It doesn't need crypto, it only needs IPFS (but we could change underlying protocol in the future, if someone creates a better alternative to IPFS).

"no transaction fees" is listed as a feature because blockchain-based social media exists, and unlike them a plebbit full node doesn't have to sync (because it's a IPFS node), it just runs immediately like a BitTorrent node would, and it runs on 4GB of RAM even on a raspberry pi, on consumer internet (consumes less bandwidth than YouTube) and it only uses a few GBs of storage. Blockchain social media fundamentally cannot scale because of node requirements, that is if you want the platform to be "decentralized" (enough full nodes).

We do have crypto features, as an addendum. Mainly, we use crypto domains such as .eth (ens.domains) end .sol (sns.id) to resolve plebbit author/community addresses to readable names, because they are IPNS public keys (very long and impossible to memorize, e.g. 12D3KooWMLCgrZT8Ucaw2DWnv1HsQianf9tVi8sK6JCbCod3XK8T). Unlike DNS, crypto domains are censorship resistant. They are cryptographic property, you hold them in your wallet, which means if you change the address of your plebbit community to one such domain, you are tokenizing your community. In theory, the more users your community has, the more people have saved your domain, the higher its value. Compare that to Reddit for example, where all subreddits are owned by Reddit, they can ban your community with millions of subs, because it's not your property, it's theirs.

https://github.com/plebbit

Because this way 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, plebbit full nodes are customized IPFS Kubo nodes, and running one is as simple as downloading the Seedit client desktop app (available on github) and keeping it open. It runs the node automatically, and seeds content automatically as you browse it. It runs on a raspberry pi, so we expect to see a lot of plebbit users running their own full node.

All the code is fully open source on github.com/plebbit

It's not a competing standard, it's a whole new approach to decentralize forum-based social media.

ActivityPub is not fully decentralized, it's a federated design, meaning it's a network of instances, and each instance is just a regular website with servers. Anyone can run an instance, but it's expensive, tiresome and you'll get banned for it; they are regular websites.

whereas Plebbit is fully decentralized, it's purely peer to peer, meaning it's a network of peers where every peer can potentially be a full node by simply using the desktop app (or in the future, a non custodial public rpc on mobile), and you don't have to run any site/domain for it, it's censorship resistant just like running a torrent with a BitTorrent client.

Also to be clear: like ActivityPub is a protocol with clients, such as Mastodon and Lemmy, Plebbit is a protocol with clients, such as Seedit and Plebchan.

Yeah, we need better communities, most of them are poorly maintained at the moment. But some of them are cool, like technopleb.eth, plebpiracy.eth, plebmusic.eth, movies-and-anime.eth. You can check out the full list on https://seedit.app/#/communities/vote (this is a maintained list of default subs to show in the app, but you can connect p2p to any sub whatsoever if you know its address, just like you can download any torrent with a torrent client)

Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:

Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.

The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don't have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS'd, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.

Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there's nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you're always reachable by any user on plebbit.

Blockchains are perfect for anything that needs to be a token in an immutable ledger, such as domain names. We use them as extra, they are not needed but they are nice to have, to show a readable-name.eth or readable-name.sol instead of a long alphanumeric string, as address for plebbit communities and users.

Because lemmy is federated, it's not decentralized. Instances run on centralized servers, using DNS, they can get deplatformed at any time and delete your data. They effectively work just like regularly centralized websites, and can block each other. Whereas on plebbit, each community is a node that can't get deplatformed (works like torrents, ie no domain/DNS/SSL) and users connect to it p2p. So, to run a lemmy instance, you have to run a whole site, whereas to run a plebbit node you just have to open the desktop app and browse the site with it. Creating a sub with your node is free, just like creating a torrent file.

spam

each subplebbit has its own admins, who set up an anti-spam challenge which gets sent p2p to users when they publish to the sub. The cool thing is these challenges can be anything that can be code (anything: including PoW if they want to get spammed, or SMS auth, a captcha, a whitelist, a password, a time-based or usage-based challenge, biometrics to fight AI like worldcoin, whatever regularly centralized social media sites will end up using to fight spam)

csam

all data on plebbit is text-only, you cannot upload media. All media you see is embedded from centralized websites, with direct links, meaning if you post a link to csam from some site like imgur, imgur will ban you, take down the media (the embed returns 404, media disappears) and report your IP address to authorities. Plebbit is also not private, it works like torrents, your IP is in the swarm (even though the app and community can't see it, authorities can track it and figure out what you seeded, just like with torrents)

It was supposed to be a lot more decentralized than Lemmy. Plebbit was built around a p2p protocol and the idea was that it wouldn’t rely on servers, everything would be fully serverless and self-hosted in a true decentralized way. What made it interesting was that it was planned to support multiple UIs, so people could use different frontends like their own version of Lemmy’s UI, or even something totally custom. A Lemmy style UI was even on their roadmap.

But the problem is... it never really happened. It’s been super slow because there are only like 3 devs working on it, and they’ve been trying to find more help for ages. The MVP still hasn’t come out, and I think the crypto side of it just scared people off or made things harder. I really believed in the idea at first, but now it just feels like vaporware.

Seedit is fully p2p, it’s not federated, meaning there’s no “instances” in the federated sense. You just download the app or go to seedit.app, connect directly to a community, using its address, and you publish to it. It’s like torrents, you’re also seeding back content you receive (that’s why it’s called seedit, but seeding is fully automated at the moment, maybe it will be possible to selectively seed communities in the future)

Plebbit doesn't use a blockchain, it's explained in the first paragraph of the whitepaper. Plebbit actually proves why a blockchain makes no sense for social media.

old.reddit was open source, also seedit is fully open source under GPLv2 license and it can't get taken down (it's serverless, and it's hosted on IPFS)

edit: also, for example, there's old.lemmy.world

implementing control over seeding is on the list of things to do, not yet implemented. same with private communities.

Well, the name can be anything. Seedit is a client for the plebbit protocol, just like Lemmy is a client for ActivityPub protocol.

The same content that you see on Lemmy can be accessed from a different ActivityPub client, like Mastodon.

The same content that you see on Seedit can be accessed from a different plebbit client, like Plebchan. Plebbit will have countless clients, ie. different interfaces for the same data, each with a different name/branding/design.

Cool. If you want your subplebbit to be featured in our apps, ie shown in the homepages with all our users auto-subscribed to it, DM us its address or open a pull request on https://github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits

At the moment, the only requirement is 99% uptime (and the sub shouldn't be about illegal stuff ofc, but it can be nsfw)

You need to have a structure for delegating moderation and such tasks to other people.

We actually have it: since there's no central database of communities, who decides which ones appear in the homepage of the apps to first-time users? We use a "default list" of communities, which is effectively moderated (vetoed) by the app developer. This is the only "global admin" we basically have, but it's only for the app itself, not the protocol, and it still doesn't stop users from connecting p2p to the community (depending on the app, some plebbit client developers could implement blacklists).

worse content searching

It's pure p2p so it can't have content searching straight out of the box, but it can easily have indexes like 4chan archivers to search in known subplebbits. It's entirely possible to crawl all active subplebbits and archive them all in a central database, and use that for search. This will happen, and plebbit clients will probably implement multiple such archivers to run search in them. And search engines will be able to index.

worse scalability

It's orders of magnitude better scalability than regular sites such as federated instances. Because it works like torrents, except you always seed, so plebbit nodes will inevitably improve the network speed more and more as more nodes join. And running a node works on a rasp pi. And all content is just text (including links from which media is embedded by the clients), so there's no scalability issue relatively to storage, either.

worse moderation

It has way better moderation, because it's just like reddit in that every community moderates itself, except there's no global admins able to censor a community/node or impose global rules. Plebbit clients are simply static HTML tools to browse the p2p network to connect to each community directly. Every community is incentivized to moderate itself effectively, or they become unusable, and to enter the homepages of the clients they must get voted for by holders of the plebbit token, via a gasless governance system using pubsub it's this page, you'll be able to vote for communities, i.e. downvote communities that aren't well moderated to remove them from the homepage for everyone). Right now, this homepage default list is centrally controlled by the developers, it's the only remaining centralized part of the project.