Plebbit is pure peer-to-peer social media protocol, it has no central servers, no global admins, and no way shut down communities-meaning true censorship resistance.
Unlike federated platforms, like lemmy and Mastedon, there are no instances or servers to rely on
this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people.
Plebbit only hosts text. Images from google and other sites can be linked/embedded in posts. This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit UI and new reddit, 4chan, and have a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy UI . Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.
anyone can contribute, build their own client, and shape the ecosystem
Important Links :
Home
App
https://plebbit.com/home#cb2a9c90-6f09-44b2-be03-75f543f9f5aa
FAQ
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md
Whitepapers
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper
https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2
Github
https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-react
https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-react/releases
No moderation seems like a recipe for disaster
Well from their site
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.