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
Can you host a node to earn its token?
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?
How long until this gets overrun with 🍕 and nobody wants to use it…
Not sure how moderation would even be possible with this model.
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.
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.
Not only is IPFS not built on solid foundations, offered nothing new to the table, and is generally bad at data retention, but the “opt-in seeding” model was always a step backwards and not a good match for apps like plebbit.
The anonymous distributes filesystem model (a la Freenet/Hyphanet) where each file segment is anonymously and randomly “inserted” into the distributed filesystem is the way to go. This fixes the “seeder power” problem, as undesirable but popular content can stay highly available automatically, and unpopular but desirable content can be re-inserted/healed periodically by healers (seeders). Only both unpopular and undesirable content may fizzle out of the network, but that can only happen in the context of messaging apps/platforms if 0 people tried pull and 0 people tried to reinsert the content in question over a long period of time.
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
Thanks for the detailed reply that helps, this sounds really interesting, with the late stage capitalism we are going through, I’ve lost all interest in private corporate controled social networks, hence the switch to Lemmy, but the instance owner is still a single point of failure with Lemmy but at least you can switch to another instance.
I have a few concerns about Plebbit though.
A - with torrents you know the size of the torrent beforehand and can decide if you can download it all and continue seeding it so long as you have the space for it on your drive, but with a forum like Plebbit, how would a user know how much space on their drive Plebbit will take for the Plebbit content they interact with. Is there a way to dedicate X gigabytes of limited storage space for it and anything above that gets purged to make space for new data?
B - One of the best uses Of Reddit imo is that it’s very easy to Google for something and find a relevant Reddit thread, especially for something niche, since Plebbit only keeps the most popular content and the rest goes away if not seeded, does it mean it won’t be a good for niche archival data, maybe that’s a use case that Plebbit isn’t design to handle and that’s okay.
C - Bots are a big concern for most social media, especially the ones used for spreading propaganda and misinformation, how does a P2P social forum like Plebbit plan to handle bots.?
So there are servers then…
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