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I think Activity Pub has a clear leg up in that you can be as decentralized as you're comfortable.
Want to go full one-person instance? You got it. Want to host for your friends and family? Covered. Want to host for the general public? Can do. Don't want to host at all? Pick your open instance and join the fun.
I love how all the developers working on it only have twitter links /s 🚩
The blockchain components meant it was dead on arrival.
The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they're the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?
Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.
Yeah, that's a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they're linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there's no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.
For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It's a good solution.
People constantly told OP that, but they just won't stop making posts about it
Not that the blockchain itself is a Bad idea, but after like a year or 2 of becoming popular it will be impossible for anyone to have a locally stored coin because they will be just multiple petabytes big
My understanding is the blockchain bit is optional and only used to establish ownership over a name. The posts and whatnot are not on a blockchain, that would be silly.
Plebbit is not a blockchain, it's P2P and all content on the network is content addressable. There's nothing to "sync"
I'm a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they're not using blockchain at all. It's some sort of ~~proprietary~~ (edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I'm not really familiar with this project so I'm certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.
Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn't blockchain based, but it's run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all
If community owners want to set a blockchain name like hello.eth or hello.sns it's possible, but it's optional.
It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?
Not true, it's free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js
but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.
What is the problem with DAOs? I think they're a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet
So, from what I've read, and you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.
If that's the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you've done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.
So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I'd say I have two problems.
Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy
The token is not forced upon anyone, and even if we start including it in the clients somehow, anybody can fork the clients and remove any token related stuff out of it.
Tokenizing your own project is a great way of supporting development without selling shares to VCs who only care about hyper growth, regardless of the ideals of the project.
Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.
Not sure what you mean by that, everything we do is out in the open.
There's no real / true decentralization. You're always dependent on something, somewhere in some way. It can be harder to shut it down but there's also a point of failure somewhere. Blockchain is all fun and games until you've to consider resource waste and that you still need DNS and IPs working.
I don't take issue with your points, but you're conflating issues. I think it's worth clarifying some terms up front.
Being utterly independent isn't necessary for decentralization. Decentralization very specifically means there's no single holder of the data; it does not have any implication for dependencies.
Lemmy is not decentralized; it's federated. "Decentralized" and "federated" are not synonyms, and as long as you doing don't run your own server, you're effectively on a centralized platform. This is to your point about being "always dependent on something, somewhere in some way." It's true for Lemmy; it is not true for all systems, not unless you're being pedantic, which wouldn't be helpful: you being dependent on electricity from your electric company doesn't mean an information network can't be "truly" decentralized.
A distributed ledger can be truly decentralized. Blockchains aren't always distributed ledgers, and not all distributed ledgers are blockchains, but whether or not a specific blockchain is resource intensive has no bearing on whether or not it's centralized. This is the part I take issue with: it's irrelevant to the decentralization discussion.
Bitcoin is decentralized: no single person or group of people control it, and there is no central server that serves as an authoritative source of information. If there were, it wouldn't be nearly so ecologically expensive. Its very nature as something that exists on equally on every single full node is part of the cost. You can take out any node, or group of nodes, and as long as there's one full node left in the world, bitcoin exists (you then have a consensus verification problem, but that's a different issue).
But let's look at a second, less controversial, example: git, or rather, git repositories. This is, again, fully decentralized, and depends on no single resource. Microsoft would like you to believe that github is the center of git, and indeed github is the main reason git is as popular as it is despite its many shortcomings, but many people don't use github for their projects, and any full clone of any repository is a independent and fully decentralized copy, isolated and uncontrolled by anyone but the person on whose computer it exists. Everything else is just convention.
Nostr is yet another fully decentralized ecosystem. It is, unfortunately, colonized almost entirely by cryptobros, and that's the majority of its content, but there's nothing "blockchain" or crypto in the core design. Nodes are simple key/value stores, and when you publish something to Nostr you submit it to (usually) a half-dozen different nodes, and it propagates out from there to other nodes. If you run your own node, even if your node dies, you still have your account and can publish content to other nodes, because your identity - your private key - is stored on your computer. Or, if you're smart, on your phone, and maybe your laptop too, with backups. Your identity need not even be centralized to one device. No single group can stop you from publishing - individual nodes can choose to reject your posts, and there are public block lists, but not every node uses those. It is truly decentralized.
I'm not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they're trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There's no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures. Jami is a good example of a project plagued by DHT sync issues. I'm not surprised they're taking a long time to get stable, because this is a hard problem to solve - a deceptively simple problem to describe, but syncing hides issues like conflict resolution, updating published content, and all the administrative tools necessary in a world full of absolute shitheads who just want to cause chaos. It does look to me as it it would be fully decentralized, in a way Lemmy isn't, if they can get it working reliably.
Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,
This isn't quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it's not distributed. It's decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn't your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.
They're not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.
Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).
DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures
I haven't looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.
I assume they're using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn't be an issue.
Man, I love a good nitpicking.
Lemmy is decentralized, but it's not distributed. It's decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn't your instance
It's a source of truth for you. It's locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.
Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there's nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that's on it. If they propagate a "delete" on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.
Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can't happen with Lemmy.
But it's also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.
Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn't be an issue.
They day they're not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯
I don't know. This post was the first I've heard of it, but since then I've seen a couple more "organic" posts asking if anyone thinks it's good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it's genuine interest. I'll wait a bit and see, personally.
Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they've prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I'm not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn't.
Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don't know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it's similar to Lemmy.
They day they’re not using DHT
I thought they're using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.
I'm working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I'm using a DHT. If they're using something else, that's potentially concerning. I haven't looked into Plebbit a ton though, I've just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I'm a bit of an outlier since I'm playing in the same space.
There’s no real / true decentralization
That's not exactly true.
That said, you do need some form of centralized service to connect peers, but you can federate those. It's only job would be to connect peers, and a STUN server w/ TURN fallback is usually the approach here. These instances don't need to store any data long term, they just need to connect peers, and the client is free to choose any instance they want, or host their own.
That's how Tor works (entry nodes), and most decentralized systems use a similar system.
One of the best parts here is that offline often just works, and you can sneakernet around firewalls (e.g. if you visit China or something), and all you need to do is connect to a local relay to find local peers.
Blockchain
My understanding is it's only used for name resolution, so the number of data points here should be in the thousands, not millions or billions, so the resource usage should be minimal.
Basically, the blockchain is functioning as DNS here.
A few months ago, eh? I know nothing about and have no opinion on Plebbit. But shit takes time, especially open source volunteer efforts.
Yup. Seems like just mismatched expectations from OP. I hope to see news from the project, there are a lot of interesting concepts.
As someone who has never heard of that: What would have been its advantages over Lemmy?