this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
63 points (78.4% liked)

Selfhosted

53408 readers
355 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
63
Plebbit is the the most decentralized selfhosted social media protocol And why development slowed Down (github.com)
submitted 5 days ago by EstebanAbaroa@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Why did development slow down?

We spent a long time debugging and stabilizing IPFS-related issues that affected content reliability. These fixes were essential before building new features otherwise the protocol wouldn’t scale.

Is the team big?

No, the project is small, and the current budget only allows paying two developers. Progress is steady but slower because everything is done properly instead of rushed.

How does anti-spam work?

Each community chooses its own challenge: captcha, crypto ENS, SMS, email OTP, or custom rules. This keeps spam protection decentralized instead of relying on a global, platform-wide filter.

Why not use Mastodon/ActivityPub/Bluesky/Nostr/Farcaster/Steemit/Blockchain

mastodon / lemmy / activitypub Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances.

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.

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).

Is this running on ETH?

the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, it's a content addressed network like Bittorrent, built using IPFS/libp2p.

all 33 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago

How is the hosting changed when needed (e.g., a different IPFS address)? What happens in a coordinated attack by someone with 51% of the seeds, can they overwrite all of the content? Is there any cryptographic way to ensure the content hasn’t been maliciously altered?

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 18 points 5 days ago

Buddy are we gonna do this every 6 months? We know you're a crypto-grifting 4channer.

[–] talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago

Intriguing.

What's the mechanism for dealing with spammers?

In lemmy there's a clear escalation path that will lead to either the spammer's instance dealing with the issue or the instance itself being de-federated.

How would that work in a p2p system?

Each user having to individually block every spammer will work as well as it did for email back in the day.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

No sane person wants to run anything on the internet where they can't delete or block comments/users/other instances

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.

Sounds like freenet, though the obvious downside of freenet is that you have to have it running as a program before you access its sites.

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

You can do all the things you mentioned. If you're a user you can opt to block communities from showing on your feed, although eventually we're gonna have tags so people can mark SFW, NSFW and political, etc so devs can make clients that filters based on that.

Also if you're a community owner you can ban people from your sub, you're in full control of your community.

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Shit name

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

what's wrong with it

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

You want to be a pleb? Go join your other plebs there, lmao.

At least put the name through ChatGPT and check if is sounds like an insult, in any language.

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It's a social network for the plebs instead of corporate overlords. Sounds good to me

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

"Pleb" is generally used as a pejorative and is roughly equivalent to calling someone a peasant.

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Want more users? Ask what we think. It sounds bad to me and 9 others here.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Off the top of my head, I can immediately think of "civitt" as a better alternative - civilians instead of corpo overlords. Personitt. Hell, even "netizen" or some variation of that would be better. Zennet?

[–] glowie@infosec.pub 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Was NOSTR intentionally left out? Because it is way more decentralized than plebbit ever was.

[–] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 11 points 5 days ago

The normal guy who makes plebbit post is a grifter trying to shill crypto and blockchain so... Yes

[–] EstebanAbaroa@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Nostr still relies on federated servers, while Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer. It runs on IPFS, which works more like BitTorrent, basically pure P2P.

The problem with federated platforms is that their servers (instances) are not easy to set up, and regular users usually have zero motivation to run one. And even if they did, those servers aren’t really censorship-resistant at all. They behave pretty much the same as normal centralized sites.

Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get taken down by a DDoS attack, or cut off by the SSL provider, the datacenter, or even the domain registrar.

[–] oeuf@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 days ago

Sounds cool. I always wondered whether something like Lemmy could work P2P or like a mesh network.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Last time I checked it out there was a lot of racist spam. It seems better now. Maybe it was one bad actor or the spam filter is better.

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yes we had a lot of spam a few months ago but we cleaned it up by adding additional challenges and a white list for the time being till we get to MVP stage

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

White list? How did you build that list? How do new people get in the white list? Who controls the white list? When the white list goes away, do the racist or illegal posts return?

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

The whitelist is used by the communities we run, but anybody can run a community and they can ignore the whitelist. It's totally opt-in. Also, it's only temporary till we figure out a good sybil resistant challenge design with great UX

[–] cathfish@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

I don't understand on the white paper how it can be "like P2P" and have community with users. I misunderstood maybe but it seems that A creates a node and asks B to resolve a challenge to post on the node. And then any client can get the content from the node... Isn't that how every social platform works?

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Until Plebbit fixes how god awful slow it is, I won't be interested in it. Lemmy is decentralized enough for me.

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

Yes that's a problem on the web (working on it atm), but desktop apps should be much faster since it's pure p2p. Try out Seedit, https://github.com/plebbit/seedit

[–] FreedomAdvocate 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Instances cannot block a user

You’ll find very little support here then haha.

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You can block and ban people if you're the community owner though, the point is there's no federated instances that block people arbitrarily. Every community owner is in full charge of their community.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

So, if I'm on programming.dev and you're the owner/manager of lemmy.world, I can post on lemmy.world but you can't block me at all, is that right?

[–] rinse@lemmy.world 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're thinking in federation, it's a p2p network. Every user is equal to each other in terms of posting to each other communities.

If I'm hosting community then yes I can ban you, or assign mods who can ban people

[–] FreedomAdvocate 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ok so your original statement that I quoted is just 100% a lie lol. Off to a great start.

[–] K3can@lemmy.radio 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think it's like this:

Imagine Reddit, but every user stores a random piece of reddit in an instance on their device. They're all still normal users, so they can't block users from Reddit or from specific subs, even though their instance contributes to the whole. Their instance doesn't represent the entirety of Reddit, or even the entirety of a single sub, it's just a random chunk of Reddit.

BUT a user can be made a sub mod, which now gives them extra power over other users, but only in that one sub. It doesn't matter whether any portion of that sub is stored on their instance, all that matters is that they're a sub mod.

So you, as a pleb, have no control over what's stored on your instance, but a mod has full control over their community (which may or may not partially exist on your instance).

That's my interpretation, at least.

[–] FreedomAdvocate -2 points 3 days ago

So it’s exactly the same moderation as Reddit and Lemmy then, complete with all the power hungry mod bullshit.

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

> "most dezentralized"
> hosts on ShitHub

[–] FreedomAdvocate -1 points 5 days ago

I see someone doesn’t understand what GitHub is lol