6d ago

Why selfhosted social media protocols are hated ?

A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.

The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.

But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.

Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:

– Plebbit is serverless. – There are no global admins. – It does not rely on any central server. – It can’t be censored or taken down. – It works like BitTorrent, but for social media. – No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.

Every subreddit (called a "subplebbit") is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.

And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.

I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.

It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.

Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.

If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,

https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper

please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.

I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.

62 comments

Maybe because you tried to backdoor a sales pitch into a community where it wasn't quite on topic, and the community members didn't appreciate it?
- No they made people up that got mad. It’s just sympathy bait. It’s most likely an ad to fake interest in a hopeless project

I'm going to post it again.
For anyone else looking for a reason to stay away from plebbit- uh, look at their X account https://x.com/getplebbit
It’s 4chan crypto hashwash
- Uh! Plebbit, crypto and nft. I'll stay as far as I can.
- we have nothing to do with 4chan, not sure why you mention it here.
  We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that's a good thing because they're more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
  
  Homie, you used 4chans logo in your shitty nft drops
  https://x.com/getplebbit/status/1516387903177383948

I’m not doing this for approval.
Okay. Go away and do it then.

My question is... What does this do that ActivityPub and ATProto doesn't do? That's the angle you should approach this from (and be ready to defend... People on Lemmy seem adamant that ActivityPub is perfect and unbeatable...). We're technical people here, sell it as a technical solution to a problem rather than using buzzwords or comparing it to Bitcoin.
You've mentioned serverless many times, but ultimately I need to send content somewhere and ask someone to send me content. I can't just throw my posts into the wind and expect someone else to get them. So how do I make a post if not by sending it to a trusted person?
- It's not serverless, of course. Each peer is a server and the peer that created the "sub" have control to be able to moderate things. You have to maintain your peer always online, because it's a server. Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow.
  ActivityPub is not perfect, but this is just a channer wanting some freeze prach space he can control.
  
  Each peer is a server That's not true, you can be a peer in the network without posting or seeding anything to the network.
  peer that created the “sub” have control to be able to moderate things If you create your own community, you will be able to moderate it, yes. Why would people create communities when it can't be moderated?
  With Plebbit there's no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
  You have to maintain your peer always online, because it’s a server If the community node is down, but other peers in the network are online and providing the community's data, then people will still be able to read and navigate the community in read-only mode. They can't publish new votes/comments/edits to it, because all updates has to come from the community node.
  Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow Not true, try the desktop app of Seedit and you will see for yourself.
- Difference is it's a pure p2p network with no need for anyone to set up their own DNS/TLS/etc, so that brings the barrier of entry for running your node way lower. When you download the desktop app of Seedit for example, you're essentailly running a full p2p node in the background.
  That is way more censorship resistant than say, Mastodon or ActivityPub-based socials
  
  Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.
  How do I:
  Locate bob given a name or some other ID
  Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
  Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
  Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
  All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.

Decentralized? Zero administration or censorship? Blockchain? No governance or oversight? Absolute freedom? No approval from anyone?
Plebbit contains child porn. Has to, there's no way it doesn't.
When? Probably the day after it went online, and every day following it.
You believe with zero shadow of a doubt that 8chan, motherless and Anonib all have cp, but Plebbit doesn't?
mmmhm
- Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren't hosted anywhere on the protocol.
  
  Images are just bytes. Just encode an image via base64 and now you can send it via text. People will find ways.

Wait until regulations hears about your decentralized social media not regulating CSAM content sharing. Pure decentralization is a libertarian wet dream. We are not into that here.
- Libertarian police
  I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
  “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
  “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
  “Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
  The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
  “Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
  “Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
  He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
  I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
  “Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
  “Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
  “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
  It didn’t seem like they did.
  “Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
  Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
  I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
  “Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
  Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
  “Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
  I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
  He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
  “All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
  “Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
  “Because I was afraid.”
  “Afraid?”
  “Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
  I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
  “Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
  He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
  
  Feels like P.K.Dick, but actulized with current day terminology.
  Good work
  
  Lol that's very good satire, thank you for that
  
  I wanted to coldremoved the guy.
  God, Lemmy's word filter is so asinine.
- Despite everything. I was considering giving it a try, just to see.
  But your right, if there's a CSAM community on there I would inevitably host it to.
  So I will not be trying plebbit
- Also plebbit is text only protocol, there are no images hosted on the protocol.
- What is there to regulate? We the devs aren't hosting anything. Is the Bittorrent founder responsible for regulating data transmitted on his protocol?
- We are not into that here.
  they say on a decentralised social media platform.
  
  Any instance not moderating csam quickly gets defederated and reported...
  
  This is not pure unregulated decentralization. Learn the difference.
  
  Perhaps @mehdi_benadel@lemmy.balamb.fr was trying to say de-regulated; which is what libertarians do get hot and wet for. They have been cheering it on in Argentina and importing that as DOGE, but that is another matter.
  
  To be pedantic, lemmy is federated, rather than decentralized (e.g. a direct p2p architecture).
  With decentralization, moderation is much harder than federation, so many people aren't a fan.

If you want to participate in Plebbit, then do that. Have fun. You do you. It shouldn't matter whether anyone here approves or not.

This whole thing is just another crypto bro angle and it’s fucking cancer. Whatever the technical merits of the decentralization techniques used, people won’t buy into tech with crypto and crypto bros involved because they don’t want to deal with financial fraud
- That's the real problem. Crypto bros can take something genuinely interesting and kill it by association. IPNS is a really neat idea. Self-certifying name resolution over a DHT swarm would be fun to play around with, but if pushed by the bros isn't going to get any adoption.

It can’t be censored or taken down
I know nothing of Plebbit, however, even as a huge privacy and freedom of speech advocate, I have issue with uncensored social media. There is a huge difference between freedom and freedumb. Total freedumb equals total chaos. Freedumb seems to be trending, and if all the freedumb loving people want to congregate in one place to spew their bile and hatred at each other, fine....I won't engage. The problem occurs when freedumb loving people want to export that hatred and bile to other social media thinking just because they fly the freedumb flag, everyone else should too. I 'helped' beta test Gab when if first started, and immediately dropped it. It was clear early on who their clientele would be: Hate mongering racists.
Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism. LBJ, tho he had his own issues with racism, said a truth that still stands today in that, if you give a man someone to hate, they will bend over and willingly spread their cheeks for your amusement. No one slipped me a note up in the slot while I was in utero and asked me what I wanted to be when I got out. Hmmmm....lets see.....oh WHITE definitely. It's stupidity of the highest order to hate someone for their skin pigment when I myself, like them, had no choice in the matter. It's probably not a popular opinion but these things should be censored.
- Some things, in my most humble opinion, should be censored such as hate speech and overt racism
  You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Plebbit is not pure chaos, it's a p2p protocol that allows communities and users to connect if they really wish to with no intermediaries.

Sounds like a real haven for "free speech extremist" types. Personally, I'm not searching for social media with more hate, slurs and conspiracy nonsense. I'd go back to twitter if I wanted that.
- You can filter your feed by tags/keywords, and eventually we're gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone's else blocked keywords.
  In centralized social media, there's only a single entity deciding what's allowed, with Plebbit that decision is pushed to the edges of the network. So each node can decide what it wants to see, nothing is pushed on the end user.
  
  So every user is their own moderator... which just sounds like a ton of extra work vs something like Mastodon where I can pick a server whose moderation practices I agree with, is already decentralized into countless servers and allows the user to spin up their own instance.
  Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find "clever" new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.
  Meanwhile, you're pitching this thing as "uncensorable" which automatically appeals to the worst elements available. Maybe I'm wrong and it'll be the perfect format for internet discussion, but I'm going to have to see that actually happen before I jump on board.

I think there's such a knee-jerk reaction to any mention of crypto currency, even in comparison, that even a whiff of a relationship generates negative reactions. As you say, much of it is based on no actual knowledge about the topic. It doesn't help that there are some truly deplorable people associated with cryptocurrency, a great many bad actors, and proof-of-work was in retrospect a terrible design decision by Satoshi.
Blockchain isn't cryptocurrency, and vice-versa, but most people can't distinguish between the two. If there's any mention of blockchain on the site, or especially if you mention bitcoin (as you did) you're going to get crusaders.
- Plebbit is not built on top of blockchains, it's a pure p2p network akin to Bittorrent. We do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS
  
  Sure; I'm saying that there are trigger words that are guaranteed to generate negative comments: blockchain, crypto, crypto currency, and Bitcoin.
  You said that you can't understand the negative feedback. I'm giving you one reason why you might be seeing it. Lemmy and Mastodon (the AP FediVerse in general) is not cryptocurrency-friendly. If you mention "Bitcoin" in the post, you're going to get brigaded. If someone sniffs around on the repo documentation and sees the crypto link, they'll mention it in the comments and you'll get brigaded.

I like the concept. But something without any central admins is probably going to be full of all kinds of awful stuff, and I don't want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed, because if my client happens to cache anything illegal then I'm now potentially distributing that illegal content P2P which is a huge problem.
The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it's basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.
- I don’t want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed
  You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else labels of spam/nsfw/etc.
  because if my client happens to cache anything illegal
  Plebbit is text-only protocol, also it is end-to-end encrypted. Also you could set your own node to never seed anybody else's content.
  The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it’s basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.
  We're not a crypto project, we do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS