Selfhosted

Did they pay devs to build it for them?

I'm working on a similar project, but I'm 100% bootstrapping it. I'm using Iroh (similar to IPFS, but hopefully faster), and there will just be the one UI until someone makes another. I haven't done authentication yet, but I might end up using blockchain for that, idk, I need some form of trusted directory.

I'm going to be looking through this, because it sounds very similar to what I'm working on, and I'd love to just join a project instead of doing all the leg work of getting traction myself. The things I'm particularly interested in are:

• moderation - I plan to use something like a web of trust, but with transitive trust; you select people you trust, and whether you see something depends on how those users moderated
• persistence when users go offline - I use a local first approach, so a post is cached locally if you either authored or viewed it, and peers will pull from you if you're the closest source; caches would need to expire so we don't blow up everyone's storage
• communities operate in a single namespace (so fix the main complexity w/ federation) - you create a community by posting to that namespace, and it gets mixed w/ other users who post to that same namespace

I'm also interested in building an ActivityPub bridge, so this network can act like an "instance" of sorts and push/pull content from the rest of the Fediverse. This is mostly to seed content in the early days, and I'll decide whether it's worth it once everything else works.

I don't know if Plebbit does any or all of this, hence the interest. That said, someone spending actual money on it seems a bit... odd, since I don't see how this could be monetized.