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.
Nice essay, strong fud but we have safe guards against this. Users can back up or copy any subs they want, so if a sub owner goes insane, users can simply restore it, to exactly how it was. Sure the name will be slightly different since the previous owner owns the name, so p/games might now be p/videogames. But that's a minor inconvenience. In fact multiple users can own a community which further safe guards it.
We will also remove communities that are toxic from our recommended subs list and replace it with the non toxic one. Alternatively users can create their on recommended subs list and share it round. Plebbit is open source so if we act nefariously, people can just fork it
I think you missed a lot of my points. What's fud, the monetization of your platform? Went to give it a look, that's what a lot of those "recommended" topics are showing users are looking forward to on some of the clients. You explained something I wasn't complaining about, but now that you have, that opens up so many attack vectors as well. People can try to copy popular communities to set up fake "grassroots" communities, and it sounds like they can copy and simulate user participation along with it.
And no, how a community identifies itself is not a minor inconvenience, it has literally fueled the domain name market, it is what people linked to, what people see in archives, and where people will go. The elephant in the room you are forgetting to mention is how the whole community will suddenly coordinate so well and won't just split itself off into several.
Communities can defend against bots using captchas, minimum karma limits and whatever else they can think of. We're constantly improving this aspect.
People can make up Communities and purposely fill them with bots and astroturfing, however they can already do this on your typical social media. Its upto the user to spot this and move to a better community. We of course will do what we can to discourage astroturfing.
In terms of monetisation and building it around NFTS. All of that is optional. Communties can choose to only allow users to have NFT profiles or allow them to have whatever image they want. The tipping is optional. The domain name is a valid point, however its the most decentralised, non censorable option. We intend to allow domain names from different blockchains so if games.eth is taken people can use games.Sol.
About your point concerning community splits, this sort of thing happens in reddit all the time. A few communties get created in the splinter but eventually everyone moves to the one with the most activity and decent mods. And as we said we will facilitate the best ran subs gaining prominence from our side by adding it to the recommended list.
In terms of monetisation, the dev has spent $600k of his own money on this and is still spending. He doesn't care to make any of it back. Plebbit is a non profit company. Any money made from plebbit via pleb domains or donations or plebbit gold will go to funding devs or other aspects of plebbit, but profit isn't the goal.
The internet sorely needs a fully decentralised social media. Most of the social media has been taken kver by corporations, speech is stifled, what you see is controlled by shady algorithms. Plebbit gives all that control back to the community. Lemmy is a good stepping stone, but Plebbit is the end all be all. Improvements are always happening but a P2P social media is such a simple yet novel idea its surprising its not been done before.