A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
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Hadn’t heard of it before. But based on the cheesy meme, how desperate this post sounds, and the fact that the platform seems like a chan imposter, I’ll pretend like I still haven’t heard of it.
bullish comment, every successful project was misunderstood at the beginning
It’s basically 4chan and OP keeps begging people to join it
Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf
The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email
Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation
What is this scam and why is it still here?
basically I was trying to think, which tech with the most adoption should decentralized/censorship resistant reddit be built on. and I thought about all the popular alternatives, mastodon/lemmy/bluesky/blockchains/etc and none of them are viable, it’s simply not possible to build a sufficiently censorship resistant platform using these protocols, it must be P2P, and the most adopted P2P protocols are IPFS/libp2p, so even 3 years later, we made the only possible choice.
even if IPFS/libp2p are pretty buggy and difficult to work with, and that bluesky/nostr/lemmy already have adoption, it’s simply not possible to build anything sufficiently censorship resistant with them, there are no choices other than the path we’ve chosen.