A few months ago, I posted here about my excitement for Plebbit and the promise it held for decentralization. I was convinced that a p2p social platform with a unique UI could be the future, with different UI of all social media…including Lemmy, a true alternative to centralized services. I saw the potential, and I wanted to believe in it.
Plebbit promised a lot of an innovative interface, decentralization, community driven governance. But after months of delays, vague updates, and little to no progress, it’s clear they never delivered. They had the right ideas but lacked the follow through to make them a reality. What was once an exciting project quickly turned into an example of what can go wrong when the hype overshadows the substance.
I wanted Plebbit to succeed, but in the end, I’ve realized that I’m better off sticking with what actually works.
If Plebbit had actually followed through on its promises especially with its vision of being a decentralized Reddit alternative. it could have been the best. The idea of a selfhosted platform, where users had true control over their content and communities, was a dream for those of us who wanted more than just another centralized app. It had the potential to be the go-to solution for anyone seeking real decentralization and p2p freedom. But unfortunately, that potential was never realized. Instead of delivering on its ambitious promises, Plebbit became just another project that failed to meet expectations, and the opportunity for a truly revolutionary platform faded away.
I think Activity Pub has a clear leg up in that you can be as decentralized as you’re comfortable.
Want to go full one-person instance? You got it. Want to host for your friends and family? Covered. Want to host for the general public? Can do. Don’t want to host at all? Pick your open instance and join the fun.
I love how all the developers working on it only have twitter links /s 🚩
What would you recommend instead? Seems like Twitter has the most reach, and until Plebbit reaches critical mass we need to reach out to people on popular platforms
I don’t necessarily disagree with this in theory, as you gotta have some reach in order to spread your message. I forget the name of the particular situation (people don’t use it because it’s not popular, and it’s not popular because people don’t use it…etc etc)
That said, Twitter is a cesspool. Bluesky has enough users that it shouldn’t be an issue reaching out via that instead.
Yeah I don’t mind having an account on Bluesky, and will be making one shortly.
All the developers that care about not being on a Nazi platform have already moved to mastodon or bluesky.
Those that haven’t yet Imo, can suck Goebbels cock.
I’m personally planning to set up a bluesky account soon, but running a selfhosted instance doesn’t look easy yet
There’s no hosting needed for Bluesky, you can just create an account on their website, like any other website
But then who’s hosting my content and till when they’re hosting it?
Bluesky. If you’re okay with Twitter/X, you should be okay with Bluesky.
Ideally hosting your node should be easier, it doesn’t seem they care about it that much which concerns me
It sounds really cool, hopefully something similar will come one day, would be cool if one could create instances on github (or alternatives) for version control, posts would be markdown files, images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform (imgur, imgbb, etc.)
Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)
The ui part would also be great, I really don’t like discord’s new one for example
nghhh maybe if I fail my university entry exam
I really don’t think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you’re going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.
Also, if you’re doing the UUID thing, you’d have sort everything every time locally. That’s fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it’ll get bad, especially if you’re dealing with files.
Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.
There’s no real / true decentralization. You’re always dependent on something, somewhere in some way. It can be harder to shut it down but there’s also a point of failure somewhere. Blockchain is all fun and games until you’ve to consider resource waste and that you still need DNS and IPs working.
I don’t take issue with your points, but you’re conflating issues. I think it’s worth clarifying some terms up front.
Being utterly independent isn’t necessary for decentralization. Decentralization very specifically means there’s no single holder of the data; it does not have any implication for dependencies.
Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms, and as long as you doing don’t run your own server, you’re effectively on a centralized platform. This is to your point about being “always dependent on something, somewhere in some way.” It’s true for Lemmy; it is not true for all systems, not unless you’re being pedantic, which wouldn’t be helpful: you being dependent on electricity from your electric company doesn’t mean an information network can’t be “truly” decentralized.
A distributed ledger can be truly decentralized. Blockchains aren’t always distributed ledgers, and not all distributed ledgers are blockchains, but whether or not a specific blockchain is resource intensive has no bearing on whether or not it’s centralized. This is the part I take issue with: it’s irrelevant to the decentralization discussion.
Bitcoin is decentralized: no single person or group of people control it, and there is no central server that serves as an authoritative source of information. If there were, it wouldn’t be nearly so ecologically expensive. Its very nature as something that exists on equally on every single full node is part of the cost. You can take out any node, or group of nodes, and as long as there’s one full node left in the world, bitcoin exists (you then have a consensus verification problem, but that’s a different issue).
But let’s look at a second, less controversial, example: git, or rather, git repositories. This is, again, fully decentralized, and depends on no single resource. Microsoft would like you to believe that github is the center of git, and indeed github is the main reason git is as popular as it is despite its many shortcomings, but many people don’t use github for their projects, and any full clone of any repository is a independent and fully decentralized copy, isolated and uncontrolled by anyone but the person on whose computer it exists. Everything else is just convention.
Nostr is yet another fully decentralized ecosystem. It is, unfortunately, colonized almost entirely by cryptobros, and that’s the majority of its content, but there’s nothing “blockchain” or crypto in the core design. Nodes are simple key/value stores, and when you publish something to Nostr you submit it to (usually) a half-dozen different nodes, and it propagates out from there to other nodes. If you run your own node, even if your node dies, you still have your account and can publish content to other nodes, because your identity - your private key - is stored on your computer. Or, if you’re smart, on your phone, and maybe your laptop too, with backups. Your identity need not even be centralized to one device. No single group can stop you from publishing - individual nodes can choose to reject your posts, and there are public block lists, but not every node uses those. It is truly decentralized.
I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures. Jami is a good example of a project plagued by DHT sync issues. I’m not surprised they’re taking a long time to get stable, because this is a hard problem to solve - a deceptively simple problem to describe, but syncing hides issues like conflict resolution, updating published content, and all the administrative tools necessary in a world full of absolute shitheads who just want to cause chaos. It does look to me as it it would be fully decentralized, in a way Lemmy isn’t, if they can get it working reliably.
Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,
This isn’t quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.
They’re not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.
Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures
I haven’t looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.
I assume they’re using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.
Man, I love a good nitpicking.
Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance
It’s a source of truth for you. It’s locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.
Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there’s nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that’s on it. If they propagate a “delete” on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.
Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can’t happen with Lemmy.
But it’s also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.
Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.
They day they’re not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯
I don’t know. This post was the first I’ve heard of it, but since then I’ve seen a couple more “organic” posts asking if anyone thinks it’s good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it’s genuine interest. I’ll wait a bit and see, personally.
Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they’ve prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I’m not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn’t.
Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don’t know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it’s similar to Lemmy.
They day they’re not using DHT
I thought they’re using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.
I’m working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I’m using a DHT. If they’re using something else, that’s potentially concerning. I haven’t looked into Plebbit a ton though, I’ve just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I’m a bit of an outlier since I’m playing in the same space.
The blockchain components meant it was dead on arrival.
The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they’re the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?
Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.
Yeah, that’s a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they’re linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there’s no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.
For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It’s a good solution.
I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of
proprietary(edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm
I completely lost interest for the project at this point of the text
I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all
If community owners want to set a blockchain name like
hello.ethorhello.snsit’s possible, but it’s optional.It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?
Not true, it’s free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js
but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
What is the problem with DAOs? I think they’re a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet
So, from what I’ve read, and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.
If that’s the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you’ve done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.
So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I’d say I have two problems.
- Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy.
- Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.
Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy
The token is not forced upon anyone, and even if we start including it in the clients somehow, anybody can fork the clients and remove any token related stuff out of it.
Tokenizing your own project is a great way of supporting development without selling shares to VCs who only care about hyper growth, regardless of the ideals of the project.
Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.
Not sure what you mean by that, everything we do is out in the open.
People constantly told OP that, but they just won’t stop making posts about it
