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
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.