Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy is Where I’m Staying
Plebbit Will Never Deliver, Apologies for the Hype, Lemmy is Where I’m Staying
A few months ago, I posted here about my excitement for Plebbit and the promise it held for decentralization. I was convinced that a p2p social platform with a unique UI could be the future, with different UI of all social media..including Lemmy, a true alternative to centralized services. I saw the potential, and I wanted to believe in it.
Plebbit promised a lot of an innovative interface, decentralization, community driven governance. But after months of delays, vague updates, and little to no progress, it’s clear they never delivered. They had the right ideas but lacked the follow through to make them a reality. What was once an exciting project quickly turned into an example of what can go wrong when the hype overshadows the substance.
I wanted Plebbit to succeed, but in the end, I’ve realized that I’m better off sticking with what actually works.
If Plebbit had actually followed through on its promises especially with its vision of being a decentralized Reddit alternative. it could have been the best. The idea of a selfhosted platform, where users had true control over their content and communities, was a dream for those of us who wanted more than just another centralized app. It had the potential to be the go-to solution for anyone seeking real decentralization and p2p freedom. But unfortunately, that potential was never realized. Instead of delivering on its ambitious promises, Plebbit became just another project that failed to meet expectations, and the opportunity for a truly revolutionary platform faded away.
I think Activity Pub has a clear leg up in that you can be as decentralized as you're comfortable.
Want to go full one-person instance? You got it. Want to host for your friends and family? Covered. Want to host for the general public? Can do. Don't want to host at all? Pick your open instance and join the fun.
The blockchain components meant it was dead on arrival.
The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they're the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?
Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.
Yeah, that's a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they're linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there's no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.
For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It's a good solution.
Not that the blockchain itself is a Bad idea, but after like a year or 2 of becoming popular it will be impossible for anyone to have a locally stored coin because they will be just multiple petabytes big
My understanding is the blockchain bit is optional and only used to establish ownership over a name. The posts and whatnot are not on a blockchain, that would be silly.
Plebbit is not a blockchain, it's P2P and all content on the network is content addressable. There's nothing to "sync"
I'm a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they're not using blockchain at all. It's some sort of
proprietary(edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I'm not really familiar with this project so I'm certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn't blockchain based, but it's run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all
If community owners want to set a blockchain name like
hello.ethorhello.snsit's possible, but it's optional.It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?
Not true, it's free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js
but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
What is the problem with DAOs? I think they're a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet
I love how all the developers working on it only have twitter links /s 🚩
What would you recommend instead? Seems like Twitter has the most reach, and until Plebbit reaches critical mass we need to reach out to people on popular platforms
I don't necessarily disagree with this in theory, as you gotta have some reach in order to spread your message. I forget the name of the particular situation (people don't use it because it's not popular, and it's not popular because people don't use it.....etc etc)
That said, Twitter is a cesspool. Bluesky has enough users that it shouldn't be an issue reaching out via that instead.
A few months ago, eh? I know nothing about and have no opinion on Plebbit. But shit takes time, especially open source volunteer efforts.
Yup. Seems like just mismatched expectations from OP. I hope to see news from the project, there are a lot of interesting concepts.
As someone who has never heard of that: What would have been its advantages over Lemmy?
It was supposed to be a lot more decentralized than Lemmy. Plebbit was built around a p2p protocol and the idea was that it wouldn’t rely on servers, everything would be fully serverless and self-hosted in a true decentralized way. What made it interesting was that it was planned to support multiple UIs, so people could use different frontends like their own version of Lemmy’s UI, or even something totally custom. A Lemmy style UI was even on their roadmap.
But the problem is... it never really happened. It’s been super slow because there are only like 3 devs working on it, and they’ve been trying to find more help for ages. The MVP still hasn’t come out, and I think the crypto side of it just scared people off or made things harder. I really believed in the idea at first, but now it just feels like vaporware.
"what made it interesting was that it was planned support miltiple UIs"
you may are interested into looking into the various LemmyUIs or Lemmy close alternatives like piefed when you like to test out frontends to see their quirksWe're still working on it and getting very close to releasing MVP
It sounds really cool, hopefully something similar will come one day, would be cool if one could create instances on github (or alternatives) for version control, posts would be markdown files, images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform (imgur, imgbb, etc.)
Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don't know if there's a way to auto update forks) so we don't risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don't use mastodon because apparently you can't export posts)
The ui part would also be great, I really don't like discord's new one for example
nghhh maybe if I fail my university entry exam
I really don't think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you're going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.
Also, if you're doing the UUID thing, you'd have sort everything every time locally. That's fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it'll get bad, especially if you're dealing with files.
Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.
posts would be markdown files
Seedit, which is a plebbit client actually parses posts as Markdown, try it on Seedit
images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform
It's already this way with Plebbit, we only allow text.
Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)
On Plebbit all clients are open source with GPL V2, they can also be self hosted easily with a single click. Check out seedit repository Seedit
Yeah, I was pretty stoked for it too. As someone building something like this on my own time, I really want someone to beat me to the punch, because maintaining something like this isn't something I really want to do.
Building something like this is hard, marketing a project is hard, and getting the timing right is also hard (major usability issues solved before everyone comes to try it out).
But yeah, I'm still here until I find something better.
Feel free to check out Seedit, it's the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we're working on it every day to make it better.