An open source Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on IPFS

[backgrndnoize@lemmy.world]

If there's no central server then where is all the data stored?. With Lemmy I know the instance creator has to host it all on his own server.

[notfromhere@lemmy.one]

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.

Nowhere in the project whitepaper or FAQ does it talk about banning image hosting. Base64 encoding images in the text post is trivial, so maybe OP is the one projecting this intent or feature?

[notfromhere@lemmy.one]

Great question! Unlike Lemmy, which relies on federation with dedicated servers, Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer (P2P) and does not have a central server or even instances. Instead, storage happens via a combination of IPFS and users seeding data. Here’s how it works:

Where Is Plebbit's Data Stored?

1. Subplebbit Owners Host the Data (Like Torrent Seeders)

   • Each subplebbit owner runs a Plebbit node that stores and republishes their own community's data.
   • Their device (or a server, if they choose) must be online 24/7 to ensure the subplebbit remains accessible.
   • If a subplebbit owner goes offline, their community disappears unless others seed it—very similar to how torrents work.

2. Users Act as Temporary Seeders

   • Any user who visits a subplebbit automatically stores and seeds the content they read.
   • This means active users help distribute content, like in BitTorrent.
   • If a user closes their app and no one else is seeding the content, it becomes unavailable until the owner comes back online.

3. IPFS for Content Addressing

   • Posts and comments are stored in IPFS, which ensures that popular content remains available longer.
   • Unlike a blockchain, there is no permanent historical ledger—if no one is seeding, the data is gone.
   • Each post has a content address (CID), meaning that as long as someone has the data, it can be re-fetched.

4. PubSub for Live Updates

   • Plebbit uses peer-to-peer pubsub (publish-subscribe messaging) to broadcast new content between nodes in real-time.
   • This helps users see new posts without needing a central server to pull updates from.

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What Happens If Everyone Goes Offline?

• If no one's online to seed a subplebbit, it's as if it never existed.
• This is a trade-off for infinite scalability—it removes the need for central databases but relies on community participation.
• Think of it like a dead torrent—no seeders, no content.

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Comparison With Lemmy

Feature	Lemmy	Plebbit
Hosting Model	Federated servers (instances)	Fully P2P (no servers)
Who Stores Data?	Instance owners (like Reddit mods running a server)	Subplebbit owners & users (like torrents)
If Owner Goes Offline?	Instance still exists; data stays up	The community disappears unless users seed it
Historical Content Availability	Instances keep all posts forever	Older data may disappear if not seeded
Scalability	Limited by instance storage & bandwidth	Infinite, as long as people seed

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Bottom Line: No Servers, Just Users

• With Lemmy: The instance owner has to host everything themselves like a mini-Reddit admin.
• With Plebbit: The subplebbit owner AND users seed the content—no one has to host a centralized database.
• If something is popular, it stays alive.
• If something isn't seeded, it disappears, just like torrents.

It’s a radical trade-off for decentralization and censorship resistance, but if no one cares about a community, the content naturally dies off. No server, no mods deleting you from a database—just pure P2P.

Hope that clears it up!

[4am@lemm.ee]

So there are servers then…

[backgrndnoize@lemmy.world]

Thanks for the detailed reply that helps, this sounds really interesting, with the late stage capitalism we are going through, I've lost all interest in private corporate controled social networks, hence the switch to Lemmy, but the instance owner is still a single point of failure with Lemmy but at least you can switch to another instance.

I have a few concerns about Plebbit though.

A - with torrents you know the size of the torrent beforehand and can decide if you can download it all and continue seeding it so long as you have the space for it on your drive, but with a forum like Plebbit, how would a user know how much space on their drive Plebbit will take for the Plebbit content they interact with. Is there a way to dedicate X gigabytes of limited storage space for it and anything above that gets purged to make space for new data?

B - One of the best uses Of Reddit imo is that it's very easy to Google for something and find a relevant Reddit thread, especially for something niche, since Plebbit only keeps the most popular content and the rest goes away if not seeded, does it mean it won't be a good for niche archival data, maybe that's a use case that Plebbit isn't design to handle and that's okay.

C - Bots are a big concern for most social media, especially the ones used for spreading propaganda and misinformation, how does a P2P social forum like Plebbit plan to handle bots.?

[Guest]

Can you host a node to earn its token?

[suoko@feddit.it]

When everyone will have a 50G PON fiber connection at home, IPFS is going to be the standard serverless configuration.

2030? Everyone uses that date for everything futuristic

[bb_c@programming.dev]

Not only is IPFS not built on solid foundations, offered nothing new to the table, and is generally bad at data retention, but the "opt-in seeding" model was always a step backwards and not a good match for apps like plebbit.

The anonymous distributes filesystem model (a la Freenet/Hyphanet) where each file segment is anonymously and randomly "inserted" into the distributed filesystem is the way to go. This fixes the "seeder power" problem, as undesirable but popular content can stay highly available automatically, and unpopular but desirable content can be re-inserted/healed periodically by healers (seeders). Only both unpopular and undesirable content may fizzle out of the network, but that can only happen in the context of messaging apps/platforms if 0 people tried pull and 0 people tried to reinsert the content in question over a long period of time.

[wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

I bring this point up every time I see someone pushing the idea of P2P or federated social networks with no moderation and no one has a solution for it yet. Because there isn't a solution.

It's like these people don't even want to look at existing social media with minimal moderation. It doesn't take long on 4chan and other less reputable *chan style sites to see that no matter how much you want to shake off the chains of overbearing moderators, there is a bare minimum moderation necessary for any social media to survive.

Even social media sites on TOR have moderation.

When even the darkest, least moderated cesspools online still have some minimal moderation, it should be a massive neon sign that there needs to be some moderation functionality.

[wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

How are users able to decide what they seed and what they don't? Just because I viewed something doesn't mean I necessarily want to support its proliferation.

[sirdorius@programming.dev]

Technically cool, but it's scary that it tries to emulate the anonymous, unmoderated shithole that is 4chan. Go to 4chan now and try to imagine something even more racist, nazi and unhinged.

[bb_c@programming.dev]

Because there isn’t a solution.

This has been discussed and experimented with to death where such networks existed for a long time. Just because you never heard of them or even knew they exist doesn't mean that they don't.

See Freenet/Hyphanet and the three approaches (local trust, shared user trust lists, web of trust) if you want to learn something. The second one worked out the best from a performance and scalability point of view compared to the third.

[andybytes@programming.dev]

Either way you still do. Think about it.

[wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Holy shit you cannot be serious. In the shortest possible terms: trust systems are forms of moderation. Anything implementing them would not fall under what I was talking about.

This project doesn't appear to implement that. It doesn't even appear to have a bare minimum way for users to prevent themselves from sharing something they viewed but don't want to share. Viewing something should not imply trust.

Definitely appreciate the assumption that I'm just a dumbass and you've come to shine the light of enlightenment on me though. That my point of view could only be possible to reach through ignorance. That's always nice.

[wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Please spare me whatever philosophical navel gazing you're trying to do here. I'm asking what should be an incredibly straightforward question about what should be basic functionality in any P2P seeding based system:

What control, if any, does an individual user have over what they seed back into the system?

Some P2P systems just give each user an encrypted blob of all sorts of stuff, so the individual user can't choose and on paper isn't responsible for whatever it is that they are seeding back in. I'm personally not ok with not having a way to ensure that I'm not seeding nazi manifestos.

[Guest]

From the whitepaper:

8. The user completes the captcha challenge and publishes his post and
   captcha challenge answer over pubsub.
9. The subplebbit owner’s client gets notified that the user published to his
   pubsub, the post is not ignored because it contains a correct captcha
   challenge answer.
10. The subplebbit owner’s client publishes a message over pubsub indicating
    that the captcha answer is correct or incorrect. Peers relaying too many
    messages with incorrect or no captcha answers get blocked to avoid DDOS
    of the pubsub.
11. The subplebbit owner’s client updates the content of his subplebbit’s
    public key-based addressing automatically

I may be misunderstanding how this protocol works, but at step 10 what prevents the owner from publishing the captcha answer as incorrect as a method of censorship based on the content of the post?

[bb_c@programming.dev]

Apologies if I was presumptions and/or my tone was too aggressive.

Quibbling at No Moderation = Bad usually refers to central moderation where "someone" decides for others what they can and can't see without them having any say in the matter.

Bad moderation is an experienced problem at a much larger scale. It in fact was one of the reasons why this very place even exists. And it was one of the reasons why "transparent moderation" was one of the celebrated features of Lemmy with its public Modlog, although "some" quickly started to dislike that and try to work around it, because power corrupts, and the modern power seeker knows how to moral grandstand while power grabbing.

All trust systems give the user the power, by either letting him/her be the sole moderator, or by letting him/her choose moderators (other users) and how much each one of them is trusted and how much weight their judgment carries, or by letting him/her configure more elaborate systems like WoT the way he/she likes.

[boomkop3@reddthat.com]

This again? It's basically lemmy but less secure, stop advertising it

[Guest]

Do you mean spamming faulty captcha answers to trigger the DDOS protection on the peers?

[Guest]

No moderation seems like a recipe for disaster