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.
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.