captcha system between client and community admin
    
    mine - relies on distributed moderation
    
    how data is stored
    
    plebbit - community owner has all the content for the community, and other peers may have the content as well
    
    mine - unlikely for anyone to have all the data for a community, you’ll only cache what’s relevant to you, plus some random additional data depending on space to improve discoverability for your peers; in the beginning, I will have peers that cache all content until I figure out the right mix, but long-term, I intend to have most content live in someone’s cache through statistics, while very unpopular content (spam and whatnot) will disappear from the network
    
    And other notes:
    
    Browser users cannot join peer-to-peer networks directly, but they can use an HTTP provider or gateway that relays data for them
    
    Not exactly, WebRTC exists, so you only need an HTTP provider to initiate the WebRTC connection to peers. Look at WebTorrent for an example. I haven’t yet tackled the web on my own project, but I am building everything web-first (I’m using Tauri for my desktop app), and I intend to have it work on the web when I release.
    
    proof of balance of a certain cryptocurrency
    
    This seems odd to me. Why would someone holding an arbitrary amount of cryptocurrency have any bearing on their trustworthiness? Surely a bad actor could just move crypto around and spam as much as they like, no?
    
    Likewise, payment seems like a bad idea, because that would encourage exclusive groups that share illegal content (drugs, child porn, military secrets, etc).
    
    It would allow unlimited amounts of subplebbits, users, posts, comments, and votes.
    
    Aren’t posts, comments, and probably votes limited by the storage space available to the community owner? From what I can tell, they host everything, so once that storage space is full, things will stop working properly. The whitepaper isn’t clear here, so I could be mistaken.
    
    With my approach, there are no bottlenecks, and you can adjust how much storage you give to the app as you see fit, and the more storage you allocate, the better the experience for you and your peers (diminishing returns). But even if you set your persistent cache to zero, you can still use the service, though you’ll need to make a lot of DHT calls.
    
    That said, it seems like an interesting system and IMO a step up from Lemmy, because it reduces the cost to self-host (don’t need a copy of all data for every community you use, just the communities you own). I’ll certainly be tracking development, but I don’t currently use Telegram and want to work on my own project for now before getting involved in another project. Once I’ve proven the technical bits and feel comfortable sharing it, I’ll take a call on whether I’ll continue development or join some other project.
    
    Thanks for the offer, but I’ll stick to watching the project on Github for now, and maybe I’ll play with it a bit in my spare time. If you had a Matrix channel instead, I’d join and at least read through the discussion there.
    
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jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They’re probably calculation their own labor, which they mark as a negative.

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