A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.
The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.
But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.
Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:
– Plebbit is serverless. – There are no global admins. – It does not rely on any central server. – It can’t be censored or taken down. – It works like BitTorrent, but for social media. – No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.
Every subreddit (called a “subplebbit”) is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.
And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.
It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.
Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.
If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.
I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.
I think there’s such a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of crypto currency, even in comparison, that even a whiff of a relationship generates negative reactions. As you say, much of it is based on no actual knowledge about the topic. It doesn’t help that there are some truly deplorable people associated with cryptocurrency, a great many bad actors, and proof-of-work was in retrospect a terrible design decision by Satoshi.
Blockchain isn’t cryptocurrency, and vice-versa, but most people can’t distinguish between the two. If there’s any mention of blockchain on the site, or especially if you mention bitcoin (as you did) you’re going to get crusaders.
Plebbit is not built on top of blockchains, it’s a pure p2p network akin to Bittorrent. We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
Sure; I’m saying that there are trigger words that are guaranteed to generate negative comments: blockchain, crypto, crypto currency, and Bitcoin.
You said that you can’t understand the negative feedback. I’m giving you one reason why you might be seeing it. Lemmy and Mastodon (the AP FediVerse in general) is not cryptocurrency-friendly. If you mention “Bitcoin” in the post, you’re going to get brigaded. If someone sniffs around on the repo documentation and sees the crypto link, they’ll mention it in the comments and you’ll get brigaded.
I agree crypto has a bad rep, which is why we’re not associating with it. Our goal is to replace both web2 and web3 socials with a p2p solution that actually scales to the masses. Using blockchain for some aspects of it might raise some eyebrows, but it’s worth it imo
Naw, there are several good use cases for blockchain. Ask a blockchain hater how to implement an auditable change log, and they’ll re-invent blockchain and claim it’s not.
I’m only saying: you specifically mentioned Bitcoin, and then later said design goals included cryptocurrency integration. I’m not opposed to crypto, conceptually - I’m just giving a possible reason why you may be garnering downvotes.