Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ?
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A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.
The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.
But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.
Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:
– Plebbit is serverless.
– There are no global admins.
– It does not rely on any central server.
– It can’t be censored or taken down.
– It works like BitTorrent, but for social media.
– No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.Every subreddit (called a "subplebbit") is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.
And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.
It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.
Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.
If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.
I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.
It can’t be censored or taken down
I know nothing of Plebbit, however, even as a huge privacy and freedom of speech advocate, I have issue with uncensored social media. There is a huge difference between freedom and freedumb. Total freedumb equals total chaos. Freedumb seems to be trending, and if all the freedumb loving people want to congregate in one place to spew their bile and hatred at each other, fine....I won't engage. The problem occurs when freedumb loving people want to export that hatred and bile to other social media thinking just because they fly the freedumb flag, everyone else should too. I 'helped' beta test Gab when if first started, and immediately dropped it. It was clear early on who their clientele would be: Hate mongering racists.
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism. LBJ, tho he had his own issues with racism, said a truth that still stands today in that, if you give a man someone to hate, they will bend over and willingly spread their cheeks for your amusement. No one slipped me a note up in the slot while I was in utero and asked me what I wanted to be when I got out. Hmmmm....lets see.....oh WHITE definitely. It's stupidity of the highest order to hate someone for their skin pigment when I myself, like them, had no choice in the matter. It's probably not a popular opinion but these things should be censored.
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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.With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
I mean, that's true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.
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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
Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.
How do I:
- Locate bob given a name or some other ID
- Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
- Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
- Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.
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A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.
The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.
But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.
Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:
– Plebbit is serverless.
– There are no global admins.
– It does not rely on any central server.
– It can’t be censored or taken down.
– It works like BitTorrent, but for social media.
– No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.Every subreddit (called a "subplebbit") is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.
And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.
It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.
Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.
If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.
I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.
Decentralized? Zero administration or censorship? Blockchain? No governance or oversight? Absolute freedom? No approval from anyone?
Plebbit contains child porn. Has to, there's no way it doesn't.
When? Probably the day after it went online, and every day following it.
You believe with zero shadow of a doubt that 8chan, motherless and Anonib all have cp, but Plebbit doesn't?
mmmhm
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With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
I mean, that's true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.
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Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.
How do I:
- Locate bob given a name or some other ID
- Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
- Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
- Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.
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.
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So every user is their own moderator... which just sounds like a ton of extra work vs something like 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.
Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find "clever" new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.
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.
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.
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Sure; I'm saying that there are trigger words that are guaranteed to generate negative comments: blockchain, crypto, crypto currency, and Bitcoin.
You said that you can't understand the negative feedback. I'm giving you one reason why you might be seeing it. Lemmy and Mastodon (the AP FediVerse in general) is not cryptocurrency-friendly. If you mention "Bitcoin" in the post, you're going to get brigaded. If someone sniffs around on the repo documentation and sees the crypto link, they'll mention it in the comments and you'll get brigaded.
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
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Decentralized? Zero administration or censorship? Blockchain? No governance or oversight? Absolute freedom? No approval from anyone?
Plebbit contains child porn. Has to, there's no way it doesn't.
When? Probably the day after it went online, and every day following it.
You believe with zero shadow of a doubt that 8chan, motherless and Anonib all have cp, but Plebbit doesn't?
mmmhm
Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren't hosted anywhere on the protocol.
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It can’t be censored or taken down
I know nothing of Plebbit, however, even as a huge privacy and freedom of speech advocate, I have issue with uncensored social media. There is a huge difference between freedom and freedumb. Total freedumb equals total chaos. Freedumb seems to be trending, and if all the freedumb loving people want to congregate in one place to spew their bile and hatred at each other, fine....I won't engage. The problem occurs when freedumb loving people want to export that hatred and bile to other social media thinking just because they fly the freedumb flag, everyone else should too. I 'helped' beta test Gab when if first started, and immediately dropped it. It was clear early on who their clientele would be: Hate mongering racists.
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism. LBJ, tho he had his own issues with racism, said a truth that still stands today in that, if you give a man someone to hate, they will bend over and willingly spread their cheeks for your amusement. No one slipped me a note up in the slot while I was in utero and asked me what I wanted to be when I got out. Hmmmm....lets see.....oh WHITE definitely. It's stupidity of the highest order to hate someone for their skin pigment when I myself, like them, had no choice in the matter. It's probably not a popular opinion but these things should be censored.
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.
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I like the concept. But something without any central admins is probably going to be full of all kinds of awful stuff, and I don't want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed, because if my client happens to cache anything illegal then I'm now potentially distributing that illegal content P2P which is a huge problem.
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.
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
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Wait until regulations hears about your decentralized social media not regulating CSAM content sharing.
Pure decentralization is a libertarian wet dream. We are not into that here.Also plebbit is text only protocol, there are no images hosted on the protocol.
