Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoLemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,
This isn’t quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.
They’re not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.
Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures
I haven’t looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.
I assume they’re using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.
sxan@midwest.social 1 day ago
Man, I love a good nitpicking.
It’s a source of truth for you. It’s locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.
Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that’s on it. If they propagate a “delete” on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.
Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can’t happen with Lemmy.
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But it’s also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.
They day they’re not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯
I don’t know. This post was the first I’ve heard of it, but since then I’ve seen a couple more “organic” posts asking if anyone thinks it’s good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it’s genuine interest. I’ll wait a bit and see, personally.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they’ve prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I’m not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn’t.
Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don’t know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it’s similar to Lemmy.
I thought they’re using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.
I’m working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I’m using a DHT. If they’re using something else, that’s potentially concerning. I haven’t looked into Plebbit a ton though, I’ve just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I’m a bit of an outlier since I’m playing in the same space.