Looks interesting. But I don’t see what the point is unless you connect to fediverse or can attract a critical mass to keep it self sustaining.
I don't get why people are so interested in the fediverse. I guess it's a sizeable amount of content, but it's not really all that popular and has a host of its own issues. I think people like the idea behind it more than the actual implementation.
That said, I'm working on a similar project (distributed Reddit clone), and one of my goals is to eventually connect it to the fediverse to get access to content. That said, a distributed service isn't directly compatible w/ a federated one (there are no servers in a distributed service, only simple relays), so I'd have to build a bridge to get it to work, and bridges are notoriously awkward to deal with in the best case (see Matrix bridges), and adding P2P on top of that makes things even more awkward.
I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.
Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!
But we're still at the mercy of the admins of the large instances. Most of the popular Lemmy communities are at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works. Eventually the admins of those instances will either turn evil (I argue that has already happened on lemmy.ml) or stop hosting the service, and then we're still screwed. I don't know mastodon well enough, but I'm guessing they have a similar problem with a handful of instances hosting a disproportionate portion of the content.
I don't know that I can do better, but I can try something different. Plebbit is trying something different as well, so hopefully someone will find a good mix of tradeoffs.
I'm on Lemmy because it's the least bad option at the moment for what I'm looking for, but I think it's fundamentally flawed. Apparently the Plebbit devs do as well (or they think they can get away with a grift), and I hope there are lots of others out there quietly plunking away at their own project. I believe Lemmy will die eventually, and I'd really like to have an alternative ready.
So...
Start alternatives, on a host ypu maintain, and then everything can be ran perfectly how you want it to run
Problem solved.
According to OP’s previous comments the dev of this has spent 600k of their own money on this. If that claim is legitimate then feel free to draw your own conclusions about why someone with 600k to burn would spend it on an NFT crypto reddit, but without images.
Yeah, I lost interest at 'blockchain'.
Yet more cryptotrash.
Hold up plebs (hah), this alternative to dns (domain name system) called ens is actually more centralized.
The pros listed here over federation: no central http endpoint, database or dns are a lie. The whole point of having federated instances is that they're not a central thing. Yes, individual instances can be knocked out. It'll be just the same for plebbit except no one can moderate trolls creating scummy or phishing domain names.
Whomever came up with the idea to charge people gas fees is a billionaire now. Ignoring that bit, this blockchain based domain system looks cool, but an unmoderatable free-for-all is an absolutely terrible idea
unmoderatable free-for-all
I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say "adminless," but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.
So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it'll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.
If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you'll be more right than wrong.
On an unrelated topic, I'm working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn't have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it's fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn't manually handled, it's handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I'm deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Just because moderation doesn't look similar to what you're familiar with doesn't mean it's ineffective. We'll see if Plebbit works out, but I'm still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn't have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.
In fact, trust isn't manually handled, it's handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I'm deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Wouldn't this just create an impenetrable filter bubble/echo chamber where you see nothing else than content you 100% agree with?
This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.
How does removing images change anything? Any file can be transmitted by text, as we used to do with e-mail, and you don't need to use images to make illegal or just intentionally offensive content.
Something tells me the "I don't host CSAM I just host posts that embed/link to CSAM (from other hosts)" argument won't hold up in court.
Doesn't it tho? That was part of the issue with Lemmy federating suspected csam content as the actual content ended up on their servers.
Edit:Should probably be clear, I mean legally, not ethically or morally lmao.
... Ain't that just a website?
Incoming ASCII CSAM
So in what way is that better than Lemmy?
I think it's the same in most aspects, just less developed. However, it looks like the devs lie about the benefits and use a less secure alternative to dns.
It's garbage with a funny name
No matter what choice you make, Lemmy or Plebbit or something else, it's clear that decentralized/federated services are the real future. The return of the torrent swarms but forum swarms instead.
At some point something clicked with everyone, and they realized "the cloud" is someone else's computer, someone else's property. We all collectively realized you never feel truly free when you're on someone else's property, you're always playing by their rules. At least with decentralization the levels of control are distributed so you have less of one person wresting control from anyone else.
It's a bit like growing your own garden. You do it because you know what you're putting into your garden and getting out of it. If you choose to use pesticides, that's your choice, and no one else's. When you choose how to run your own self-hosted services, it becomes your choice what comes and goes from your network.
I'm glad to be part of the self-hosting future here.
From the whitepaper it seems like you cannot comment at all? Or each comment is a post also, so you need a server, you need to host it to be able to reply? I don't see a mention how an upvote/downvote system could work.
How this is even similar to reddit? From what I could find it's much like a topic based microblogging, and it's a very one way communication. As it's similar to IPFS and torrent, which are also very one way communication. Seems like an interesting idea, but I don't see why it was compared to reddit.
Personal opinion, IPFS clones are reinvented about every year, and because they sound very good on paper, but noone could figure out a legit usecase - maybe except piracy - they fail after a while. Maybe if we would become an actual InterPlanetary species with colonies on Mars they could be useful, but until I don't really see a point trying it again and again and again...
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