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

https://github.com/plebbit

  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    it does not “seem”

    I haven’t used the service or reviewed the code, I’ve only read the whitepaper and read the website. Early stage projects like this have a habit of stating this things that aren’t yet true, hence the uncertainty.

    Hash tables are used in database indexes

    It sounds like you’re limiting your definition of “database” to relationship databases, there are a lot of other types of databases out there. The most common use case for Redis, for example, is as a key value store, and a hash table would be a perfect way to implement that. I’ve used redb in this project, which is a disk based key value database.

    The naming system is still a central part of any network

    Sure, but DNS systems are authoritative, meaning there’s only one right answer to a given query. This requires synchronization across the network, which creates a ton of complexity.

    If we can avoid that synchronization, the design gets a lot simpler, which makes it more robust. In my design, I’m specifically avoiding mandatory deletes and updates, so the only operations my “database” needs to support are creates and reads. Communities are just topics you can post to, and moderation is just client-side filtering. The tricky part is getting the client side filtering good enough to not give spammers and trolls too much visibility.

    Some nice parts about this:

    • users can leave the network, create posts and comments, and later sync up when they rejoin
    • air gapped networks can still sync transparently through sneakernet (i.e. sneaking content behind national firewalls)
    • any portion of the userbase could leave and the network in unaffected (no dead communities)
    • content lives as long as someone cares to store it since no users can delete anything, while unpopular content goes away
    • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Let’s hope it’s not true yet or ever. Did you mean relational? And no, that’s not what I said.

      The current dns system works, and has it’s flaws. But ens is not an improvement, it’s worse.

      • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Yes, relational. Stupid auto correct…

        And I’m not arguing for or against DNS vs ENS, I’m saying that whole concept is an unnecessary centralization for something that could be implemented without it at all. The only technical reason something like Reddit would need an authoritative answer for name resolution is for moderation (i.e. elevated privileges), so you can verify that you’re getting authoritative moderation.

        If you can do distributed moderation, you get a lot of nice flexibility and resiliency. That’s what I’m interested in exploring, and my main criticism of Plebbit. If I take Plebbit to a region that blocks ENS or sending packets to the owner, I can’t use the service, which to me means it’s not truly decentralized. If I take my system there, I can keep using it with locals there provided I find a relay behind that firewall, and I can sync up with my usual peers later. The only hosting needed for my service is a relay to connect nodes, and someone needs to provide storage space on their client. That’s it, and relays are cheap.

        • Boomkop3@reddthat.comEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Without names you wouldn’t have… names though? We’re still dealing with humans in the end, we like names

          • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            There would be names, just no owners of those names. You’d navigate to /c/technology or whatever, there just wouldn’t be anyone who owns or controls that name, it’s just a tag that anyone can post to.

            To get the posts for /c/technology, you’d ask your peers, and they’d ask their peers until someone provides that data. Your client would then aggregate all of the responses, filter them through local moderation, and then display the feed.

              • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                Connect to a relay (ideally multiple), which connects you directly to peers. From there, peers can directly refer you to other peers. So just like a BitTorrent tracker or peer exchange.

                There currently isn’t a web frontend, but once there is, you could select any that you like. You could self host your own portal, use someone else’s, or use the one I provide. That portal doesn’t store any data, it just serves the page and facilitates connection to the platform, and any caching would be an implementation detail. It’ll be incredibly lightweight, so you could host it on the cheapest VPS available.

                  • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
                    1·
                    3 days ago

                    No. From what I can tell, Plebbit works like this:

                    1. User A generates public and private key, and registers a name with the DNS/ENS service to link the name to the public key
                    2. User A controls the list of moderators, which have the power to delete posts and comments granted by the private key
                    3. Other users create posts and comments with that public key, and User A later signs them with the private key to make them “official”

                    If User A ends the service, moderation and signing of comments end, which effectively kills the community.

                    My proposal works like this:

                    1. users post to a topic (i.e. community)

                    That’s it. Any moderation happens on the client. I have plans to make moderation largely automatic, so it’s not a pain while still hopefully controlling spam and trolls. Half the network could go down and the data would still largely be intact. In fact, a country could block internet entirely, and you could still sneakernet it in as long as someone has a relay there. If somehow all relays go down, you spin one up and everyone resyncs and we call it an outage. You can even host your own within your LAN.

                    Domain names are convenient for relays, but they’re not essential. The only thing required is some way to connect peers.