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

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

  source