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
I don't get why people are so interested in the fediverse. I guess it's a sizeable amount of content, but it's not really all that popular and has a host of its own issues. I think people like the idea behind it more than the actual implementation.
That said, I'm working on a similar project (distributed Reddit clone), and one of my goals is to eventually connect it to the fediverse to get access to content. That said, a distributed service isn't directly compatible w/ a federated one (there are no servers in a distributed service, only simple relays), so I'd have to build a bridge to get it to work, and bridges are notoriously awkward to deal with in the best case (see Matrix bridges), and adding P2P on top of that makes things even more awkward.
Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!
But we're still at the mercy of the admins of the large instances. Most of the popular Lemmy communities are at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works. Eventually the admins of those instances will either turn evil (I argue that has already happened on lemmy.ml) or stop hosting the service, and then we're still screwed. I don't know mastodon well enough, but I'm guessing they have a similar problem with a handful of instances hosting a disproportionate portion of the content.
I don't know that I can do better, but I can try something different. Plebbit is trying something different as well, so hopefully someone will find a good mix of tradeoffs.
I'm on Lemmy because it's the least bad option at the moment for what I'm looking for, but I think it's fundamentally flawed. Apparently the Plebbit devs do as well (or they think they can get away with a grift), and I hope there are lots of others out there quietly plunking away at their own project. I believe Lemmy will die eventually, and I'd really like to have an alternative ready.
So...
Start alternatives, on a host ypu maintain, and then everything can be ran perfectly how you want it to run
Problem solved.
That saves the service, but the communities are still dead. The problem is the single source of failure, and that isn't solved.
There is no real need for the kind of permanence you think you need.
Imagine if a building could only be a bar, for perpetuity, and nobody opened any other bars, because that first bar existed.
Bars would suck for like.... 99.99999% of the human population, huh?
Sure, but that analogy only makes sense when talking about real estate. With a distributed system, there isn't really a limit to what you can store, as long as someone wants to store it.
If someone can just take something down that you value, that sucks. You should never be forced to preserve something you don't want to, but you should also be free to preserve something you value. Communities should come and go naturally, not because someone decided to stop paying for a server.
All communities work like that...
Communities naturally come and go, and they change over time. That's fine. I'm talking about artificial deaths of communities because the nature of the platform changes (Reddit's closure of the API, a self-hosted platform disappearing due to cost/interest, etc).
How do ypu think communities "naturally" come and go?
Communities don't have heary attacks, or get a new child or something...
People lose interest and move on. That's how it works in in-person communities, and that's also how it should work in online communities.
Thats... literally what happens. Like when the owner of a bar calls it quit, and leaves.
That's different.
If I create a book club and lose interest, the rest of the group should continue on without me. I certainly shouldn't be obligated to continue hosting, but in a digital book club, nobody needs to host. That book club could continue as long as people are interested.