Rinse - Plebbit Dev

Each community (equivalent of subreddit) is essentially a keypair, and whoever runs the community and has access to the keypair can do whatever they want. They can ban people + assign moderators + etc, there are no global admins.

Enjoy, it’s a bit buggy but we’re always looking for feedback and help if you’re interested. All code is open source and GPL v2

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

A global DHT unfortuantely is extremely resource intensive, and part of our design requirements is full p2p capabilities for both mobile and web browsers. This cannot be achieve with a DHT, although if a DHT design emerges with support for both, we will consider using it.

Next update for plebbit-js will have full p2p capabilities including gossipsub using libp2p/helia in browser/mobile! We’re excited to ship that.

I’m personally planning to set up a bluesky account soon, but running a selfhosted instance doesn’t look easy yet

Feel free to check out Seedit, it’s the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we’re working on it every day to make it better.

We’re still working on it and getting very close to releasing MVP

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.

Plebbit is not a ledger, it’s a P2P protocol and has no DHT. Peers find each other by coordinating over HTTP routers, which are similar to bittorrent trackers. HTTP routers are essentially key-value stores so they’re very easy to deploy.

If we could achieve bittorrent decentralization along with their usage numbers, I’d consider it a success

Plebbit is not a blockchain, it’s P2P and all content on the network is content addressable. There’s nothing to “sync”

Not true, it’s free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js

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.eth or hello.sns it’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

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.

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

posts would be markdown files

Seedit, which is a plebbit client actually parses posts as Markdown, try it on Seedit

images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform

It’s already this way with Plebbit, we only allow text.

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)

On Plebbit all clients are open source with GPL V2, they can also be self hosted easily with a single click. Check out seedit repository Seedit