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
sounds to me like it’s a much better match for piracy than for social networking (similar to using autodl-irssi)
From the whitepaper:
- The user completes the captcha challenge and publishes his post and captcha challenge answer over pubsub.
- The subplebbit owner’s client gets notified that the user published to his pubsub, the post is not ignored because it contains a correct captcha challenge answer.
- The subplebbit owner’s client publishes a message over pubsub indicating that the captcha answer is correct or incorrect. Peers relaying too many messages with incorrect or no captcha answers get blocked to avoid DDOS of the pubsub.
- The subplebbit owner’s client updates the content of his subplebbit’s public key-based addressing automatically
I may be misunderstanding how this protocol works, but at step 10 what prevents the owner from publishing the captcha answer as incorrect as a method of censorship based on the content of the post?
i don’t trust any messenger system that uses the word “serverless”. such a word is misleading, at best, and a scam more likely.
If there’s no central server then where is all the data stored?. With Lemmy I know the instance creator has to host it all on his own server.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Feature Lemmy Plebbit Hosting Model Federated servers (instances) Fully P2P (no servers) Who Stores Data? Instance owners (like Reddit mods running a server) Subplebbit owners & users (like torrents) If Owner Goes Offline? Instance still exists; data stays up The community disappears unless users seed it Historical Content Availability Instances keep all posts forever Older data may disappear if not seeded Scalability Limited by instance storage & bandwidth Infinite, as long as people seed
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! 🚀
How are users able to decide what they seed and what they don’t? Just because I viewed something doesn’t mean I necessarily want to support its proliferation.
Either way you still do. Think about it.
When everyone will have a 50G PON fiber connection at home, IPFS is going to be the standard serverless configuration.
2030? Everyone uses that date for everything futuristic
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no global admins, and no way shut down communities-meaning true censorship resistance.
“True censorship resistance” is not a desirable property. No normal user wants to deal with moderation. You need to have a structure for delegating moderation and such tasks to other people.
Can you host a node to earn its token?
How long until this gets overrun with 🍕 and nobody wants to use it…
Not sure how moderation would even be possible with this model.
No moderation seems like a recipe for disaster
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.
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.
Nowhere in the project whitepaper or FAQ does it talk about banning image hosting. Base64 encoding images in the text post is trivial, so maybe OP is the one projecting this intent or feature?
Technically cool, but it’s scary that it tries to emulate the anonymous, unmoderated shithole that is 4chan. Go to 4chan now and try to imagine something even more racist, nazi and unhinged.
This again? It’s basically lemmy but less secure, stop advertising it
