An open source Peer-to-peer serverless decentralized social media protocol built on IPFS

Well from their site

Moderation

Since there are no global admins, the administrative control of a subplebbit rests solely with its creator. No one else can moderate content or accounts unless the subplebbit creator grants them permission.

So, it's not that there's no moderation. It's just "subplebbit" creator/delegates controlled as there is no over arching site wide company able to moderate it on the whole.

It will mean, as a user, you'll have to be liberal with removing subplebbits from your own feed though. I'm sure there will be some.. not so pleasant subplebbits appearing.

I was there for the early days of Voat, which was an earlier version of a Reddit clone. Those first few months were nice, but it quickly devolved into a hate-filled N*zi safe haven.

Fediverse has an early version of a bot problem, which is ubiquitous in all social media these days (thanks to state actors and also corpos that want you to think/feel a certain way). idk how the fediverse is handling the bot problem, but for now it seems to be less noticeable here than other places.

If the platform is truly "free speech" without any moderation, then it will quickly devolve into worse than 4chan.

Voat is gone now, which is a good thing, but if you have an programming background you can use an LLM to study the way it self-destructed by looking at the archive.org snippets. See how it quickly became theDonald but worse.

That is what will happen to this un-moderated decentralized social media protocol.

The communities moderate themselves with their own admins, just like on reddit. The difference is, there's no global admins that can censor communities or enforce global rules. However, the plebbit app developer can basically act like a global admin by blacklisting connections to certain communities. I predict the most popular plebbit apps won't include such blacklisting functions.

Plebbit is like BitTorrent, there's no global BitTorrent admin. You use a BitTorrent client (like uTorrent) to download torrents, and the client could technically blacklist your torrent. You use a plebbit client (like Seedit) to download a subplebbit, and the client could technically blacklist your subplebbit.

It's entirely possible that more centralized plebbit clients will be created, to be published on app stores for example, and they will implement whitelists of safe communities to participate in, blocking any other community.

I bring this point up every time I see someone pushing the idea of P2P or federated social networks with no moderation and no one has a solution for it yet. Because there isn't a solution.

It's like these people don't even want to look at existing social media with minimal moderation. It doesn't take long on 4chan and other less reputable *chan style sites to see that no matter how much you want to shake off the chains of overbearing moderators, there is a bare minimum moderation necessary for any social media to survive.

Even social media sites on TOR have moderation.

When even the darkest, least moderated cesspools online still have some minimal moderation, it should be a massive neon sign that there needs to be some moderation functionality.

there's no 🍕 because ALL data on plebbit is text-only, you cannot upload media. We did this intentionally, so if you want to post media you must post a direct link to it (the interface embeds the media automatically), a link from centralized sites like imgur and stuff, who know your IP address, take down the media immediately (the embed 404's) and report you to authorities. Further, plebbit works like torrents so your IP is already in the swarm, so you really shouldn't use it for anything illegal or you'll get caught.

You can't encode base64 images on plebbit, each fiels has a character limit. Obviously centralized links, from which media is embedded, will be taken down by the relative centralized website.

You need to have a structure for delegating moderation and such tasks to other people.

We actually have it: since there's no central database of communities, who decides which ones appear in the homepage of the apps to first-time users? We use a "default list" of communities, which is effectively moderated (vetoed) by the app developer. This is the only "global admin" we basically have, but it's only for the app itself, not the protocol, and it still doesn't stop users from connecting p2p to the community (depending on the app, some plebbit client developers could implement blacklists).

The owner can obviously moderate and thereby censor, anyway. Thats not the kind of censorship free this thing advertises. Its not more or less censored as lemmy is when instance hosts do moderation.

nothing prevents it, the sub owner can put a challenge that's impossible to solve to troll people. it's required that this be possible otherwise the sub owner wouldnt have full control over what the challenge is.

a lemmy instance could do the same thing so it's not really an issue, the fix is just dont use subs / instances that dont work.

Do you mean spamming faulty captcha answers to trigger the DDOS protection on the peers?

Great question! Unlike Lemmy, which relies on federation with dedicated servers, Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer (P2P) and does not have a central server or even instances. Instead, storage happens via a combination of IPFS and users seeding data. Here’s how it works:

Where Is Plebbit's Data Stored?

1. Subplebbit Owners Host the Data (Like Torrent Seeders)

   • Each subplebbit owner runs a Plebbit node that stores and republishes their own community's data.
   • Their device (or a server, if they choose) must be online 24/7 to ensure the subplebbit remains accessible.
   • If a subplebbit owner goes offline, their community disappears unless others seed it—very similar to how torrents work.

2. Users Act as Temporary Seeders

   • Any user who visits a subplebbit automatically stores and seeds the content they read.
   • This means active users help distribute content, like in BitTorrent.
   • If a user closes their app and no one else is seeding the content, it becomes unavailable until the owner comes back online.

3. IPFS for Content Addressing

   • Posts and comments are stored in IPFS, which ensures that popular content remains available longer.
   • Unlike a blockchain, there is no permanent historical ledger—if no one is seeding, the data is gone.
   • Each post has a content address (CID), meaning that as long as someone has the data, it can be re-fetched.

4. PubSub for Live Updates

   • Plebbit uses peer-to-peer pubsub (publish-subscribe messaging) to broadcast new content between nodes in real-time.
   • This helps users see new posts without needing a central server to pull updates from.

What Happens If Everyone Goes Offline?

• If no one's online to seed a subplebbit, it's as if it never existed.
• This is a trade-off for infinite scalability—it removes the need for central databases but relies on community participation.
• Think of it like a dead torrent—no seeders, no content.

Comparison With Lemmy

Bottom Line: No Servers, Just Users

• With Lemmy: The instance owner has to host everything themselves like a mini-Reddit admin.
• With Plebbit: The subplebbit owner AND users seed the content—no one has to host a centralized database.
• If something is popular, it stays alive.
• If something isn't seeded, it disappears, just like torrents.

It’s a radical trade-off for decentralization and censorship resistance, but if no one cares about a community, the content naturally dies off. No server, no mods deleting you from a database—just pure P2P.

Hope that clears it up! 🚀

It's stored in each plebbit node. Each subplebbit runs a custom IPFS node for plebbit, with its text-only database, which is the content you see in the app. Peers download it and seed it back.

I agree in general, just like the word "decentralized". But in this case it's legit, because it simply means it's p2p. I'd call bitcoin "serverless" as well, so it's BitTorrent and IPFS. Plebbit is exactly the same: you open the desktop app and it runs a p2p node automatically in the background, to run your subplebbit, and users connect to it peer to peer. Your p2p node is not really a "server", because it doesn't require any centralized domain to function, it uses transport protocols and peer discovery instead.

Hopefully! That way all the crypto bros will concentrate there and leave normal social media alone.

nobody is running the matrix server at the moment, if you are interested in running it dm @estebanabaroa on telegram