Nice essay, strong fud but we have safe guards against this. Users can back up or copy any subs they want, so if a sub owner goes insane, users can simply restore it, to exactly how it was. Sure the name will be slightly different since the previous owner owns the name, so p/games might now be p/videogames. But that’s a minor inconvenience. In fact multiple users can own a community which further safe guards it.

We will also remove communities that are toxic from our recommended subs list and replace it with the non toxic one. Alternatively users can create their on recommended subs list and share it round. Plebbit is open source so if we act nefariously, people can just fork it

You can create a plebbit client that uses DNS instead of crypto domains to resolve the addresses, but it won’t be compatible with our clients because we think that’s a terrible idea. The whole DNS system is a complete scam, it’s controlled by very few people, all in the same jurisdiction. There is absolutely no point to plebbit if most people will use .lol or .fun names that the US government can seize with no effort.

DNS is not the future, crypto is the future.

Who is “we” here and why do they get to decide what’s acceptable in my community (‘subpleb’ if you will)?

For our clients, “we” means us devs, the devs of Seedit and Plebchan. You can create your own client where you have NSFW profile pics, maybe resolved with regular centralized image hosting websites instead of NFTs like we did. Our NFT whitelist is only temporarily centralized, same as our default list of subplebbit addresses to show in the homepage of the client (before the user is subscribed to any sub). Both lists are here: github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits In our clients, we will decentralize this curation via gasless pubsub voting by token holders. There’s no other way to decentralize it, so this is another thing that crypto excels at (DAOs).

Yes. Reddit is A, ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon) is B, Plebbit (Seedit, Plebchan) is C:

As the FAQ says, the base protocol doesn’t use tokens. Meaning, there are no critical features tied to any blockchain.

The crypto features we implemented in our clients are not required by the protocol. The protocol works perfectly fine without them. We implemented them in our clients because they are nice, and they are:

• readable names using crypto names, instead of having to see long alphanumeric IPNS public keys as addresses
• NFT profile pics tied to a user’s plebbit account, because we whitelist the specific NFT collections to prevent NSFW profile pics
• tipping, which is an upcoming feature, to provide a fully decentralized alternative to Reddit awards/gold (plebbit users will actually make money, so will the community owners and admins since they’ll be able to tax tips in their community; and there’s no corporation/global admin that gets a cut)

It’s not a competing standard, it’s a whole new approach to decentralize forum-based social media.

ActivityPub is not fully decentralized, it’s a federated design, meaning it’s a network of instances, and each instance is just a regular website with servers. Anyone can run an instance, but it’s expensive, tiresome and you’ll get banned for it; they are regular websites.

whereas Plebbit is fully decentralized, it’s purely peer to peer, meaning it’s a network of peers where every peer can potentially be a full node by simply using the desktop app (or in the future, a non custodial public rpc on mobile), and you don’t have to run any site/domain for it, it’s censorship resistant just like running a torrent with a BitTorrent client.

Also to be clear: like ActivityPub is a protocol with clients, such as Mastodon and Lemmy, Plebbit is a protocol with clients, such as Seedit and Plebchan.