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.
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,
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have 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.
The code is fully open source on
Connect to a relay (ideally multiple), which connects you directly to peers. From there, peers can directly refer you to other peers. So just like a BitTorrent tracker or peer exchange.
There currently isn't a web frontend, but once there is, you could select any that you like. You could self host your own portal, use someone else's, or use the one I provide. That portal doesn't store any data, it just serves the page and facilitates connection to the platform, and any caching would be an implementation detail. It'll be incredibly lightweight, so you could host it on the cheapest VPS available.
Isn't that effectively the same? I like the lightweight aspect of it though
No. From what I can tell, Plebbit works like this:
If User A ends the service, moderation and signing of comments end, which effectively kills the community.
My proposal works like this:
That's it. Any moderation happens on the client. I have plans to make moderation largely automatic, so it's not a pain while still hopefully controlling spam and trolls. Half the network could go down and the data would still largely be intact. In fact, a country could block internet entirely, and you could still sneakernet it in as long as someone has a relay there. If somehow all relays go down, you spin one up and everyone resyncs and we call it an outage. You can even host your own within your LAN.
Domain names are convenient for relays, but they're not essential. The only thing required is some way to connect peers.
Oh, that might just create some legal issues
For who?
The biggest targets are individual users, but as we've seen with BitTorrent, that almost never happens. There's also no profit here, so there are no assets to seize, though I'll probably accept donations.
I don't mean crime, no. There's laws regarding moderation when a platform is big enough. And regarding personal data in a lot of cases
Ah, that's not a thing where I'm from (US). I wonder what that would look like without a central authority. There's no way to guarantee any particular moderation or ensure deletion of personal data, so I guess their options are to ban it or let it slide.
Probably only the instances big enough to qualify