Seedit is a selfhosted peer-to-peer Reddit Alternative using IPFS
doesn’t rely on any servers or instances .
We mainly use 3 technologies, which each have several protocols and specifications:
IPFS (for content-addressed, immutable content, similar to bittorrent) https://docs.ipfs.tech/ https://specs.ipfs.tech/
IPNS (for mutable content, public key addressed)
https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/
Libp2p Gossipsub (for publishing content and votes p2p)
https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
They also have a youtube channel where they cover how most of their tech works:
https://www.youtube.com/c/IPFSbot
the problem with federated social media is that each federated instance is just a regular centralized sites. They can censor each other, they can get taken down at any moment, and they are hard to run and manage. Whereas on p2p tech like bittorrent or bitcoin or plebbit, the p2p nodes don't require domains, they just work straight out of the box. On plebbit, you open the app, and you're instantly receiving p2p connections right away, just like a bittorrent client, no domain or server required. Users connect to your node directly, p2p, and nobody can stop you. P2P also scales infinitely, which is the reverse of centralized websites like federated instances: the more users there are, the faster it gets. And it's impossible to censor at scale.
Seedit is not Nostr
nostr isnt p2p, the relays can censor you, the relays can run out of money and shut down, the relays can get DDOSed, they earn no money to serve your content.
the people running the relays are probably legally obligated to censor you by their jurisdiction. for example in the UK you go to jail for mean tweets. the person running the relay with mean content would probably go to jail if they set foot in the UK.
CP
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the protocol is text only, to embed media, you need to host it on the regular ( Centralized ) internet, and then you link to it like https://example.com/image.jpg, and the host will stop hosting that image and report your IP.
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the community creator can assign mods, mods can remove posts from that community. if a community is badly moderated, the user will never see it, it wont be recommended to him. the user can visit bad communities directly just like you can visit a bad website directly, but it's not recommended to you so it's safe to use.
it’s the same as bittorrent , this p2p tech can’r prevent people from sharing stuff, but on seedit you can’t share media, it’s text-only so the liability falls to the centralized provider of the embedded media from the link the user shares as text. Also being p2p, seedit is not private, so it can’t really be used for illegal activity
About ActivityPub
the problem with federated social media is that each federated instance is just a regular centralized sites. They can censor each other, they can get taken down at any moment, and they are hard to run and manage. Whereas on p2p tech like bittorrent, p2p nodes don't require domains, they just work straight out of the box. On seedit, you open the app, and you're instantly receiving p2p connections right away, just like a bittorrent client, no domain or server required. Users connect to your node directly, p2p, and nobody can stop you. P2P also scales infinitely, which is the reverse of centralized websites like federated instances: the more users there are, the faster it gets. And it's impossible to censor at scale.
Also the code is fully open source
Yet is hosted on Github and presumably requires a working DNS and HTTPS system to download.
Except your ISP and/or government.
So your supposedly non-centralized project requires external hosting? It's like NFTs where the images were just worthless links. :P Also, uh, base64 encoding is a thing and clients will absolutely start supporting it.
... Isn't this what you've been trying to avoid?
Finally, a mention of content discovery. How is your recommendation system implemented? What decides whether a community is worth being recommended?
Wait... Isn't your whole pitch that it was censorship resistant? Can you clarify your threat model here, who are you actually worried about censoring your platform?
And using a completely unknown new service and protocol isn't? I'm sure there's tons of documentation out there for hosting Mostodon or Lemmy servers.
I agree with this, but not for the reasons you've stated.
P2P scales much worse than centralized systems. Centralized systems scale at N connections per node, while P2P systems scale at N^2 connections per node.
You know what, I don't mind this project. We need a place for far right people to go to to avoid "censorship" (getting banned from a subreddit for doing nothing but throwing slurs at people) and collaborate on their "plans" (killing minorities) on a platform that is "private" (easily traceable, unencrypted and linked to your IP address).
Incorrect, Seedit works similarly to a BitTorrent client, you just open the app and you're connected p2p to the communities, similarly to how you connect p2p to torrent seeders.
Your ISP and/or government can't stop you. Just like they can't stop you from downloading a torrent or using Bitcoin with a full node. They can make you life harder, tracking you, sending you to jail etc but they can't prevent the initial p2p connection.
Posting images isn't required. Why would you want to decentralize media hosting anyway (which is impossible)? To share CSAM? Not sure why you'd want to do that. Also, no, base64 encoding isn't allowed in the protocol, you literally can't publish it to the p2p network because there are character limits.
Nope, how would that make any sense? A community is such if it's moderated. If it's unmoderated, it's not even a community, it would be fully unusable because of spam.
Our clients use https://github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits also you can query the ethereum and solana blockchains for .eth and .sol domains respectively with text records/subdomains of value "subplebbit-address" (see: https://dune.com/plebbit/plebbit-protocol) and we'll support more decentralized domain systems later.
Again, it works like torrents. Torrents are censorship resistant, yet torrents aren't private because your IP address is in the p2p swarm. Law enforcement can use expensive fingerprinting software to catch the big fish, for very illegal content sharing.
Well, which is harder in your opinion, opening a reddit-like app and create a sub (and that's it, it runs a p2p full node automatically for the sub) or: buy a domain with ssl, set up the server, pay for the server, set up moderation for the whole instance, get censored, get sued, get defederated by other instances, prevent spam, etc.
You'll see the light.
Wrong. Real-world P2P systems don’t use full mesh and don’t require O(N²) connections. They typically scale with far fewer connections per node (e.g. O(log N)), while centralized systems hit bottlenecks at O(N) connections to a single server.
Plebbit is neutral, anyone can use it (left wing, right wing, apolitical etc), nobody can stop anyone from using it. And it can't get taken down nor shut down, it's eternal.
Uhh... No, your link is to Github. If Microsoft decide they don't like something you're doing, they can wipe your app off the surface of the planet. At least mirror it to Codeberg or something.
Same thing for Google and Apple by the way, if you want to make a mobile app. They don't like you, you're gone from their platform.
Honestly, if I were doing anything that required a uncensorable network connection, "avoiding going to jail" feels like it'd be one of my top priorities...
What are you going to do? Ask people politely to not do it?
Every time Plebbit has been shilled here, the advertising has always criticized "power-tripping" Reddit and Lemmy[sic] mods and tries to place itself as a "free speech" platform.
So your decentralised peer to peer platform has a list of curated nodes that must have nearly 100% uptime.
Just copy ATProto and use did identifiers with DNS. No need to use blockchain for name lookups.
Okay, this project has consumed too much of my time so... I'm probably just going to leave it here. However I do have some last thoughts.
I agree that ActivityPub does have centralization problems. It's mostly decentralized, but has problems with having many small kingdoms that tend to not always get along. I think that's something that ATProto gets right; your name and "instance" are decoupled so it's trivial to hop from one to another. And honestly, I think a Lemmy-like built on top of ATProto could work really well, and may even be better than AP based ones.
But... This project seems to be reinventing the wheel for no good reason. It ignores existing technologies in favour of venture capitalist scams. It has a very muddled set of priorities. The project management is sending out massive red flags. I don't have trust that this project will solve the problems with Lemmy and Reddit.