A few months ago, I posted here about my excitement for Plebbit and the promise it held for decentralization. I was convinced that a p2p social platform with a unique UI could be the future, with different UI of all social media…including Lemmy, a true alternative to centralized services. I saw the potential, and I wanted to believe in it.
Plebbit promised a lot of an innovative interface, decentralization, community driven governance. But after months of delays, vague updates, and little to no progress, it’s clear they never delivered. They had the right ideas but lacked the follow through to make them a reality. What was once an exciting project quickly turned into an example of what can go wrong when the hype overshadows the substance.
I wanted Plebbit to succeed, but in the end, I’ve realized that I’m better off sticking with what actually works.
If Plebbit had actually followed through on its promises especially with its vision of being a decentralized Reddit alternative. it could have been the best. The idea of a selfhosted platform, where users had true control over their content and communities, was a dream for those of us who wanted more than just another centralized app. It had the potential to be the go-to solution for anyone seeking real decentralization and p2p freedom. But unfortunately, that potential was never realized. Instead of delivering on its ambitious promises, Plebbit became just another project that failed to meet expectations, and the opportunity for a truly revolutionary platform faded away.
All the developers that care about not being on a Nazi platform have already moved to mastodon or bluesky.
Those that haven’t yet Imo, can suck Goebbels cock.
I’m personally planning to set up a bluesky account soon, but running a selfhosted instance doesn’t look easy yet
There’s no hosting needed for Bluesky, you can just create an account on their website, like any other website
But then who’s hosting my content and till when they’re hosting it?
Bluesky doesn’t federate, unless you have billions.
I’ve heard good things about self hosting with GoToSocial (federates with Mastodon) for single user instances
Our core problem with mastodon design is the same issue we have with email, eventually big hosters consolidate and they start banning people they disagree with. Now, in contrast you have a full p2p protocol like Bittorrent where you can download anything you want as long as you can find people to download it from. This is the model we’re going for in Plebbit
The problem (as matrix people found out the hard way) is some media & content is very illegal. Most individuals really don’t want even the chance of being exposed to CSAM or gore, and neither do server operators want the chance of that being shared from their server or written to their disk when that can result in police at the door. You need default-on moderation that is very powerful, and end users should never be distributing media they don’t want to. This pushes towards centralisation of nodes run by experts, and heavily punishes true P2P models.
Plebbit doesn’t support media or images, only text. If a user links to an image they have to provide the URL, which is never hosted on the community owner’s node. Also, if somebody posts an illegal link or something like that the community owner can choose to purge their comment from their node.
Plebbit nodes are very cheap and easy to run, we’re very similar to Bittorrent in that regard. The next update we will have full p2p capabilities in mobile as well.
Is it a problem though? There are thousands of email providers you can choose form, and they still work fine for sending and receiving email.
On social platforms federating with everyone might not be desired and defederation is seen as a feature not a bug.
One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.
An email provider as well as mastodon provider can:
Can I choose another email provider that will let me do what I want? Yeah maybe I can find one, or maybe I can run my one, but then these big email providers they’re gonna start blocking or throttling self hosters making it infeasible or extremely incovienet to run your own email instance.
Not to mention, there’s a financial + time cost to setting up your own email/mastodon instances that most people won’t bother with.
Look at Bittorrent or Plebbit as an example, running a full p2p node is literally a single click and nobody can censor you. The barrier of entry for self hosters is much lower.
Mastodon social controles a big chunk of the network, that’s not healthy imo. That’s a huge power of the network.
imo moderation of the network should never be at the center, rather it should be pushed to the edges of the network (users). I like Bluesky’s model of subscribing to someone’s labels of the content, and maybe we’re gonna have something similar in Plebbit as well. In Plebbit currently you can choose which communities you subscribe to, and you can also filter by NSFW and other tags, so you’re not really forced to see content you don’t like.
Also community owners set the rules for their own communities and enforce it however they like, there are no global admins.
Catering to CSAM is see.
If you’re going to talk about power Threads is the one to speak of and lots of hosts blocked it.
MAU 2-10k seems to be a sweet spot for alternatives to mastodon.social and that list combined is significant.
Bluesky’s modal ≠ no global admins
If somebody does something illegal, it’s up to the government to act on it. Also users of clients can choose to omit certain communities or keywords from their feed. This is a healthier approach than letting a few dudes in Silicon valley telling us what to see/think
Lots of mastodon hosts aren’t from the US.
It makes your choice of Twitter and Bluesky all the more questionable.
It sounds like you just don’t like being blocked.