Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, 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.
it has no central server, database, HTTP endpoint or DNS - it is pure peer to peer. Unlike federated instances, which are regular websites that can get deplatformed at any time,
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chan, and have a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy. Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.
The code is fully open source on
There’s more abuse potential with full anonymity vs persistent pseudonyms
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The difference between 4chan and Reddit is pretty small, and abuse certainly happens on both platforms. It’s pretty easy to swap out a pseudonym (I used to do it every 2-3 years on Reddit), so the difference between that and completely anonymous posts is pretty small.
If you tie accounts to a persistent identity (e.g. Facebook), you have an opportunity to address abuse, but you open yourself up to even more tracking by the service and your government, which I think is worse.
For me, tying online accounts to actual identity (e.g. government ids) is a no-go for me, so the abuse problem needs to be addressed another way. For lemmy, that’s centralized moderation (per community and instance). For a P2P service, that means users opting-in to moderation (e.g. something like a web of trust), which should prevent them from seeing abuse in the first place since they won’t see untrusted content.