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 1 month agoSure, but something being federated doesn’t make it decentralized, it just makes centralized systems cooperate through established protocols.
This community is on lemmy.world, which neither of us are part of. If the admin of lemmy.world doesn’t like a comment or post, they can delete it. So even though we’re not affiliated with lemmy.world directly, we’re still subject to their rules, because lemmy.world is a centralized service that just happens to share some data with other centralized services. If lemmy.world goes away, so does this community; we’ll still see our respective copies of the data on our instances, but we can no longer see each others’ posts and comments.
The main benefit federation provides is mitigating damage to the service as a whole if a node goes down. It doesn’t protect individual communities at all.
Plebbit is the same as federation, it just cuts the centralization to the community level and distributes load across the network. But it the community owner disables the community, it’s dead.
I prefer that nobody can kill a community. I don’t want to trade one tyrant for a handful of tyrants or even a lot of tyrants, I’d prefer no tyrants.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 1 month ago
You can always zoom in and say “see, this little bit is centralized on it’s own”
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Not necessarily.
Is Bittorrent centralized in any way? Once something is seeded by peers, there’s no single authoritative source, and it’s trivial to host new relays (in BitTorrent parlance, either a PEX or Tracker) if some get shut down. You’d have to take a ton down to really impact the Bittorrent network, whereas with Lemmy, you just need to take down one or two instances to cause a mass exodus. With Plebbit, that number is probably a bit higher, but a dozen or so of the most popular communities is probably enough to impact nearly everyone. Likewise, infiltrating (i.e. court gag orders) would be incredibly effective on Lemmy and perhaps Plebbit, but fairly useless on BitTorrent without added technical measures (e.g. seeding something with an exploit).
The gold standard IMO for free speech is complete decentralization with local moderation.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 1 month ago
There’s a lot of lemmy instances, which two would you shoot at?
BitTorrent still relies on trackers, but much like a lemmy instance you can move over and share things elsewhere
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Lemmy.world and lemmy.ml or sh.itjust.works. Those are the largest and host the most popular communities.
If an instance goes down, all the communities hosted there become dead. If a BitTorrent tracker goes down, you pick another and nothing changes, because the tracker doesn’t own the data. This is especially true for peer exchanges.