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.
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I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media.
I found your problem.
I’m going to post it again.
For anyone else looking for a reason to stay away from plebbit- uh, look at their X account https://x.com/getplebbit
It’s 4chan crypto hashwashUh! Plebbit, crypto and nft. I’ll stay as far as I can.
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
I think there’s such a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of crypto currency, even in comparison, that even a whiff of a relationship generates negative reactions. As you say, much of it is based on no actual knowledge about the topic. It doesn’t help that there are some truly deplorable people associated with cryptocurrency, a great many bad actors, and proof-of-work was in retrospect a terrible design decision by Satoshi.
Blockchain isn’t cryptocurrency, and vice-versa, but most people can’t distinguish between the two. If there’s any mention of blockchain on the site, or especially if you mention bitcoin (as you did) you’re going to get crusaders.
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
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
Naw, there are several good use cases for blockchain. Ask a blockchain hater how to implement an auditable change log, and they’ll re-invent blockchain and claim it’s not.
I’m only saying: you specifically mentioned Bitcoin, and then later said design goals included cryptocurrency integration. I’m not opposed to crypto, conceptually - I’m just giving a possible reason why you may be garnering downvotes.
you specifically mentioned Bitcoin I did not, I believe that was OP
included cryptocurrency integration Only for things we believe web3 does better; such as name systems, uncensorable financial transaction
This whole thing is just another crypto bro angle and it’s fucking cancer. Whatever the technical merits of the decentralization techniques used, people won’t buy into tech with crypto and crypto bros involved because they don’t want to deal with financial fraud
That’s the real problem. Crypto bros can take something genuinely interesting and kill it by association. IPNS is a really neat idea. Self-certifying name resolution over a DHT swarm would be fun to play around with, but if pushed by the bros isn’t going to get any adoption.
