nothing prevents it, the sub owner can put a challenge that’s impossible to solve to troll people. it’s required that this be possible otherwise the sub owner wouldnt have full control over what the challenge is.
a lemmy instance could do the same thing so it’s not really an issue, the fix is just dont use subs / instances that dont work.
It’s stored in each plebbit node. Each subplebbit runs a custom IPFS node for plebbit, with its text-only database, which is the content you see in the app. Peers download it and seed it back.
You can’t encode base64 images on plebbit, each fiels has a character limit. Obviously centralized links, from which media is embedded, will be taken down by the relative centralized website.
there’s no 🍕 because ALL data on plebbit is text-only, you cannot upload media. We did this intentionally, so if you want to post media you must post a direct link to it (the interface embeds the media automatically), a link from centralized sites like imgur and stuff, who know your IP address, take down the media immediately (the embed 404’s) and report you to authorities. Further, plebbit works like torrents so your IP is already in the swarm, so you really shouldn’t use it for anything illegal or you’ll get caught.
nobody is running the matrix server at the moment, if you are interested in running it dm @estebanabaroa on telegram
The communities moderate themselves with their own admins, just like on reddit. The difference is, there’s no global admins that can censor communities or enforce global rules. However, the plebbit app developer can basically act like a global admin by blacklisting connections to certain communities. I predict the most popular plebbit apps won’t include such blacklisting functions.
Plebbit is like BitTorrent, there’s no global BitTorrent admin. You use a BitTorrent client (like uTorrent) to download torrents, and the client could technically blacklist your torrent. You use a plebbit client (like Seedit) to download a subplebbit, and the client could technically blacklist your subplebbit.
It’s entirely possible that more centralized plebbit clients will be created, to be published on app stores for example, and they will implement whitelists of safe communities to participate in, blocking any other community.
You need to have a structure for delegating moderation and such tasks to other people.
We actually have it: since there’s no central database of communities, who decides which ones appear in the homepage of the apps to first-time users? We use a “default list” of communities, which is effectively moderated (vetoed) by the app developer. This is the only “global admin” we basically have, but it’s only for the app itself, not the protocol, and it still doesn’t stop users from connecting p2p to the community (depending on the app, some plebbit client developers could implement blacklists).
I agree in general, just like the word “decentralized”. But in this case it’s legit, because it simply means it’s p2p. I’d call bitcoin “serverless” as well, so it’s BitTorrent and IPFS. Plebbit is exactly the same: you open the desktop app and it runs a p2p node automatically in the background, to run your subplebbit, and users connect to it peer to peer. Your p2p node is not really a “server”, because it doesn’t require any centralized domain to function, it uses transport protocols and peer discovery instead.
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Nice essay, strong fud but we have safe guards against this. Users can back up or copy any subs they want, so if a sub owner goes insane, users can simply restore it, to exactly how it was. Sure the name will be slightly different since the previous owner owns the name, so p/games might now be p/videogames. But that’s a minor inconvenience. In fact multiple users can own a community which further safe guards it.
We will also remove communities that are toxic from our recommended subs list and replace it with the non toxic one. Alternatively users can create their on recommended subs list and share it round. Plebbit is open source so if we act nefariously, people can just fork it
we use IPNS for mutable data (like upvote counts, reply counts, etc) https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/ and gossipsub for an author node to communicate their publication to a community node https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.
The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don’t have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS’d, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.
Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there’s nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you’re always reachable by any user on plebbit.
Steemit is A, it’s a regularly centralized website with global admins, claiming to be “decentralized” simply because it’s built on a blockchain. Whenever you are asking yourself whether something is “decentralized” or not, ask “how can I run a full node”? “What are the hardware requirements”? Steemit admins won’t answer those questions. Whereas you can easily spin up your own ActivityPub (Mastodon or Lemmy) instance (even though those instances work like regularly centralized websites, at least you have the option to run your own).
On Plebbit, just using the desktop app of a client (like Seedit’s desktop app you can download here means you are running a full node already. The app runs an IPFS node in the background, seeding all content you browse automatically, thereby improving the speed of the network for everybody else. The more nodes there are, the more decentralized the network is, so if all users can easily run a node and are incentivized to do so, then the network is properly decentralized/distributed. On Seedit, you can’t run a community if you don’t run a full node (the community is the node, acting like a server, and users connect to it P2P). There are no global admins.
You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won’t be compatible with our clients because we think that’s a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it’s controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.
DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.
Who is “we” here and why do they get to decide what’s acceptable in my community (‘subpleb’ if you will)?
For our clients, “we” means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There’s no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).
Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:
https://seedit.app/ is a fully decentralized client for the Plebbit protocol, using a old.reddit UI.
You can also try a demo of a much faster version of Seedit, it works via public RPC: https://plebbit.mooo.com/seedit/#/hot (warning: you’re using someone else’s full node to browse fully P2P, so if you create a community it’s in their node, it’s not yours). This version showcases how you can create a community even on mobile device, running a full node remotely. But we have to build user auth for this, it’s in our roadmap.
https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js
https://github.com/plebbit/plips