I'm here to address some FUD and questions from people who think Plebbit won’t succeed. Let’s talk about why peer-to-peer is better than all those other social media platforms
list of reason why P2P is better than:
- mastodon / lemmy / activitypub
- Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances. It's too difficult to run your own instance, you need to buy a domain name, server, DDOS protection, set up SSL, etc.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- bluesky
- Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own instance is difficult, your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won't be able to reach your users.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- nostr
- Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own instance is difficult, your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won't be able to reach your users.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- farcaster
- Hubs cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own hub is difficult (long sync time, lots of bandwidth/storage/ram), your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won't be able to reach your users.
- Hubs in general cannot scale infinitely as they keep growing forever, like a blockchain.
- Must pay $5 on optimism to be able to post, most users don't want to pay. Also can be censored by the optimism RPC or USDC.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
- steemit
- Blockchain RPCs cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities. Since running your own blockchain node is difficult (long sync time, lots of bandwidth/storage/ram), your user account and community will be blocked most of the time and you won't be able to reach your users.
- Blockchains in general cannot scale infinitely as they keep growing forever.
- Must pay blockchain transaction fees to post, most users don't want to pay.
- No mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.
plebbit solves each problem:
- instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community, because there are no instances, it's directly peer to peer. a community node can be run from home on consumer internet, no server, domain name, SSL, sync time, etc. it's as easy as running a bittorrent client.
- it can scale infinitely because there are no historical ledger like a blockchain or hub, it's like bittorrent, if a community no longer has any seeds, it stops existing. (this is also a downside of plebbit, but scaling is more important, not scaling makes the system useless)
- it has no cost to publish, like bittorrent, because is has no historical ledger that each node must sync. users seed their communities for free while they use it, like bittorrent.
- a community node can communicate a challenge to a user to post to his community (like a minimum user account age, or karma, or a captcha, whitelist, etc), because it's directly peer to peer, the community node is the instance, so it can gatekeep it however it wants. (this is also a downside of plebbit, a community node must be online 24/7, but it's also possible to delegate running a node to an RPC/instance/hub, you just lose some censorship resistance, so it's not inferior in this regards, it's strictly superior because of the optionality).
basically I was trying to think, which tech with the most adoption should decentralized/censorship resistant reddit be built on. and I thought about all the popular alternatives, mastodon/lemmy/bluesky/blockchains/etc and none of them are viable, it's simply not possible to build a sufficiently censorship resistant platform using these protocols, it must be P2P, and the most adopted P2P protocols are IPFS/libp2p, so even 3 years later, we made the only possible choice.
even if IPFS/libp2p are pretty buggy and difficult to work with, and that bluesky/nostr/lemmy already have adoption, it's simply not possible to build anything sufficiently censorship resistant with them, there are no choices other than the path we've chosen.