Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people.
Plebbit only hosts text. Images from google and other sites can be linked/embedded in posts. This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chanw, andhave a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy. Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.
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.
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.
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.