Rinse - Plebbit Dev

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

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.

Also plebbit is text only protocol, there are no images hosted on the protocol.

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

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.

Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren’t hosted anywhere on the protocol.

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

That’s an NFT collection made by an independent artist. It’s not a representative of the project’s ethos

So every user is their own moderator… which just sounds like a ton of extra work

Once we have the labeling services it will be easy and a single click to use someone’s else labeling.

Also each community moderate however they see fit, as a community owner you’re incentivized to keep their community free of spam and derailing posts etc.

Mastodon where I can pick a server whose moderation practices I agree with, is already decentralized into countless servers and allows the user to spin up their own instance.

P2P is superior to federation in many ways though

Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find “clever” new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.

I agree, but it’s not just keywords, it’s community-based labeling services, so you could have 10+ people labeling on a single content-labeling extension. You could also have AI agent sifting through the network and labeling content with minimal human intervention.

Meanwhile, you’re pitching this thing as “uncensorable” which automatically appeals to the worst elements available. Maybe I’m wrong and it’ll be the perfect format for internet discussion, but I’m going to have to see that actually happen before I jump on board.

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.

You can filter your feed by tags/keywords, and eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else blocked keywords.

In centralized social media, there’s only a single entity deciding what’s allowed, with Plebbit that decision is pushed to the edges of the network. So each node can decide what it wants to see, nothing is pushed on the end user.

I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used. We have no control over that as the devs, but you as the user can choose to filter by tags/keywords/NSFW etc. If you go to the settings in Seedit you will find the option.

In its early days the internet was used mostly for porn as well, it doesn’t make sense to dismiss a whole project based on disagreements with people using it.

Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.

That is up to the sub owner, they can mandate a SMS challenge or any kind of KYC challenge if they would like. Users who get banned will automatically be disregarded by the of the swarm.

I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either. The moderation is on the community level, there are no global admins. If you run a community, you can moderate it however you like, or assign somebody to moderate it for you.

What do you mean fragmented?

If you run a community on Plebbit, you’re responsible for its own moderation, or you can assign somebody else to moderate it.

What is there to regulate? We the devs aren’t hosting anything. Is the Bittorrent founder responsible for regulating data transmitted on his protocol?

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

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.

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

we have nothing to do with 4chan, not sure why you mention it here.

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