this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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112
Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy is Where I’m Staying (plebbit.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,

This isn't quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it's not distributed. It's decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn't your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.

They're not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.

Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).

DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures

I haven't looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.

I assume they're using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn't be an issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Man, I love a good nitpicking.

Lemmy is decentralized, but it's not distributed. It's decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn't your instance

It's a source of truth for you. It's locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.

Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there's nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that's on it. If they propagate a "delete" on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.

Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can't happen with Lemmy.

But it's also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.

Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn't be an issue.

They day they're not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯

I don't know. This post was the first I've heard of it, but since then I've seen a couple more "organic" posts asking if anyone thinks it's good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it's genuine interest. I'll wait a bit and see, personally.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they've prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I'm not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn't.

Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don't know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it's similar to Lemmy.

They day they’re not using DHT

I thought they're using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.

I'm working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I'm using a DHT. If they're using something else, that's potentially concerning. I haven't looked into Plebbit a ton though, I've just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I'm a bit of an outlier since I'm playing in the same space.