There will be no way for new people to discover the purged content through the community itself.
Now, if you had the CID of a purged content and there are people seeding it to you, then yes Plebbit functions like any P2P network in which anyone can fetch a content that's seeded by somebody
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
Sure, I’m just worried it’ll have similar problems as reddit, just without global admins to fix/enforce things
I disagree, I think Reddit ruined their own subreddits. If you're a community owner, you know your community best and know how to moderate it. They're the most invested in it after all.
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.
An email provider as well as mastodon provider can:
Read incoming messages
Block me from sending messages to specific people
Block me from fetching content I want
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.
One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.
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.
Each community (equivalent of subreddit) is essentially a keypair, and whoever runs the community and has access to the keypair can do whatever they want. They can ban people + assign moderators + etc, there are no global admins.
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
There will be no way for new people to discover the purged content through the community itself.
Now, if you had the CID of a purged content and there are people seeding it to you, then yes Plebbit functions like any P2P network in which anyone can fetch a content that's seeded by somebody