Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people.
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.
it has no central server, database, HTTP endpoint or DNS - it is pure peer to peer. Unlike federated instances, which are regular websites that can get deplatformed at any time,
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy. Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.
The code is fully open source on
I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say “adminless,” but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.
So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it’ll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.
If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you’ll be more right than wrong.
On an unrelated topic, I’m working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn’t have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it’s fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).
Just because moderation doesn’t look similar to what you’re familiar with doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. We’ll see if Plebbit works out, but I’m still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn’t have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.
Wouldn’t this just create an impenetrable filter bubble/echo chamber where you see nothing else than content you 100% agree with?
For many users, probably. I do have plans to have a “moderation queue” or something where you can opt in to seeing stuff that was hidden and adjust your moderation preferences.
On Reddit, the recommendation was to upvote constructive comments even if you didn’t agree, and downvote unconstructive comments even if you do. People didn’t do that, so we got echo chambers.
On mine, I plan to have four responses to a comment:
Users could adjust the weights of each, but by default “relevant” and “flag” would be much more highly weighed than “agree” and “disagree.” You can also block users. All of those are taken into account by the moderation graph to decide which content to show and in what order.
You misread, the unmoderatable free-for-all is about the domain name system alternative. Not the hosted platforms they point to
Good to see they’ve got some moderation tools for the platform regardless tho!
What do you need moderation for that for? All a domain name service needs is some kind of reputable link between two things (e.g. domain name and IP), and Plebbit seems to be using it to reserve community names (so name -> public key, or maybe the other way, I haven’t looked into it). The reputation comes from the blockchain, which dramatically increases the barrier for an attacker to change an entry. Instead of a central authority, you have a group of individuals (ETH is based on proof-of-stake now, and I assume ENS is as well) who verify claims before it becomes part of the blockchain.
To me, it’s the least problematic part of it, I’m more concerned about communities having owners, and thus communities can die if the owner decides to stop hosting it or decides to dramatically change the rules (or moderators, etc). One of the major points of decentralization is to remove the power of individuals to change/break things, and Plebbit doesn’t do that. The most problematic part, IMO, is ties to cryptocurrency, which seems to be its profit motive, so the moment it takes off, the creator gets rich (because they hold a ton of PLEB token), and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of the project.
That said, we’ll see how it works out. I think it has some interesting ideas, and I’m all for alternatives to the established players in the social media space.
Have you been living under a rock? Just allow me to register plebbbit.eth and make it simple steal user accounts then redirect to the actual website. This, and plenty of other tricks need to dealt with
You could do the same with DNS, nothing is stopping you from registering a similar domain name and doing the exact same thing. ENS doesn’t change anything with the attack, it merely exchanges registrars for a block chain.
Except dns requires proper registration, and has a place to report abuse, and those reports are actually acted upon. Moderation here is not preventative, it’s reactive.
Stop trying to justify this approach, a blockchain is cool but you’re really just monopolizing domain registration
Oh, I think the approach is problematic, I just don’t think ENS is a major concern here. I don’t think you need DNS/ENS for this kind of service, nor do you need any form of blockchain.
My point is a blockchain DNS system isn’t significantly worse than the current system, where we already see a ton of similar abuse. The proper solution, IMO, is to avoid the need for DNS at all.
Accurate, what would you do instead of dns though?
Nothing?
DNS exists to give an authoritative answer for who owns something. I would have a completely different design where nobody owns communities.
Basically, I’d treat communities as topics that live on a DHT as keys, posts would be keys semantically related to the community (e.g. “communities.<community>.posts.<post>”), and so on. Anyone can post to that topic or to any posts or comments related to that topic by creating subkeys, all of which use UUIDs to guarantee uniqueness. All entries in the hash table are signed by the author’s key, and people can create identical entries (i.e. the same key), which can be distinguished by the signature. The signature is important, because we can’t trust timestamps to distinguish between collisions (e.g. someone mimicking someone else’s post id vs someone editing their own post).
Moderation consists of a web of trust system, where users are given weights based on how much you trust them. When deciding whether to display a post, you’ll check the moderation of that post by people you trust, and show/hide it accordingly. The same goes for votes, you could disregard votes from users you consider spammers/trolls. Building that moderation graph is largely automatic, if you vote or moderate similarly to someone else, you start to trust them more, and their weight in your graph increases.
In other words, nobody owns communities, so there’s no reason to have DNS, and the main reason to have DNS is for moderation, which becomes moot when moderation is itself distributed.