A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.
The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.
But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.
Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:
– Plebbit is serverless. – There are no global admins. – It does not rely on any central server. – It can’t be censored or taken down. – It works like BitTorrent, but for social media. – No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.
Every subreddit (called a "subplebbit") is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.
And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.
I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.
It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.
Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.
If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.
I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.
My question is... What does this do that ActivityPub and ATProto doesn't do? That's the angle you should approach this from (and be ready to defend... People on Lemmy seem adamant that ActivityPub is perfect and unbeatable...). We're technical people here, sell it as a technical solution to a problem rather than using buzzwords or comparing it to Bitcoin.
You've mentioned serverless many times, but ultimately I need to send content somewhere and ask someone to send me content. I can't just throw my posts into the wind and expect someone else to get them. So how do I make a post if not by sending it to a trusted person?
It's not serverless, of course. Each peer is a server and the peer that created the "sub" have control to be able to moderate things. You have to maintain your peer always online, because it's a server. Traffic happens over IPFS, which is sloooooow.
ActivityPub is not perfect, but this is just a channer wanting some freeze prach space he can control.
With Plebbit there's no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.
I mean, that's true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.