this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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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] 20 points 2 days ago (14 children)

There's no real / true decentralization. You're always dependent on something, somewhere in some way. It can be harder to shut it down but there's also a point of failure somewhere. Blockchain is all fun and games until you've to consider resource waste and that you still need DNS and IPs working.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If we could achieve bittorrent decentralization along with their usage numbers, I'd consider it a success

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A few months ago, eh? I know nothing about and have no opinion on Plebbit. But shit takes time, especially open source volunteer efforts.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As someone who has never heard of that: What would have been its advantages over Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It was supposed to be a lot more decentralized than Lemmy. Plebbit was built around a p2p protocol and the idea was that it wouldn’t rely on servers, everything would be fully serverless and self-hosted in a true decentralized way. What made it interesting was that it was planned to support multiple UIs, so people could use different frontends like their own version of Lemmy’s UI, or even something totally custom. A Lemmy style UI was even on their roadmap.

But the problem is... it never really happened. It’s been super slow because there are only like 3 devs working on it, and they’ve been trying to find more help for ages. The MVP still hasn’t come out, and I think the crypto side of it just scared people off or made things harder. I really believed in the idea at first, but now it just feels like vaporware.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Yeah, I was pretty stoked for it too. As someone building something like this on my own time, I really want someone to beat me to the punch, because maintaining something like this isn't something I really want to do.

Building something like this is hard, marketing a project is hard, and getting the timing right is also hard (major usability issues solved before everyone comes to try it out).

But yeah, I'm still here until I find something better.

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