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Welcome to Plebbit

Overview​

Plebbit is a protocol to create serverless, adminless, fully decentralized social media.

  • Serverless: Plebbit is built completely with IPFS/IPNS/pubsub. It doesn't use any central server, central database, public HTTP endpoint or DNS, it is pure peer to peer. This means that social apps built on Plebbit+ cannot "go down" as a whole.
  • Adminless: Plebbit has no global admins or global moderators; it is truly peer-to-peer, nobody can stop you from connecting to another user directly, if the user is online. Every user has full property rights over their own content, which they can monetize how they want, and moderate how they want.
  • Fully decentralized: unlike "federated" or blockchain-based social media, running a Plebbit full node is extremely easy, as easy as opening a desktop app and keeping it running, and it works with only ~4GB of RAM, a few GBs of storage and a regular internet connection (few GBs pf bandwidth per month).

Similarly to how BitTorrent works, Plebbit nodes automatically seed content to other nodes, so the more nodes there are, the faster the network gets. Running a full node takes a few seconds, since there is no blockchain to sync.

Plebbit clients​

Plebbit clients are different social media applications that use the same plebbit protocol data. This means that you can use the same account on different user interfaces, and your posts, comments, likes, etc. will be the same.

Existing Plebbit clients are:

  • Seedit, a decentralized reddit alternative
  • Plebchan, a decentralized 4chan alternative
  • Plebones, a barebones interface, mainly for testing
  • plebbit-cli, a command line interface for Plebbit

Plebbit is a permissionless protocol, so anyone can create their own Plebbit client, and we encourage you to do so. All code is open source, and you can find the code for the existing clients on GitHub.

Why Plebbit?​

Centralized social media platforms are a problem, because they are controlled by a few companies that can censor content, ban users, and even take down entire platforms. Social consensus is being replaced by corporate consensus.

Plebbit is a revolutionary protocol, because we believe it is currently the only working design in existence for truly decentralized social media that can scale to millions of users.

Truly decentralized communities​

Plebbit's design is based on communities, which can take the shape of a forum, a subreddit, a 4chan board, a facebook page, etc. Users connect peer to peer to one or more communities, from which they read or write content. Plebbit can fully decentralize community-based social media of all kinds, including reddit, 4chan, old-school forums, but also crowdfunding platforms, blogging platforms, facebook groups and pages, meetups, etc.

You can read the whitepaper here.

Plebbit's core innovation: spam resistance​

What truly distinguishes Plebbit from any other "decentralized" social media solution is its solution to spam: fully arbitrary anti-spam challenges, exchanged p2p, customizable by each node to anything that can be code.

When you publish to a plebbit community (a post, vote, comment or edit) you receive an anti-spam challenge from the community's node, fully peer to peer, and the challenge is arbitrary to the community, meaning it can be anything that can be code. It could be a password, an SMS, a PoW challenge, a puzzle, a biometric login, it could require karma or a token, a payment... etc; it could be anything.

This means that Plebbit clients are as reslient from spam as any centralized or decentralized site could ever be. Whichever anti-spam solution will win against AI spam for example, plebbit nodes will be able to use it. It's up to them.

Read more about Plebbit's arbitrary anti-spam challenges here.

Plebbit's future potential​

Unlike Plebbit, in user-based social media like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc the user reads and writes content to another user's profile, and all profiles are stored in a central database that cannot be fully decentralized. However, it's entirely possible for Plebbit to provide a more decentralized alternative to user-based social media, by treating each user as if it were a community, via public RPC nodes for every user, assigned non-custodially. This is on the roadmap.

Because of this, we believe that Plebbit can effectively replace virtually all centralized social media platforms.