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.
To be pedantic, lemmy is federated, rather than decentralized (e.g. a direct p2p architecture).
With decentralization, moderation is much harder than federation, so many people aren’t a fan.
If you run a community on Plebbit, you’re responsible for its own moderation, or you can assign somebody else to moderate it.
I took a look through the twitter, which someone mentioned in another thread.
Given the 4chan like aestetic of your twitter post, I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used.
Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.
I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either.
No, I’m good. I think I’ll stay far away from plebbit.
In its early days the internet was used mostly for porn as well, it doesn’t make sense to dismiss a whole project based on disagreements with people using it.
That is up to the sub owner, they can mandate a SMS challenge or any kind of KYC challenge if they would like. Users who get banned will automatically be disregarded by the of the swarm.