rinse
@rinse@lemmy.world
Working on Plebbit.com - A decentralized P2P social media protocol
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
you specifically mentioned Bitcoin I did not, I believe that was OP
included cryptocurrency integration Only for things we believe web3 does better; such as name systems, uncensorable financial transaction
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
The default limit on comments size is 40kb, and each subplebbit (community) can configure that to be even lower. Hardly doubt people will find a way to embed 40kb images
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
if you want to host a Plebbit server
Did you mean a community (subplebbit) here? Or did you mean running your own client instance, like Seedit?
Use a hosting provider, which is something you want to avoid according to your pitch. Running a community is very cheap on terms of computing resources, it’s on par with running a bittorrent client, you can probably run 50+ communities on a single raspberry pi or a $5 VPS. No need for DNS/TLS, and I suspect many people will opt to host communities themselves.
If you still wanna host it with someone else, you could have the address of the community be a blockchain name system tied to a wallet you own, and then give the hosting provider your database (which contains your IPNS private key). The hosting provider will receive and publish updates on your behalf, but in the case they went rogue, you can update the text records of your domain to point to a new IPNS you fully own.
So even this way, the hosting provider doesn’t really have a lot of power over the community owner.
Serve it from your own personal network under your own IP. Given that you’re worried about censorship from even the DNS system, I imagine this is something you absolutely don’t want to do.
You can use relays/tor/vpn to obfuscate your real ip address. The peers in the network won’t know necessarily that IP address <x> is running these specific communities, just in the same way you don’t know if a random bittorrent seeder is person who originally created the file and uploaded it.
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed
You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else labels of spam/nsfw/etc.
because if my client happens to cache anything illegal
Plebbit is text-only protocol, also it is end-to-end encrypted. Also you could set your own node to never seed anybody else’s content.
The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it’s basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.
We’re not a crypto project, we do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism
You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Plebbit is not pure chaos, it’s a p2p protocol that allows communities and users to connect if they really wish to with no intermediaries.
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren’t hosted anywhere on the protocol.
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
I agree crypto has a bad rep, which is why we’re not associating with it. Our goal is to replace both web2 and web3 socials with a p2p solution that actually scales to the masses. Using blockchain for some aspects of it might raise some eyebrows, but it’s worth it imo
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 3 weeks ago:
What do you mean fragmented?
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 3 weeks ago:
Plebbit is not built on top of blockchains, it’s a pure p2p network akin to Bittorrent. We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 3 weeks ago:
Each peer is a server That’s not true, you can be a peer in the network without posting or seeding anything to the network.
peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things If you create your own community, you will be able to moderate it, yes. Why would people create communities when it can’t be moderated?
With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server If the community node is down, but other peers in the network are online and providing the community’s data, then people will still be able to read and navigate the community in read-only mode. They can’t publish new votes/comments/edits to it, because all updates has to come from the community node.
Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow Not true, try the desktop app of Seedit and you will see for yourself.
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 3 weeks ago:
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
- Comment on Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ? 3 weeks ago:
It’s a terrible analogy, I think of Plebbit as the Bittorrent of social media.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 5 weeks ago:
Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy
The token is not forced upon anyone, and even if we start including it in the clients somehow, anybody can fork the clients and remove any token related stuff out of it.
Tokenizing your own project is a great way of supporting development without selling shares to VCs who only care about hyper growth, regardless of the ideals of the project.
Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.
Not sure what you mean by that, everything we do is out in the open.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 5 weeks ago:
Yeah I don’t mind having an account on Bluesky, and will be making one shortly.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 5 weeks ago:
Ideally hosting your node should be easier, it doesn’t seem they care about it that much which concerns me
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
But then who’s hosting my content and till when they’re hosting it?
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
If somebody does something illegal, it’s up to the government to act on it. Also users of clients can choose to omit certain communities or keywords from their feed. This is a healthier approach than letting a few dudes in Silicon valley telling us what to see/think
- Comment on Disappointed in Plebbit : I Really Believed in the Vision, But It Was All Just Talk 1 month ago:
Protocol implementation plebbit-js is separated from client like Seedit
- Comment on Disappointed in Plebbit : I Really Believed in the Vision, But It Was All Just Talk 1 month ago:
Lol pretty sure if we’re funded by these guys we would’ve been way faster with our development. P2P is hard, many pitfalls
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Sure, I’m just worried it’ll have similar problems as reddit, just without global admins to fix/enforce things
I disagree, I think Reddit ruined their own subreddits. If you’re a community owner, you know your community best and know how to moderate it. They’re the most invested in it after all.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Plebbit doesn’t support media or images, only text. If a user links to an image they have to provide the URL, which is never hosted on the community owner’s node. Also, if somebody posts an illegal link or something like that the community owner can choose to purge their comment from their node.
Plebbit nodes are very cheap and easy to run, we’re very similar to Bittorrent in that regard. The next update we will have full p2p capabilities in mobile as well.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Is it a problem though? There are thousands of email providers you can choose form, and they still work fine for sending and receiving email.
An email provider as well as mastodon provider can:
- Read incoming messages
- Block me from sending messages to specific people
- Block me from fetching content I want
Can I choose another email provider that will let me do what I want? Yeah maybe I can find one, or maybe I can run my one, but then these big email providers they’re gonna start blocking or throttling self hosters making it infeasible or extremely incovienet to run your own email instance.
Not to mention, there’s a financial + time cost to setting up your own email/mastodon instances that most people won’t bother with.
Look at Bittorrent or Plebbit as an example, running a full p2p node is literally a single click and nobody can censor you. The barrier of entry for self hosters is much lower.
One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.
Mastodon social controles a big chunk of the network, that’s not healthy imo. That’s a huge power of the network.
imo moderation of the network should never be at the center, rather it should be pushed to the edges of the network (users). I like Bluesky’s model of subscribing to someone’s labels of the content, and maybe we’re gonna have something similar in Plebbit as well. In Plebbit currently you can choose which communities you subscribe to, and you can also filter by NSFW and other tags, so you’re not really forced to see content you don’t like.
Also community owners set the rules for their own communities and enforce it however they like, there are no global admins.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Elaborate
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Each community (equivalent of subreddit) is essentially a keypair, and whoever runs the community and has access to the keypair can do whatever they want. They can ban people + assign moderators + etc, there are no global admins.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Enjoy, it’s a bit buggy but we’re always looking for feedback and help if you’re interested. All code is open source and GPL v2
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
Our core problem with mastodon design is the same issue we have with email, eventually big hosters consolidate and they start banning people they disagree with. Now, in contrast you have a full p2p protocol like Bittorrent where you can download anything you want as long as you can find people to download it from. This is the model we’re going for in Plebbit
- Comment on Disappointed in Plebbit : I Really Believed in the Vision, But It Was All Just Talk 1 month ago:
Federated has many of the pitfalls of emails like a few providers holding most of the network captive, we believe a full p2p design similar to BitTorrent is the best way forward for full sovereignty of communication.
- Comment on Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy's Where I’m Staying 1 month ago:
A global DHT unfortuantely is extremely resource intensive, and part of our design requirements is full p2p capabilities for both mobile and web browsers. This cannot be achieve with a DHT, although if a DHT design emerges with support for both, we will consider using it.
Next update for plebbit-js will have full p2p capabilities including gossipsub using libp2p/helia in browser/mobile! We’re excited to ship that.
