Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ?
savvywolf@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
My question is… What does this do that ActivityPub and ATProto doesn’t do? That’s the angle you should approach this from (and be ready to defend… People on Lemmy seem adamant that ActivityPub is perfect and unbeatable…). We’re technical people here, sell it as a technical solution to a problem rather than using buzzwords or comparing it to Bitcoin.
You’ve mentioned serverless many times, but ultimately I need to send content somewhere and ask someone to send me content. I can’t just throw my posts into the wind and expect someone else to get them. So how do I make a post if not by sending it to a trusted person?
Difference is it’s a pure p2p network with no need for anyone to set up their own DNS/TLS/etc, so that brings the barrier of entry for running your node way lower. When you download the desktop app of Seedit for example, you’re essentailly running a full p2p node in the background.
That is way more censorship resistant than say, Mastodon or ActivityPub-based socials
Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.
How do I:
All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.
Plebbit is text-only, images are not hosted on the protocol anywhere. Although you can embed a link to an image within your comments or posts. Eventually we will think of a design for p2p image hosting but it’s not high priority right now, also it could be abused easily.
Locate bob given a name or some other ID At the moment we use key-value trackers similar to bittorrent trackers, Bob in this sceneario would post their content CID (content identifier, similar to hash) with addresses they can be reached through (quic, webtransport, websocket, https, etc).
If we assume Bob in this is a community with human name like cats, then the backend of Plebbit will resolve the text records of the domain to find its IPNS address, which then can be queries from trackers to find Bob, or anyone else who has the content of Bob’s community.
Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
Plebbit uses IPFS for its backend, which is based on content-addressing. You always get what you ask for.
Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am Each comment/vote/edit published by users to communities is signed with ed25519 keys.
Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
Depending how you connected to Bob, if you connect over a websocket or any encrypted protocol it will encrypted and nobody can snoop on you.
It still looks like you’re relying on IP addresses, which means if you want to host a Plebbit server (sorry, “always on peer”) you need one of the following:
Cochise@lemmy.eco.br 3 weeks ago
It’s not serverless, of course. Each peer is a server and the peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things. You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server. Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow.
ActivityPub is not perfect, but this is just a channer wanting some freeze prach space he can control.
rinse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
savvywolf@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
I mean, that’s true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.
rinse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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