So every user is their own moderator… which just sounds like a ton of extra work
Once we have the labeling services it will be easy and a single click to use someone's else labeling.
Also each community moderate however they see fit, as a community owner you're incentivized to keep their community free of spam and derailing posts etc.
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.
P2P is superior to federation in many ways though
Keyword filtration as a moderation technique is woefully ineffective vs trolls who simply find “clever” new ways to harass with intentional misspellings, dogwhistles, etc.
I agree, but it's not just keywords, it's community-based labeling services, so you could have 10+ people labeling on a single content-labeling extension. You could also have AI agent sifting through the network and labeling content with minimal human intervention.
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.
Plebbit is text-only, images are not hosted on the protocol anywhere. Although you can embed a link to an image within your comments or posts. Eventually we will think of a design for p2p image hosting but it's not high priority right now, also it could be abused easily.
Locate bob given a name or some other ID
At the moment we use key-value trackers similar to bittorrent trackers, Bob in this sceneario would post their content CID (content identifier, similar to hash) with addresses they can be reached through (quic, webtransport, websocket, https, etc).
If we assume Bob in this is a community with human name like cats, then the backend of Plebbit will resolve the text records of the domain to find its IPNS address, which then can be queries from trackers to find Bob, or anyone else who has the content of Bob's community.
Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
Plebbit uses IPFS for its backend, which is based on content-addressing. You always get what you ask for.
Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
Each comment/vote/edit published by users to communities is signed with ed25519 keys.
Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it
Depending how you connected to Bob, if you connect over a websocket or any encrypted protocol it will encrypted and nobody can snoop on you.
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.
I decided to take a look through the boards and it only took me less than a minute to find the n word being used.
We have no control over that as the devs, but you as the user can choose to filter by tags/keywords/NSFW etc. If you go to the settings in Seedit you will find the option.
In its early days the internet was used mostly for porn as well, it doesn't make sense to dismiss a whole project based on disagreements with people using it.
Oh, and all the accounts are truly anonymous, rather than pseudoanonymous, which must make moderation a nightmare. Moderation being technically possible doesn’t make it easy or practical to do.
That is up to the sub owner, they can mandate a SMS challenge or any kind of KYC challenge if they would like. Users who get banned will automatically be disregarded by the of the swarm.
I don’t want an unmoderated experience by default, either.
The moderation is on the community level, there are no global admins. If you run a community, you can moderate it however you like, or assign somebody to moderate it for you.
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
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
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
You don't need the token to post or create your own community or anything like that. Our plans for the token is to be used for tipping (in a decentralized manner, without relaying on payment processors) and voting within Plebbit clients (which is up to the client dev).
serves only to enrich the owners
Assuming Plebbit token gets massive appreciation, we now as the community have a lot of funds to spend on developing new clients to replace centralized web2 platforms like:
Discord
Telegram
Meetup
Vbulletin
Discourse
Facebook groups
A project appreciating in value is not a bad thing, it's not a bad thing when you pay developer teams to push p2p decentralized social media.
Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy
The token is not forced upon anyone, and even if we start including it in the clients somehow, anybody can fork the clients and remove any token related stuff out of it.
Tokenizing your own project is a great way of supporting development without selling shares to VCs who only care about hyper growth, regardless of the ideals of the project.
Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.
Not sure what you mean by that, everything we do is out in the open.
Plebbit is text only, hard to imagine the kind of illegal material that will be sneaked that way. If anybody want to share illegal material, they're probably using tor not a pure p2p solution which is easier to trace.
99.99% of cases won't matter because most people won't seed random content forever. If the sub owner purge it from their node, I highly doubt anybody else would come across it unless there's like a group dedicated to seeding and sharing removed content
Once we have the labeling services it will be easy and a single click to use someone's else labeling.
Also each community moderate however they see fit, as a community owner you're incentivized to keep their community free of spam and derailing posts etc.
P2P is superior to federation in many ways though
I agree, but it's not just keywords, it's community-based labeling services, so you could have 10+ people labeling on a single content-labeling extension. You could also have AI agent sifting through the network and labeling content with minimal human intervention.