A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.

The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.

But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.

Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:

– Plebbit is serverless. – There are no global admins. – It does not rely on any central server. – It can’t be censored or taken down. – It works like BitTorrent, but for social media. – No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.

Every subreddit (called a “subplebbit”) is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.

And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.

I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.

It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.

Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.

If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,

https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper

please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.

I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.

  • Rinse - Plebbit Dev@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I don’t want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed

    You can choose to filter those out, for example Seedit by default filters out NSFW content. Eventually we’re gonna have labeling services, similar to Bluesky where you can subscribe to someone’s else labels of spam/nsfw/etc.

    because if my client happens to cache anything illegal

    Plebbit is text-only protocol, also it is end-to-end encrypted. Also you could set your own node to never seed anybody else’s content.

    The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it’s basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.

    We’re not a crypto project, we do have integrations with crypto, like blockchain name systems but that’s a good thing because they’re more censorship resistant than traditional DNS