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.
From the FAQ linked on the site:
This sounds fucking awful. You want a peer-to-peer network, but decided to tie critical features to the blockchain, something arguably less decentralised than APub software.
As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn't use tokens. Meaning, there are no critical features tied to any blockchain.
The crypto features we implemented in our clients are not required by the protocol. The protocol works perfectly fine without them. We implemented them in our clients because they are nice, and they are:
Deeply, deeply ironic that the developers claiming to "give control back to the people" won't even let them chose their own profile picture.
Human-readable names are a critical feature.
Not really, most of the time people post on 4chan without them even though they exist.
And we see how horrible 4chan is...
One of the interfaces copies it, so it's supposed to be a decentralized 4chan. Usernames are not a core feature of it, and anyone can impersonate you unless you post with a hash of your password. That hash is only barely human readable and many people forget what it is.
All of this just sounds worse and worse. NFTs, seriously?
I don't care what the protocol technically makes feasible, people don't use protocols they use software that interprets protocols. ActivityPub doesn't actually require DNS, but you (correctly) say it does because there's no software out there people will use that doesn't require DNS. The point is you still tied human readable names to the blockchain, something absolutely not optional for social media software. No one is going to be like "you should sub to p/nrlaoii2nsl2, the memes are 🔥".
Who is "we" here and why do they get to decide what's acceptable in my community ('subpleb' if you will)?
You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won't be compatible with our clients because we think that's a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it's controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.
DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.
For our clients, "we" means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There's no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).
"The whole DNS system is a complete scam" says the person advocating for crypto and NFTs
I mean, that's the one thing he is right about. Also, it's far from being secure. I somehow made the DNS system break someday, as I was able to "buy" an already-registered domain. The domain ownership was overriden and the original owner couldn't do anything. I have not been able to replicate the bug on any other target, but understanding the bug and finding an exploit is basically unlocking god-mode on 99% of computers as you can mitm all you want with this
This could happen on a blockchain, as well. All it takes is to control a majority of the miners. One reason I laugh when people claims btc or other ponzicoins are "distributed", since most miners are controlled by China at the moment.
You mean that?
Apparently you're an arbitter of what's a scam & what's not Who appointed you ?
Imagine you buy a cheap domain name for $0.99 a year from namecheap to be lonefaerie.lol or something
Next year they ask for $19.99 because they can. If you set up an account with that name you can either pay more or have to change accounts
Why can't we just buy domain names for like 30 year periods?
You can. I think ICANN has agreed to limit it to 10 year maximum, to reduce domain squatting, though.
This is a HUGE problem in the IT sector... A lot of folks come up with "new, better, and more agile" systems for core tech, like DNS. What they fail to account for are all the lessons learned, and problems solved over the decades the system has been in use, and fail to understand a lot of the "complications" stem from people being complicated.
That's the problem, I want a personal domain like name.person for the rest of my life. I don't want it to expire and have to pay extortion rates for my email address
So, what you propose just isn't feasible.
Who is the one who gets John Doe? First come, first serve, and never again available?
It doesn't have to be your name. How about everyone gets a random phrase?
magneticdeerflyinginthesea.person
It's much easier to remember than like 7 numbers
Ah, I see. You don't actually understand how DNS works.
What if I told you, that each TLD is managed by a different organization... And not one organization. And, what if I told you, its distributed globally, to people in different nation-states? And then, what if I told you: Anyone can create a new TLD, if they either a) put in a lot of work, or b) put in a lot of money?
And, what if I told you... You can bundle a libc resolver, that can intercept your cool domains, and provide answers for it, using any sort of backing store you could imagine?
There are other alternatives to DNS that don't require you to boil the oceans, e.g. GNUnet has their own thing.
This isn't decentralising the whitelist/default subs, it's shareholder-ising. It's also just recreating the notion of admins in ActivityPub, or replay controllers in notstr. You still have a set of privileged users able to make decisions for others, albeit less privileged than AP admins.
I'm not saying nor do I believe crypto is the future, but this project seems to use Etherium and Solana, both of which are proof of stake and will not be using huge amounts of power.
Etherium actually transitioned to proof-of-stake? Last I heard it was something they were planning to but it was being delayed for years. Good for them for actually doing it, I still don't trust the technology and refuse to use anything that integrates it, but at least it's not so actively destructive.
Yep, according to Wikipedia they finished the transfer in September 2022. Completely agreed, I don't interact with anything crypto related, just glad to see it not destroying the environment and raising hardware prices.