Plebbit only hosts text. Images from google and other sites can be linked/embedded in posts. This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.

Somewhere, a black hat master of ASCII art is cracking his hands.

It's still misleading though, it takes away control from instance controllers, which in today's world, also makes it so that it is easier to swamp it with bot accounts, misinformation, and even be an unwilling decentralization participant. Looking behind the curtains, it's basically built by and around NFT (even the user avatars have to be NFT for no good reason), and already has a market for it, so don't be surprised if there is a blockchain rugpull behind this. And it also doesn't fix the inherent problem, rather, because of its design, it makes communities all the more authoritarian because whoever controls the NFT controls the moderation.

If you use it, you will no longer have the recourse of admins when its the moderators messing up and acting in bad faith. That problem isn't due to instances, it's due to the more generalized problem of people in position of authorities more interested in representing themselves than a community or their obligations, this does nothing to, say, provide for alternative moderation groups if you are unhappy with how the current one is moderating it. It does protect your account to some degree, but it also protect the accounts of the terrorists running around spreading hate speech, and you will feed a small part of it due to its decentralized nature.

Personally, the whole platform, https://plebbit.com/introduction , just seems a monetization strategy to monetize reddit-like communities into the NFT market. Expect the inevitable drama and subsequent crashes. But also, don't expect it, it will depend wholly on the NFT holder, which means the community will go to sh-t if it gets lost or the administrative moderators of that community become out of reach, presumably because they sold it for millions to the nearest troll farm while they went off to the Bahamas. But hey, maybe it will pull the dumb and those just interested in monetization into their eco-system.

I'm all for decentralized community-based hosting for large media files such as video, but i guess for text/structured databases it wouldn't work due to synchronisation issues.

Bad idea.

The closest to a good idea IMHO is NOSTR. By the way, there is a standard for moderated communities for it, I don't know whether anything implements it yet.

In general, not in fact.

Curious, I thought IPFS was completely empty. I have the desktop client and there's just nothing

The moment I read "no transaction fees", I immediately wondered why that would be listed as a feature. Turns out it's because it uses crypto, though I don't understand why. Free domain names?

From the FAQ linked on the site:

Q: Is this running on ETH? A: the token is on ETH, the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, but the app will use several blockchains, tokens and NFTs to recreate all the features from reddit, like usernames, subplebbit names will be crypto domains like ENS (and other chains), awards will be NFTs, tips and upvotes will earn tokens (can set them to your own token or any coin of your choice in your subplebbit)
[…]
Q: What role does the PLEB token play? A: The base protocol doesn't use tokens, which lets people who don't have interest in cryptocurrency (yet) use it for free, but optionally you can use any tokens to do many things, for example you can use names.eth (ENS, which are non fungible tokens) to represent a username or subplebbit name. You can use NFT images as avatars. You can use fungible tokens and NFTs (any token or cryptocurreny of the subplebbit owner's choice) to vote, curate, reward, tip, incentivize and/or as spam protection (instead of using captchas, require users of your subplebbit to own, stake, burn or pay a certain amount of a token/NFT of your choice to post/upvote). A subplebbit's name like memes.eth (becomes /p/memes.eth) could be owned by a DAO, and owners of the DAO's tokens could vote on chain for who gets to be admin and moderator of the subplebbit, i.e. a smart contract/DAO can be owner of a subplebbit.

This sounds fucking awful. You want a peer-to-peer network, but decided to tie critical features to the blockchain, something arguably less decentralised than APub software.

From what I've gathered, this appears to be an unusably slow 4chan for crypto bros.