Plebbit
plebbit.com
Welcome to Plebbit, a decentralised, peer-to-peer Social Media platform.

A few months ago, I posted here about my excitement for Plebbit and the promise it held for decentralization. I was convinced that a p2p social platform with a unique UI could be the future, with different UI of all social media…including Lemmy, a true alternative to centralized services. I saw the potential, and I wanted to believe in it.

Plebbit promised a lot of an innovative interface, decentralization, community driven governance. But after months of delays, vague updates, and little to no progress, it’s clear they never delivered. They had the right ideas but lacked the follow through to make them a reality. What was once an exciting project quickly turned into an example of what can go wrong when the hype overshadows the substance.

I wanted Plebbit to succeed, but in the end, I’ve realized that I’m better off sticking with what actually works.

If Plebbit had actually followed through on its promises especially with its vision of being a decentralized Reddit alternative. it could have been the best. The idea of a selfhosted platform, where users had true control over their content and communities, was a dream for those of us who wanted more than just another centralized app. It had the potential to be the go-to solution for anyone seeking real decentralization and p2p freedom. But unfortunately, that potential was never realized. Instead of delivering on its ambitious promises, Plebbit became just another project that failed to meet expectations, and the opportunity for a truly revolutionary platform faded away.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    843·
    12 days ago

    The blockchain components meant it was dead on arrival.

    • Luffy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      203·
      12 days ago

      Not that the blockchain itself is a Bad idea, but after like a year or 2 of becoming popular it will be impossible for anyone to have a locally stored coin because they will be just multiple petabytes big

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        My understanding is the blockchain bit is optional and only used to establish ownership over a name. The posts and whatnot are not on a blockchain, that would be silly.

    • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      11 days ago

      The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they’re the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?

      Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        Yeah, that’s a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they’re linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there’s no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.

        For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It’s a good solution.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      51·
      9 days ago

      I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary (edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

      Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

      • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        11 days ago

        I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all

        If community owners want to set a blockchain name like hello.eth or hello.sns it’s possible, but it’s optional.

        It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?

        Not true, it’s free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js

        but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

        What is the problem with DAOs? I think they’re a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet

        • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          So, from what I’ve read, and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.

          If that’s the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you’ve done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.

          So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I’d say I have two problems.

          1. Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy.
          2. 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.
          • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 days 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.

      • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
        84·
        11 days ago

        It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm

        I completely lost interest for the project at this point of the text

  • Korne127@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    12 days ago

    As someone who has never heard of that: What would have been its advantages over Lemmy?

    • Plebbitor@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      66·
      12 days ago

      It was supposed to be a lot more decentralized than Lemmy. Plebbit was built around a p2p protocol and the idea was that it wouldn’t rely on servers, everything would be fully serverless and self-hosted in a true decentralized way. What made it interesting was that it was planned to support multiple UIs, so people could use different frontends like their own version of Lemmy’s UI, or even something totally custom. A Lemmy style UI was even on their roadmap.

      But the problem is… it never really happened. It’s been super slow because there are only like 3 devs working on it, and they’ve been trying to find more help for ages. The MVP still hasn’t come out, and I think the crypto side of it just scared people off or made things harder. I really believed in the idea at first, but now it just feels like vaporware.

      • Little8Lost@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        11 days ago

        “what made it interesting was that it was planned support miltiple UIs”
        you may are interested into looking into the various LemmyUIs or Lemmy close alternatives like piefed when you like to test out frontends to see their quirks

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    174·
    12 days ago

    There’s no real / true decentralization. You’re always dependent on something, somewhere in some way. It can be harder to shut it down but there’s also a point of failure somewhere. Blockchain is all fun and games until you’ve to consider resource waste and that you still need DNS and IPs working.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      There’s no real / true decentralization

      That’s not exactly true.

      That said, you do need some form of centralized service to connect peers, but you can federate those. It’s only job would be to connect peers, and a STUN server w/ TURN fallback is usually the approach here. These instances don’t need to store any data long term, they just need to connect peers, and the client is free to choose any instance they want, or host their own.

      That’s how Tor works (entry nodes), and most decentralized systems use a similar system.

      One of the best parts here is that offline often just works, and you can sneakernet around firewalls (e.g. if you visit China or something), and all you need to do is connect to a local relay to find local peers.

      Blockchain

      My understanding is it’s only used for name resolution, so the number of data points here should be in the thousands, not millions or billions, so the resource usage should be minimal.

      Basically, the blockchain is functioning as DNS here.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    101·
    12 days ago

    Yeah, I was pretty stoked for it too. As someone building something like this on my own time, I really want someone to beat me to the punch, because maintaining something like this isn’t something I really want to do.

    Building something like this is hard, marketing a project is hard, and getting the timing right is also hard (major usability issues solved before everyone comes to try it out).

    But yeah, I’m still here until I find something better.

    • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      Feel free to check out Seedit, it’s the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we’re working on it every day to make it better.

        • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 days 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

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            Yeah, I’ll check it out. It’s certainly an interesting approach. I’m interested to see how the moderation system ends up working in practice.

            • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 days 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.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                11 days ago

                Sure, I’m just worried it’ll have similar problems as reddit, just without global admins to fix/enforce things. The creator of a community is rarely the right person make decisions long term. Moderation should be based on trust and merit, not first come first served because moving everyone to a new community is hard.

                We had similar problems here on Lemmy when most of the popular communities were on Lemmy.ml and subject to their moderation.

                But maybe it’s fine. It’s probably an improvement on Reddit, and maybe an improvement on Lemmy if it actually encourages more diversity in community ownership. I’ll certainly check it out!

                • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  11 days 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.

  • Colloidal@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    10 days ago

    I think Activity Pub has a clear leg up in that you can be as decentralized as you’re comfortable.

    Want to go full one-person instance? You got it. Want to host for your friends and family? Covered. Want to host for the general public? Can do. Don’t want to host at all? Pick your open instance and join the fun.

  • usescomputer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    It sounds really cool, hopefully something similar will come one day, would be cool if one could create instances on github (or alternatives) for version control, posts would be markdown files, images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform (imgur, imgbb, etc.)

    Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)

    The ui part would also be great, I really don’t like discord’s new one for example

    nghhh maybe if I fail my university entry exam

    • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 days ago

      posts would be markdown files

      Seedit, which is a plebbit client actually parses posts as Markdown, try it on Seedit

      images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform

      It’s already this way with Plebbit, we only allow text.

      Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)

      On Plebbit all clients are open source with GPL V2, they can also be self hosted easily with a single click. Check out seedit repository Seedit

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      10 days ago

      I really don’t think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you’re going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.

      Also, if you’re doing the UUID thing, you’d have sort everything every time locally. That’s fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it’ll get bad, especially if you’re dealing with files.

      Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.