A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I think Activity Pub has a clear leg up in that you can be as decentralized as you're comfortable.
Want to go full one-person instance? You got it. Want to host for your friends and family? Covered. Want to host for the general public? Can do. Don't want to host at all? Pick your open instance and join the fun.
I love how all the developers working on it only have twitter links /s 🚩
The blockchain components meant it was dead on arrival.
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.
Yeah, that's a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they're linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there's no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.
For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It's a good solution.
I'm a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they're not using blockchain at all. It's some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I'm not really familiar with this project so I'm certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.
Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn't blockchain based, but it's run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all
If community owners want to set a blockchain name like hello.eth or hello.sns it's possible, but it's optional.
It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?
Not true, it's free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js
but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
What is the problem with DAOs? I think they're a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet
People constantly told OP that, but they just won't stop making posts about it
It sounds really cool, hopefully something similar will come one day, would be cool if one could create instances on github (or alternatives) for version control, posts would be markdown files, images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform (imgur, imgbb, etc.)
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)
The ui part would also be great, I really don't like discord's new one for example
nghhh maybe if I fail my university entry exam
I really don't think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you're going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.
Also, if you're doing the UUID thing, you'd have sort everything every time locally. That's fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it'll get bad, especially if you're dealing with files.
Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.
Agreed, I didn't think it through much, I just really like markdown
posts would be markdown files
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