Why did development slow down?
We spent a long time debugging and stabilizing IPFS-related issues that affected content reliability. These fixes were essential before building new features otherwise the protocol wouldn’t scale.
Is the team big?
No, the project is small, and the current budget only allows paying two developers. Progress is steady but slower because everything is done properly instead of rushed.
How does anti-spam work?
Each community chooses its own challenge: captcha, crypto ENS, SMS, email OTP, or custom rules. This keeps spam protection decentralized instead of relying on a global, platform-wide filter.
Why not use Mastodon/ActivityPub/Bluesky/Nostr/Farcaster/Steemit/Blockchain
mastodon / lemmy / activitypub Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances.
Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities.
plebbit solves each problem:
instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community, because there are no instances, it’s directly peer to peer. a community node can be run from home on consumer internet, no server, domain name, SSL, sync time, etc. it’s as easy as running a bittorrent client.
it can scale infinitely because there are no historical ledger like a blockchain or hub, it’s like bittorrent, if a community no longer has any seeds, it stops existing. (this is also a downside of plebbit, but scaling is more important, not scaling makes the system useless) it has no cost to publish, like bittorrent, because is has no historical ledger that each node must sync. users seed their communities for free while they use it, like bittorrent.
a community node can communicate a challenge to a user to post to his community (like a minimum user account age, or karma, or a captcha, whitelist, etc), because it’s directly peer to peer, the community node is the instance, so it can gatekeep it however it wants. (this is also a downside of plebbit, a community node must be online 24/7, but it’s also possible to delegate running a node to an RPC/instance/hub, you just lose some censorship resistance, so it’s not inferior in this regards, it’s strictly superior because of the optionality).
Is this running on ETH?
the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, it’s a content addressed network like Bittorrent, built using IPFS/libp2p.
Was NOSTR intentionally left out? Because it is way more decentralized than plebbit ever was.
Nostr still relies on federated servers, while Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer. It runs on IPFS, which works more like BitTorrent, basically pure P2P.
The problem with federated platforms is that their servers (instances) are not easy to set up, and regular users usually have zero motivation to run one. And even if they did, those servers aren’t really censorship-resistant at all. They behave pretty much the same as normal centralized sites.
Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get taken down by a DDoS attack, or cut off by the SSL provider, the datacenter, or even the domain registrar.
Last I ever was hearing this pushed around the fedi the big ‘sell’ was that mods/admins can’t delete posts making it a ‘freeze peach’ platform.
The only people typically drawn to those are the people who tend to get banned for being intolerable on civilized platforms.
Although true, the existence of mods is an attack vector the criminally corrupt will always exploit, and every anti-authoritarian should not oppose these systems because they’re currently exploited by the corrupt.
Fascists are buying up all media and social media explicitly to silence opposition, control the narrative, and propagandize (the thing they claim everyone else is doing to them, while being the most blatantly criminal of perpetrators).
I can’t remember the specific protocol, but the one I saw which was most interesting relies on you subscribing to individuals, and building trust through that “social graph of trust”. It’s best to view it as someone owns a domain and you’re subscribing to their rss feed, except they’re identity is cryptographically verified, and the people they engage with have more weight in your feed than those that don’t… as opposed to whatever some technofascist algorithm, oligarch-beholden journalist or corrupt mod (who may very well be a paid operative) deems valuable or worthy of your attention; basically mimicking the way people build relationships in real life (without third party oversight).
