Federated has many of the pitfalls of emails like a few providers holding most of the network captive, we believe a full p2p design similar to BitTorrent is the best way forward for full sovereignty of communication.
A global DHT unfortuantely is extremely resource intensive, and part of our design requirements is full p2p capabilities for both mobile and web browsers. This cannot be achieve with a DHT, although if a DHT design emerges with support for both, we will consider using it.
Next update for plebbit-js will have full p2p capabilities including gossipsub using libp2p/helia in browser/mobile! We're excited to ship that.
Feel free to check out Seedit, it's the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we're working on it every day to make it better.
I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.
Plebbit is not a ledger, it's a P2P protocol and has no DHT. Peers find each other by coordinating over HTTP routers, which are similar to bittorrent trackers. HTTP routers are essentially key-value stores so they're very easy to deploy.
The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they're the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?
Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.
What would you recommend instead? Seems like Twitter has the most reach, and until Plebbit reaches critical mass we need to reach out to people on popular platforms
Seedit, which is a plebbit client actually parses posts as Markdown, try it on Seedit
images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform
It's already this way with Plebbit, we only allow text.
Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)
On Plebbit all clients are open source with GPL V2, they can also be self hosted easily with a single click. Check out seedit repository Seedit
Federated has many of the pitfalls of emails like a few providers holding most of the network captive, we believe a full p2p design similar to BitTorrent is the best way forward for full sovereignty of communication.