implementing control over seeding is on the list of things to do, not yet implemented. same with private communities.

Community moderation is the same as Lemmy/Reddit, Seedit community owners assign mods who have to keep the community clean, they can remove posts, mark them as nsfw/spoiler, ban users (from their community), banning a list of words or links to prevent users from publishing them, set up a mod queue (this is in the roadmap), etc.

It’s actually safer to run a community on Seedit, because it’s just a text file on IPFS that cannot include media files, and it’s not attached to any identity of the owner nor does it use centralized domains or SSL. There’s no IP logging, and the community owner can delete the community at any time, leaving no trace, since there’s no centralized database of communities.

And since all data is on IPFS, it’s not immutable, it can expire as soon as it has no more seeders. Compare this with blockchains, where text data is permanent, it can never be deleted once it’s in a block. Links to CSAM have been found in Bitcoin/Ethereum, and they can never get deleted.

Well, the name can be anything. Seedit is a client for the plebbit protocol, just like Lemmy is a client for ActivityPub protocol.

The same content that you see on Lemmy can be accessed from a different ActivityPub client, like Mastodon.

The same content that you see on Seedit can be accessed from a different plebbit client, like Plebchan. Plebbit will have countless clients, ie. different interfaces for the same data, each with a different name/branding/design.

Blockchains are perfect for anything that needs to be a token in an immutable ledger, such as domain names. We use them as extra, they are not needed but they are nice to have, to show a readable-name.eth or readable-name.sol instead of a long alphanumeric string, as address for plebbit communities and users.

Because lemmy is federated, it’s not decentralized. Instances run on centralized servers, using DNS, they can get deplatformed at any time and delete your data. They effectively work just like regularly centralized websites, and can block each other. Whereas on plebbit, each community is a node that can’t get deplatformed (works like torrents, ie no domain/DNS/SSL) and users connect to it p2p. So, to run a lemmy instance, you have to run a whole site, whereas to run a plebbit node you just have to open the desktop app and browse the site with it. Creating a sub with your node is free, just like creating a torrent file.

We constantly back up all our code, yes. If our GitHub repos ever get taken down, we’ll just switch to GitLab, Codeberg or Radicle.

old.reddit was open source, also seedit is fully open source under GPLv2 license and it can’t get taken down (it’s serverless, and it’s hosted on IPFS)

edit: also, for example, there’s old.lemmy.world

Cool. If you want your subplebbit to be featured in our apps, ie shown in the homepages with all our users auto-subscribed to it, DM us its address or open a pull request on https://github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits

At the moment, the only requirement is 99% uptime (and the sub shouldn’t be about illegal stuff ofc, but it can be nsfw)

Yeah, we need better communities, most of them are poorly maintained at the moment. But some of them are cool, like technopleb.eth, plebpiracy.eth, plebmusic.eth, movies-and-anime.eth. You can check out the full list on https://seedit.app/#/communities/vote (this is a maintained list of default subs to show in the app, but you can connect p2p to any sub whatsoever if you know its address, just like you can download any torrent with a torrent client)

spam

each subplebbit has its own admins, who set up an anti-spam challenge which gets sent p2p to users when they publish to the sub. The cool thing is these challenges can be anything that can be code (anything: including PoW if they want to get spammed, or SMS auth, a captcha, a whitelist, a password, a time-based or usage-based challenge, biometrics to fight AI like worldcoin, whatever regularly centralized social media sites will end up using to fight spam)

csam

all data on plebbit is text-only, you cannot upload media. All media you see is embedded from centralized websites, with direct links, meaning if you post a link to csam from some site like imgur, imgur will ban you, take down the media (the embed returns 404, media disappears) and report your IP address to authorities. Plebbit is also not private, it works like torrents, your IP is in the swarm (even though the app and community can’t see it, authorities can track it and figure out what you seeded, just like with torrents)

Seedit is fully p2p, it’s not federated, meaning there’s no “instances” in the federated sense. You just download the app or go to seedit.app, connect directly to a community, using its address, and you publish to it. It’s like torrents, you’re also seeding back content you receive (that’s why it’s called seedit, but seeding is fully automated at the moment, maybe it will be possible to selectively seed communities in the future)

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Nice essay, strong fud but we have safe guards against this. Users can back up or copy any subs they want, so if a sub owner goes insane, users can simply restore it, to exactly how it was. Sure the name will be slightly different since the previous owner owns the name, so p/games might now be p/videogames. But that’s a minor inconvenience. In fact multiple users can own a community which further safe guards it.

We will also remove communities that are toxic from our recommended subs list and replace it with the non toxic one. Alternatively users can create their on recommended subs list and share it round. Plebbit is open source so if we act nefariously, people can just fork it

we use IPNS for mutable data (like upvote counts, reply counts, etc) https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/ and gossipsub for an author node to communicate their publication to a community node https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/

Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.

The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don’t have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS’d, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.

Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there’s nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you’re always reachable by any user on plebbit.

Steemit is A, it’s a regularly centralized website with global admins, claiming to be “decentralized” simply because it’s built on a blockchain. Whenever you are asking yourself whether something is “decentralized” or not, ask “how can I run a full node”? “What are the hardware requirements”? Steemit admins won’t answer those questions. Whereas you can easily spin up your own ActivityPub (Mastodon or Lemmy) instance (even though those instances work like regularly centralized websites, at least you have the option to run your own).

On Plebbit, just using the desktop app of a client (like Seedit’s desktop app you can download here means you are running a full node already. The app runs an IPFS node in the background, seeding all content you browse automatically, thereby improving the speed of the network for everybody else. The more nodes there are, the more decentralized the network is, so if all users can easily run a node and are incentivized to do so, then the network is properly decentralized/distributed. On Seedit, you can’t run a community if you don’t run a full node (the community is the node, acting like a server, and users connect to it P2P). There are no global admins.

You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won’t be compatible with our clients because we think that’s a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it’s controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.

DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.

Who is “we” here and why do they get to decide what’s acceptable in my community (‘subpleb’ if you will)?

For our clients, “we” means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There’s no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).