Plebbit is a fully peer-to-peer, decentralized alternative to Reddit Built on IPFS that doesn’t rely on centralized servers or federated instances like Lemmy or Mastodon. Instead of traditional infrastructure, .No single point of failure, no global mods with ultimate control, no admin backdoors.
In theory, this should mean true censorship resistance and user ownership of content. Communities (subplebbs) are moderated locally with cryptographic keys, and moderation actions are transparent and accountable. It’s a different model than just “federated social media” this is more like BitTorrent for discussion forums.
Do you think a system like this can scale in practice?
Can it maintain quality discussions without centralized moderation?
Will regular users adopt something this technical?
Is it really more decentralized than alternatives, or just differently centralized?
i don't want things to be censorship resistant. if i host my own instance and some asshole spams it with illegal porn, i want to be able to remove that shit.
It's a text based. No one can spam images
it specifically talks about image boards, and that posts are stored on ipfs, and that admins can't delete stuff, only hide it from new users. linking to images on ipfs is definitely possible in that case, and those will be up as long as the spammer seeds them.
Admins of communities can delete stuff. The doc was referring to global admins, there are no global admins on Plebbit.
also Plebbit nodes don't store images, we only store links to images hosted somewhere else.
delete, or hide? because if images are hosted on ipfs they'll be up as long as someone wants them to be, and in a content-addressable network you'll just be playing whack-a-mole with people linking illegal stuff.
There's a button in the UI to purge comment from your community as a mod. What will happen is:
Plebbit is text-only protocol, all images in the clients are links to image hosting websites.
i get that part, and i appreciate that you devs are here answering questions. i just don't understand how that will work if people who have already seen the content still have it cached and can help seed it. or am i understanding that wrong?
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
right, so it still exists, it's just not associated with me. idk if i'd be comfortable running something like that.
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
you're probably right that it doesn't matter for most people, but i've seen enough cases where illegal material is smuggled through the cracks of a system that i can absolutely believe that there will be groups committed to seeding and sharing removed content, possibly using a mainstream instance to post drops. then that instance gets implicated.
if you can post text, you can post base64-encoded data, incl. images
Biggest text you can embed is 30kb, and that is configurable by communities and they can choose to lower that