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 5 days agoNot 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 5 days 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 5 days 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.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 5 days ago
I suppose you’re right, It’s still a lot better than a reddit like situation though. I’ll have to keep that in mind
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Sure, and that’s why I’m here and not on Reddit, and I may switch to Plebbit if that gets traction since I think its design is better. But it’s also why I’m not hosting my own instance or actively contributing to either project. I did contribute some bug fixes to Lemmy in the past, and will probably do the same for Plebbit at some point, but my focus will be on my own project.