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.
Our core problem with mastodon design is the same issue we have with email, eventually big hosters consolidate and they start banning people they disagree with. Now, in contrast you have a full p2p protocol like Bittorrent where you can download anything you want as long as you can find people to download it from. This is the model we’re going for in Plebbit
The problem (as matrix people found out the hard way) is some media & content is very illegal. Most individuals really don’t want even the chance of being exposed to CSAM or gore, and neither do server operators want the chance of that being shared from their server or written to their disk when that can result in police at the door. You need default-on moderation that is very powerful, and end users should never be distributing media they don’t want to. This pushes towards centralisation of nodes run by experts, and heavily punishes true P2P models.
Is it a problem though? There are thousands of email providers you can choose form, and they still work fine for sending and receiving email.
On social platforms federating with everyone might not be desired and defederation is seen as a feature not a bug.
One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.