17 ms·

Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

317 points by estebanabaroa 3y ago

metadat 3y ago
What on earth.. is this captcha some kind of joke? https://ibb.co/3yW9mjj https://ibb.co/3yW9mjj I'm a human but it's not clear what the "challenge" even is that needs to be completed. And after you get it wrong, it doesn't kick you out, it just flashes a toast message like "User failed captcha". Twilight zone material.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  Write the alphanumerics connected by a green line, i.e. connect (connected) the dots. I dunno, I immediately recognised it .
  - metadat 3y ago
    I swear I tried that.. guess I'm a bot ^^
  - nailer 3y ago
    What is the final character? It looks like a backwards 7 or Cyrillic G.
    - comex 3y ago
      It’s just 7. How is it backwards?
      - GenerocUsername 3y ago
        Careful, don't teach the bots. Just let them fail to recognize. There is literally a 7 in the image on the keyboard proving it's not backwards.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- computerlover 3y ago
  Bot detected
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Maybe ChatGPT with an image recognition plugin could help us solve these
- DefineOutside 3y ago
  Agreed, this is a terrible captcha because O and 0 look nearly identical but it fails you if you mix up these two.
- webinvest 3y ago
  I just hit accept with a blank input and it accepted it
IndigoIncognito 3y ago
https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/p/politically-incorrect.eth https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/p/politically-incorrect.e... Oh no....
- quazar 3y ago
  Do you still have that resource list? The links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260345 are expired.
makotech221 3y ago
Took about 15 seconds to download the app and display the first few posts. Come back in another 2 years.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
Is there any settings to not make it look like new reddit? If I was building a new site I wouldn't copy the godawful empty space design they forced on everyone
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  We have an imageboard interface https://plebchan.netlify.app/ https://plebchan.netlify.app/ and currently working on an old.reddit interface. Other interfaces that are planned are stackexchange, discourse and vbulletin. The protocol is completely open and the code open source. Anyone can make any number of interoperable interfaces.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    Thanks for the info! I'm intrigued by the different interfaces for the same content. I'll definitely keep an eye on this when reddit dies in a couple weeks!
  - Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
    you might want to copy the teddit interface too
- abhayhegde 3y ago
  Well, the FAQ at [1] quotes that a different UX is not a goal: > The goal is to recreate Reddit exactly, the exact same UX, except without servers, DNS, global admins, global moderators, lawyers, regulations, corporate greed, etc. [1]: https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md#q-wasnt-the-point-of-this-platform-free-speech-this-sounds-like-it-would-do-the-opposite https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md#q-w...
jeroenhd 3y ago
I don't know why but this somehow taxes my CPU more than the official Reddit site, which is kind of impressive in a way. The theme itself is a good Reddit replica, but I don't think IPFS has the necessary performance to run apps like these. Maybe it can live become a Lemmy frontend for the FOSS/fediverse crowd?
- George83728 3y ago
  The number of third party domains this site needs to hit to even load any posts on the front page is insane. I'm looking at a list of domains like "etherscan", ipfs gateways, pokt... all kinds of shady sounding bullshit and it isn't at all clear to me what I would need to whitelist to get this site to work: http://0x0.st/Hbkj.jpg http://0x0.st/Hbkj.jpg Yes I know this is "my fault" for being a weirdo who doesn't blindly let his browser hit any server a website pleases. But I use this to judge the quality of a website, the care and professionalism that was put into it. This plebbit site is awful by this metric even compared to new reddit; with new reddit merely whitelisting *.reddit.com is sufficient to view a list of posts, and whitelisting 3 more domains (all clearly reddit-affiliated: redd.it, redditmedia.com and redditstatic.com) is enough to make the site behave as it should.
  - Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
    its just a bunch of IPFS and ETH gateways. I haven't tried it myself, but I think there's a desktop application you can install that connects to IPFS natively. I don't know if they're running their own ETH node, but probably not.
  - mry2048 3y ago
    I use noscript and while normally I’d agree with you about the number of reqs to 3rd party domains being an inverse indicator of quality, I think in this case it just means the client application is marshalling its own connections to broader p2p system without a fancy experience api layer.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    Welcome to dApps where everything requires centralized gateways or you must run half a dozen of your own full nodes with 1TB storage each.
thih9 3y ago
Hug of death? On ios (firefox focus) I’m getting: > FetchEvent.respondWith received an error: no-response: no-response :: [{"url":"https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/ https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/"}]
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
So does this mean each subreddit creates and hosts their own entire “Reddit clone”?
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  Each community owner must run a node 24/7 to seed his own community's content via IPFS. Similar to how you need to seed a torrent you client. There's a GUI client so it's very easy, you just double click and leave it open. It's also possible for centralized services to run communities for people, so it's technically possible to run a community without having to have any device run 24/7 yourself.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    Is there a headless "client", so one can run a community on a raspberry pi or server?
    - estebanabaroa 3y ago
      there's a CLI client yes https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-cli/releases/latest https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-cli/releases/latest
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    friendly reminder that IPFS is not usable anonymously and it will reveal your IP to everyone
witheld 3y ago
The content you’ve linked really does a good job at showing how completely decentralized P2P social media is a terrible, terrible idea.
- nelox 3y ago
  Yep, it may be technically of interest, but devoid of any modicum of social nuance or sophistication.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Yes because Reddit gets its sophistication from being centralized and VC owned? The quality of Reddit is created by the users. If they used a P2P platform the content would be of high quality.
- geysersam 3y ago
  Decentralized does not mean there's no moderation. 4chan is centralized but the content can be... We don't need big companies to help us do quality moderation. Quite the opposite. P2P social media is a fantastic idea.
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't snarkily dismiss someone's work. If you want to contribute constructively, there are plenty of other ways to bring this point. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - witheld 3y ago
    One of the first posts I saw was the N word over and over
    - dang 3y ago
      That's no excuse for posting bad comments yourself. A big internet forum like HN gets tons of crap comments. Most eventually get moderated, but not all; and even the ones that get moderated take time before we see them.
sosodev 3y ago
It's weird to use the name "plebbit" considering that's the derogatory term for Reddit used by 4chan folk. It's like begging for this to be a dumping ground for some of the worst human behaviors. Does the decentralized nature mean that illegal content can't be easily be removed?
- user- 3y ago
  > It's weird to use the name "plebbit" considering that's the derogatory term for Reddit used by 4chan folk. It's like begging for this to be a dumping ground for some of the worst human behaviors. i think thats the obvious intention. Just scroll down the page to see what the user base is.
  - marisnom 3y ago
    And that makes it nothing more of a joke website to me even if it's impressive under the hood
    - antifa 3y ago
      Impressive? It didn't even finish loading for me lol.
- theprincess 3y ago
  You'll also notice that the logo makes the face from the "NPC" memes that would have still been popular among the 4chan "politically incorrect" crowd right around the time this project was allegedly started. Sadly, for enterprising edgelords, Elon has usurped them all by turning Twitter itself into the ultimate "alt-tech" app. Like, seriously, unless you want to share illegal pornography, why not just share your spicey maymays on Twitter where they'll get more reach? Impressive amount of follow through regardless. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/angry-npc-wojak https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/angry-npc-wojak
- zadler 3y ago
  Well, theyve been working on it for 2 years, you expect them to be normies?
Madmallard 3y ago
[flagged]
- rejectfinite 3y ago
  nooo you have to heckin moderate!!!
Diti 3y ago
Not compatible with the fediverse? I’ll stay on Lemmy.
- lucideer 3y ago
  The fediverse is federated (it's in the name). This is distributed (P2P). They're fundamentally different concepts in the underlying protocol so compatibility is a bit odd to think about here. There are certainly overlaps in the two concepts and certain parts of them can be compatible to a small extent: a bunch of people have compared Bluesky Social's AT protocol to SSB despite the former being federated & the latter being p2p. But similarities aside they can't really be compatible at protocol level.
- George83728 3y ago
  Is it true that Lemmy censors casual profanity like "bitch"? I first heard of Lemmy a few days ago, in the context of somebody dismissing it because it allegedly performs such censorship.
  - Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
    there is a regex filter in the code to censor many words
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    The default instance is worse than reddit for censorship.
  - FireInsight 3y ago
    It does. This doesn't make the concept doomed, though, being on the Fediverse it's already interoperable with Kbin, a hybrid microblogging and link aggregation platform. A capable person with different views could fork Lemmy while keeping compatibility, and that has happened many times with other Fediverse software.
londons_explore 3y ago
Visually nice... Content is terrible... Speed is atrocious... Alas, I don't think it's yet ready for primetime. Is it fixable in a week?
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  >Alas, I don't think it's yet ready for primetime. Is it fixable in a week? We are 4 devs working full time on it. In my estimate it should be pretty smooth in around 1 year. We should also have an old.reddit interface as well for people who hate the new interface.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Who pays for your time? Or is this 3 years of free work?
    - estebanabaroa 3y ago
      I'm paying for it from my savings, around $300k so far
      - zadler 3y ago
        Nice going! How can I get in touch with you?
        estebanabaroa 3y ago
        twitter: estebanabaroa tg: estebanabaroa discord: estebanabaroa#2853
      - ranger_danger 3y ago
        LOL
      - wise_young_man 3y ago
        You spent that much on this so far? How do you plan to get a return?
londons_explore 3y ago
Technically this project is very impressive... But the user experience is terrible. I think to have any success, you need to let the p2p features take a backseat, and build a lot of centralised content moderation tooling. You can plug the p2p bit into the centralized bit with a config URL for "List of allowed moderators" and have it default to a bunch of trusted people, who effectively have whitelist/blacklist/supervote abilities. Then you need to populate it with a bunch of good content to start off with.
Havoc 3y ago
Congrats - seems pretty functional from a technical perspective
mvdtnz 3y ago
[dead]
AHOHA 3y ago
People are arguing about the contents, which is kind of shallow, it can be always managed in some way later. I’m more interested in the technicality, what’s the protocol, the architecture, how file are saved and served, encrypted? How about the minimum X to run the service, is it P2P as in all clients serve or only select few nodes? Who manages and operates these nodes? Is it a honeypot? Among others. Regardless, It’s always good to see new concepts or alternatives sites, just like old days with forums.
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  high level whitepaper: https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2 https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2 the protocol is a light protocol over IPFS/IPNS/Libp2p Gossipsub IPFS files (JSON/base64): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#schema https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#schema Gossipsub protocol messages (CBOR): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types There's also a FAQ https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md
  - imtringued 3y ago
    There is a disdain for federated protocols but I hardly see how this is any different except that there are no explicit federation features. The "subplebbit" owner acts like the operator of a Mastodon or Matrix instance except as mentioned above, those were designed to aggregate data across instances. The fundamental problem with these decentralised platforms is that they want to get rid of the human element but if you just let anyone get away with anything and everyone rehosts everyone else's data unconditionally, then you get something like zeronet which has its own Reddit clone. The problem with zeronet is that people advertise their illegal porn on your supposedly "family friendly" Reddit clone and your users involuntarily download it and make themselves criminally liable. Whether something should be legal or not is a philosophical question, someone has to make a decision and then enforce it. Any platform where users are allowed to upload arbitrary information requires moderation. There is no way around this. The only benefit of a decentralized app is that you can have smaller self hosted communities. I spent a lot of time evaluating the technical viability of decentralised apps and honestly you should avoid it even if your use case requires it.
12345hn6789 3y ago
Hate to be that guy, but why opt for the new reddit look? This is already coming out of the gate on the wrong foot. The UI is slow and has so much unused white space.
- SadTrombone 3y ago
  Not a fan of their UI being absolutely covered in NFT/.eth links either.
- shagie 3y ago
  Old reddit, while nice and textual is server side rendered. If you are dealing with P2P not fetching everything in one go (and thus suffering some async performance issues) is better than trying to render it all at once. That's part of the "why of new.reddit"... which makes sense for some aspects of its infrastructure. Yes, I prefer old.reddit because it renders everything at once and the layout is simpler. But if you're waiting on the network more than the CPU, new.reddit style is probably better. The UI being slow is because loading stuff from cloudflare-ipfs.com is slow. Trying to get it all at once for a 30 card rendering would be even slower if you're waiting for ipfs.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Old reddit had a compact design that filled the page. New reddit and plebbit both have huge margins on the side, tons of white space between boxes, etc. It's got nothing to do with server-side rendering.
londons_explore 3y ago
Musk claims the only solution to bots in 2023 is paid accounts. I kinda agree with him. There is no captcha that's going to keep out determined spammers. Even reddit is filled with bots. You either try to eliminate bots through paid accounts, real ID verification... Or you filter based on quality of content (ie. bots are allowed to post, as long as what they say and do is indistinguishable from a human - like reddit does). Whats the anti-spam plan?
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  >Whats the anti-spam plan? the community owner must configure some challenge exchange between his node and the users publishing to his node. the challenge is completely arbitrary, it can be a whitelist, a password, a super complex interactive game, sending a picture of your passport, account age, minimum karma, a combination of all these things, etc. Since it is arbitrary, it will evolve with time. Any method (already invented or invented in the future) that centralized platforms use to filter AI spam can also be used, but over P2P.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > Whats the anti-spam plan? User moderation in focused spaces! Its the same reason Discord/Telegram kind of works, the same reason small niche subreddits (and Hacker News) are still OK, the same reason dedicated game servers are so much nicer than public matchmaking in video games... They have a hierarchy of users who are motivated and empowered to police their own reasonably sized niche space. Twitter can't do this, but maybe Twitter should not exist as it does now. Reddit the company wouldn't really like this either, as they would have rather have mainstream mega-subreddits over collectively smaller niche subs.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > User moderation in focused spaces! Remember the bots can make their own spaces too... And then lure real users in with a bunch of chatgpt-like and/or stolen content...
    - 3y ago
RobotToaster 3y ago
So do you get a captcha every time you vote? that's quite annoying.
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  soon we will add the ability for the community owners to let users bypass challenges if they have X amount of karma or account age.
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    You should look into POW captchas like mcaptcha or powcaptcha. It's a far better user experience.
    - estebanabaroa 3y ago
      the challenge exchange between the authors and community owners are arbitrary, they can be anything the community owner can code and that the author client understands, so POW is possible, but I'm not sure it would stop spam properly, a server can do a lot POW for cheap. Maybe combined with another challenge.
squarefoot 3y ago
Already vandalized through shitty trollish posts. Sadly, in this Internet and era you can't build a healthy community without some form of moderation.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  When was it ever true that public discussion didn't require moderation? We live alongside a pile of mush brained, mouth breathing dullards whose single and only goal in life is for somebody to vote up their latest brain fart and be told what to think. Largely we excluded these people from conversation with social cues and sold them back their prejudices via red-top newspapers, which mostly kept their brain farts and prejudices suppressed. For better or worse, you can't do that with the internet. Facebook and twitter seem hell bent on not only encouraging their appalling behaviour but amplifying it. The only way to stay away from them is to stay ahead of them and stay away from any medium these idiots think is "their place".
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Unfortunately, those people vote.
    - smackeyacky 3y ago
      They do vote and they should vote. That to me is quite different from deliberately inflaming them to other actions. edit: what I mean by that is that facebook, twitter and reddit and 4chan should be held directly responsible for the violence they foster. "we're just a communication mechanism" doesn't cut it anymore. Their promotion algorithms are very different from being a telephone company
      - mikrotikker 3y ago
        Yes they do not deserve section 230 protections as the algorithm makes them a publisher.
dom96 3y ago
Every time I see social media recreated in a decentralised fashion I realise why the successful ones are centralised. The loading times of this are dreadful and I don't see how you'll be able to solve that problem when you're relying on P2P. In any case, it sounds like we'll be getting many new Reddit clones so I may as well plug what I've built recently: a Reddit alternative API that is free. Check it out if you're a dev that is being caught out by the Reddit pricing changes[1]. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com
- smt88 3y ago
  > The loading times of this are dreadful and I don't see how you'll be able to solve that problem when you're relying on P2P. It's easy enough to centralize a caching layer, perhaps through a popular CDN.
  - all2 3y ago
    Why not a bittorrent style peering mechanism? Popular content will always have pools of people who are consuming it. I've had an idea in the back of my head for what would make a decentralized video service work, and it plays with the idea of peer driven networks. So, there a few kinds of people on the network: advertisers (hang in there, I'll explain why), leechers (or consumer), content producers, and seeders. The prime relationship is between a consumer and a content producer. Every other part of the network is designed to support and benefit their interaction. First, a content producer creates a piece of content (or steals it, let's be realistic) and publishes it on the network. Attached to the content is a pay-per-view requirement; the producer has elected to require payment to view this content. This money can come from one of two places: first, an advertiser can bid on slots the producer has chosen, second, the consumer can pay the producer directly. The producer doesn't have a choice whether the consumer pays or not, only that payment is required. Requiring payment for the content is optional, but advisable. You see, the producer has a second order relationship with the seeders. The producer can't possibly feed a million viewers in the first hour. That would be a very difficult task. But what a producer can do is elect to provide a percentage of their required income to seeders. Now there's a financial benefit to seeding a popular video/song. The producer can set their payments to whatever they want. The market may equalize itself. Finally, we have advertisers, which are the monetary fuel for the fire. Most viewers will tolerate ads and wont want to pay money; so instead they pay time. An advertiser can bid on slots in as precise or general way as they want. If they want to bid on a specific creator's video slots, they can. If they want to bid on a broad category of creators or videos, they can. Etc. This won't ever be truly decentralized, and there is a whole ecosystem of services external to the network that would be needed for this to function well (payment processors, content collation and moderation -- kind of like how mastodon works, a bidding marketplace for advertisers to interface with the content network, a front end for seeders to select and re-seed, and so on). I don't have the technical hutzpah to build out something like this. I wish I did. Is there someone out there who wants to be a technical mentor? I'd be game. -- [edit] There should be more and less granularity in how different parties engage. Some people want to pay 10 bucks a month (Amazon Prime) and forget about the rest. Some people want to pay per view. Advertisers might want to target specific creator's channels or whole segments of created content. Creators might want to be able to never even think about ads and just check a box that says "put an ad in front of every video I upload" and then forget it. Or a creator might want to put ads in videos longer than a certain length. And so on. What I've specified above is loosely conceived and would need a lot of thought to turn it into something useful.
superkuh 3y ago
notabug.io was significantly better than this. The code is still on github for anyone who wants to try now that there's another wave of reddit exodus. https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug
jetbalsa 3y ago
While impressive, I don't think IPFS can scale to any kind of real load that even a fifth of the users of reddit using this could handle. Its a super heavy daemon and if its just gateway users there is still a little bit of centralization going on. Like who runs "pubsubprovider.xyz" that most of the data is being relayed with? same with "plebpubsub.live"
- estebanabaroa 3y ago
  you can see the list of providers in the settings page, and you can add your own providers to the list (for example your local IPFS node) https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/settings/plebbit-options https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/settings/plebbit-options the idea is that if there's 100 providers eventually, and only 1 needs to not censor you to get your content, then it's unlikely you will be censored we plan on adding IPFS webrtc and webtransport at some point, to reduce the need and load on the ipfs gateways, and whatever new that comes out that can help the browser/mobile clients. For example https://iroh.computer/ https://iroh.computer/ seems promising the desktop client is fully P2P, it bundles an IPFS node, and the only requests it makes are through the IPFS node. (technically it makes one request to github for default communities, but we will remove that at some point). Also if your community or username uses a human readable name (optional), then you need to resolve that name somehow, we can technically support any name system anyone makes, and that might or might not be P2P.
b59831 3y ago
Rdrama has already done it... did it better too
euix 3y ago
The site is definitely slow, but not so much that it is intolerable (at least in my experience). It's a interesting idea but I think 4chan, as the internet watering hole, has the core audience captured already and has done so for the last 15ish years. I am curious as to what the marginal value is here.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway81523 3y ago
I don't think technology is the problem here. Rather, it is the evergreen gullibility of humans, showing their willingness to trust their communities and memories and volunteerism to corporations which then seize control of everything. We had a P2P and open source Reddit alternative 40 years ago, called Usenet. But people fell for a centralized one run by a company once it came along, like they always do. May Reddit's fate end up looking something like Digg's and AOL's.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  I agree with your main point: tech isn't the problem here. But a minor quibble: USENET wasn't exactly peer-to-peer. I mostly got to USENET through my university or ISP's NNTP servers. If I wanted to start a new group and get you involved, I would've had to set up my own NNTP server for you to connect to, using either your NNTP client or your own NNTP server.
  - rcarmo 3y ago
    OR you could talk to the newsmaster and have that one set up and propagated.
    - rahimnathwani 3y ago
      Right, but she could reject or ignore my request.
- slg 3y ago
  [dead]
- charcircuit 3y ago
  usenet didn't have a karma system
  - alrs 3y ago
    Sure it does, that's why people PGP-sign their posts.
est 3y ago
Lots of 403 in api. Monthly capacity limit exceeded. Visit alchemyapi to upgrade your scaling policy for continued service.
dbg31415 3y ago
The first post I read was full of hate speech. Instant turn off. It’s not the technology that is hard to replace, it’s the community and it's the moderators. Reddit took what, 10+ years to sort of clean up? You want a discussion site, but you don’t want the top posts to be from horrible alt-right incels… it’s a hard problem to solve. Also, the load time on that site was abysmal.
smackeyacky 3y ago
This might be a rather obvious and stupid suggestion, but why don't all the 3rd party apps just get together, agree on a "new reddit" and move to that. If their users are more loyal to the app than to reddit, problem solved. It just can't be that hard to hack together a nested newsgroup-like system in this day and age.
- shagie 3y ago
  Spinning up the backends that are strong enough to support the load that the 3rd party apps put on it isn't a trivial undertaking. Note also that many of the apps were designed to not have advertising or monthly subscription costs. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... > Apollo made 7 billion requests last month What does it cost to stand up that server? Establish the core group needed to moderate the site to not have it turn into eternal spam or content that they'd rather not serve site? Pay the lawyers needed to make sure they've got NSFW and copyright take down requests handled? It's not impossible... but the "bunch of people start up a new site" misses a lot of the technical and social aspects of barn raising ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising ). The advantage of reddit for the backend is: > BarnRaising is part of the difference between SlashDot and wiki. With SlashDot the barn is already raised - the OpeningStatement already written - before you start, and everyone just sits around bitchin' about it.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    Fair enough, it's not a trivial undertaking and I suspect reddit knows that as part of their shakedown strategy. I still feel like the various protests going on indicate the space is absolutely ripe for an alternative and being a bad alternative might just be good enough.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    7 billion averages to about 2300/sec and most of that is reads. I also looked at the requests appolo makes and it polls the inbox a lot. The only maybe difficult part is paying for storage. But this isn't large scale at that size, scaling is solved anyway.
gmerc 3y ago
[flagged]
webinvest 3y ago
The loading time need to be improved & sped up to under 2 seconds. Ideally a quarter of a second. It’s doable — one thing to do is serve a cached page first. At the time of writing, the 1st page load is 14 seconds and subsequent page loads are 7 seconds.
sammy2255 3y ago
Aaand its down
tsuujin 3y ago
The first post I saw on this site was an anti-trans post using some really offensive terms. I did not bother exploring further.
sedatk 3y ago
There is Aether since forever for that. https://getaether.net https://getaether.net
- dvasdekis 3y ago
  So sad he never went Open Source, it would have been so instructive for us mortals
  - FireInsight 3y ago
    Who is he? Aether is FOSS. https://github.com/aethereans/aether-app https://github.com/aethereans/aether-app
    - dvasdekis 3y ago
      Apologies - you're correct, but it's a very early version on Github. The author hasn't updated the public open source repo in yonks.
maria1998zx 3y ago
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RF_Savage 3y ago
How does this compare to Aether?
- FireInsight 3y ago
  Being less functional and more offensive? Oh, and this one has a literal official 4chan-style UI.
FireInsight 3y ago
This shows why I choose to believe in federation rather than full peer to peer decentralization after years of searching for a good enough peer to peer social media protocol. Not to even mention the content, the site is slow asf, and instead of allowing people to host their own "instances" with multiple communities, they host just the communities with IPFS and pay for ENS domains. This makes the barrier to entry to creating new communities way higher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36204984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36204984
csomar 3y ago
I am not sure why you went for the new Reddit UX which is both horrible and hated instead of the more "simple" text only UI. This had also the side effect that you managed to do it worse (probably by combining a bunch of React components) and the whole thing is slow and non-responsive.
simfoo 3y ago
I think decentralizing and p2p is the wrong approach to solving the issue with commercialized social networks. What we really need is a non-profit & transparent & independent governance setup. Financing should happen through donations, maybe grants but certainly not ads. A bit like Wikipedia mixed with Mozilla, but even more transparent.
- medo-bear 3y ago
  we need centralized communications even more than we need centralized file sharing. while we are at it, centralize the whole internet. heck, centralize and regulate every form of human interaction, digital or otherwise
peterpost2 3y ago
And there is already nazi shit on the frontpage. No thanks!
nottorp 3y ago
Hold on, judging by the comments here it just a different Reddit frontend right? Can’t call it an alternative if it browses reddits content.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bestest 3y ago
Terrible. It's slow, UI is jaggy, everything feels so clunky. I didn't know it's possible to make it worse than current reddit. Apparently I was wrong.
- azangru 3y ago
  No ads tho!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dvdkon 3y ago
I don't think full P2P or Lemmy-style federation is the right way to make a decentralised Reddit alternative. P2P systems aren't great for mobile devices that can't/shouldn't be full peers, not to mention moderation issues. And ActivityPub-style federation where accounts belong to one instance and content is copied across instances has many problems, which a Reddit alternative needn't have. Reddit content is already perfectly stratified into subreddits, so I think anything that's primarily a decentralised Reddit alternative should use the same principles. Instances should host subreddits with floating user identities, and content from one instance should always stay on that instance. This solves things like moderation (it basically stays the same as on Reddit, but you get to choose your instance) and legal content attribution. In a way, it's a continuation of the "independent web forum" model that Reddit supplanted.
- remram 3y ago
  What you're describing is actually very much like Lemmy. Communities are on a specific server, you just use federation to post from your account (instead of creating a local account every time) and as not much more than a frontend. Your local instance just provides your customized browsing interface and identity and talks to the server hosting the community over the API.
  - dvdkon 3y ago
    I'll admit I don't know much about the specifics of Lemmy, so I assumed it has the same issues as Mastodon. There's still the issue of defederation? And notifications (new post/reply) are sent to the home instance of every subscribed user and include content, right? I think it would be better to send only small "something's new" push notifications, having the client reach out for any data or even metadata. Also, having user identities be cryptographic keys could solve the defederation problem, but I understand that the user experience would be very atypical. Restricting moderation drama to one particular instance is to me a very important feature of decentralised systems, and the possibility of being excluded from the larger community over such drama is a serious fault, even if that's probably less likely with Lemmy.
opatdchan 3y ago
It improved a lot since the last version I tried, much faster especially. Nice work, and good luck.
Randomizer42 3y ago
SIA decentralized solution.
Meph504 3y ago
Captcha challenge to upvote is a pretty poor design choice. having it consistently not recognize accurate input is problematic also.
pvo50555 3y ago
[dead]

317 points by estebanabaroa 3y ago

What on earth.. is this captcha some kind of joke? https://ibb.co/3yW9mjj https://ibb.co/3yW9mjj I'm a human but it's not clear what the "challenge" even is that needs to be completed. And after you get it wrong, it doesn't kick you out, it just flashes a toast message like "User failed captcha". Twilight zone material.

bongobingo1 3y ago
Write the alphanumerics connected by a green line, i.e. connect (connected) the dots. I dunno, I immediately recognised it .
- metadat 3y ago
  I swear I tried that.. guess I'm a bot ^^
- nailer 3y ago
  What is the final character? It looks like a backwards 7 or Cyrillic G.
  - comex 3y ago
    It’s just 7. How is it backwards?
    - GenerocUsername 3y ago
      Careful, don't teach the bots. Just let them fail to recognize. There is literally a 7 in the image on the keyboard proving it's not backwards.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
computerlover 3y ago
Bot detected
quickthrower2 3y ago
Maybe ChatGPT with an image recognition plugin could help us solve these
DefineOutside 3y ago
Agreed, this is a terrible captcha because O and 0 look nearly identical but it fails you if you mix up these two.
webinvest 3y ago
I just hit accept with a blank input and it accepted it

IndigoIncognito 3y ago

https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/p/politically-incorrect.eth https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/p/politically-incorrect.e... Oh no....

quazar 3y ago
Do you still have that resource list? The links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260345 are expired.

makotech221 3y ago

Took about 15 seconds to download the app and display the first few posts. Come back in another 2 years.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

Is there any settings to not make it look like new reddit? If I was building a new site I wouldn't copy the godawful empty space design they forced on everyone

estebanabaroa 3y ago
We have an imageboard interface https://plebchan.netlify.app/ https://plebchan.netlify.app/ and currently working on an old.reddit interface. Other interfaces that are planned are stackexchange, discourse and vbulletin. The protocol is completely open and the code open source. Anyone can make any number of interoperable interfaces.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  Thanks for the info! I'm intrigued by the different interfaces for the same content. I'll definitely keep an eye on this when reddit dies in a couple weeks!
- Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
  you might want to copy the teddit interface too
abhayhegde 3y ago
Well, the FAQ at [1] quotes that a different UX is not a goal: > The goal is to recreate Reddit exactly, the exact same UX, except without servers, DNS, global admins, global moderators, lawyers, regulations, corporate greed, etc. [1]: https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md#q-wasnt-the-point-of-this-platform-free-speech-this-sounds-like-it-would-do-the-opposite https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md#q-w...

jeroenhd 3y ago

I don't know why but this somehow taxes my CPU more than the official Reddit site, which is kind of impressive in a way. The theme itself is a good Reddit replica, but I don't think IPFS has the necessary performance to run apps like these. Maybe it can live become a Lemmy frontend for the FOSS/fediverse crowd?

George83728 3y ago
The number of third party domains this site needs to hit to even load any posts on the front page is insane. I'm looking at a list of domains like "etherscan", ipfs gateways, pokt... all kinds of shady sounding bullshit and it isn't at all clear to me what I would need to whitelist to get this site to work: http://0x0.st/Hbkj.jpg http://0x0.st/Hbkj.jpg Yes I know this is "my fault" for being a weirdo who doesn't blindly let his browser hit any server a website pleases. But I use this to judge the quality of a website, the care and professionalism that was put into it. This plebbit site is awful by this metric even compared to new reddit; with new reddit merely whitelisting *.reddit.com is sufficient to view a list of posts, and whitelisting 3 more domains (all clearly reddit-affiliated: redd.it, redditmedia.com and redditstatic.com) is enough to make the site behave as it should.
- Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
  its just a bunch of IPFS and ETH gateways. I haven't tried it myself, but I think there's a desktop application you can install that connects to IPFS natively. I don't know if they're running their own ETH node, but probably not.
- mry2048 3y ago
  I use noscript and while normally I’d agree with you about the number of reqs to 3rd party domains being an inverse indicator of quality, I think in this case it just means the client application is marshalling its own connections to broader p2p system without a fancy experience api layer.
- imtringued 3y ago
  Welcome to dApps where everything requires centralized gateways or you must run half a dozen of your own full nodes with 1TB storage each.

thih9 3y ago

Hug of death? On ios (firefox focus) I’m getting: > FetchEvent.respondWith received an error: no-response: no-response :: [{"url":"https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/ https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/"}]

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

So does this mean each subreddit creates and hosts their own entire “Reddit clone”?

estebanabaroa 3y ago
Each community owner must run a node 24/7 to seed his own community's content via IPFS. Similar to how you need to seed a torrent you client. There's a GUI client so it's very easy, you just double click and leave it open. It's also possible for centralized services to run communities for people, so it's technically possible to run a community without having to have any device run 24/7 yourself.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Is there a headless "client", so one can run a community on a raspberry pi or server?
  - estebanabaroa 3y ago
    there's a CLI client yes https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-cli/releases/latest https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-cli/releases/latest
- ranger_danger 3y ago
  friendly reminder that IPFS is not usable anonymously and it will reveal your IP to everyone

witheld 3y ago

The content you’ve linked really does a good job at showing how completely decentralized P2P social media is a terrible, terrible idea.

nelox 3y ago
Yep, it may be technically of interest, but devoid of any modicum of social nuance or sophistication.
- geysersam 3y ago
  Yes because Reddit gets its sophistication from being centralized and VC owned? The quality of Reddit is created by the users. If they used a P2P platform the content would be of high quality.
geysersam 3y ago
Decentralized does not mean there's no moderation. 4chan is centralized but the content can be... We don't need big companies to help us do quality moderation. Quite the opposite. P2P social media is a fantastic idea.
dang 3y ago
Please don't snarkily dismiss someone's work. If you want to contribute constructively, there are plenty of other ways to bring this point. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- witheld 3y ago
  One of the first posts I saw was the N word over and over
  - dang 3y ago
    That's no excuse for posting bad comments yourself. A big internet forum like HN gets tons of crap comments. Most eventually get moderated, but not all; and even the ones that get moderated take time before we see them.

sosodev 3y ago

It's weird to use the name "plebbit" considering that's the derogatory term for Reddit used by 4chan folk. It's like begging for this to be a dumping ground for some of the worst human behaviors. Does the decentralized nature mean that illegal content can't be easily be removed?

user- 3y ago
> It's weird to use the name "plebbit" considering that's the derogatory term for Reddit used by 4chan folk. It's like begging for this to be a dumping ground for some of the worst human behaviors. i think thats the obvious intention. Just scroll down the page to see what the user base is.
- marisnom 3y ago
  And that makes it nothing more of a joke website to me even if it's impressive under the hood
  - antifa 3y ago
    Impressive? It didn't even finish loading for me lol.
theprincess 3y ago
You'll also notice that the logo makes the face from the "NPC" memes that would have still been popular among the 4chan "politically incorrect" crowd right around the time this project was allegedly started. Sadly, for enterprising edgelords, Elon has usurped them all by turning Twitter itself into the ultimate "alt-tech" app. Like, seriously, unless you want to share illegal pornography, why not just share your spicey maymays on Twitter where they'll get more reach? Impressive amount of follow through regardless. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/angry-npc-wojak https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/angry-npc-wojak
zadler 3y ago
Well, theyve been working on it for 2 years, you expect them to be normies?

Madmallard 3y ago

[flagged]

rejectfinite 3y ago
nooo you have to heckin moderate!!!

Diti 3y ago

Not compatible with the fediverse? I’ll stay on Lemmy.

lucideer 3y ago
The fediverse is federated (it's in the name). This is distributed (P2P). They're fundamentally different concepts in the underlying protocol so compatibility is a bit odd to think about here. There are certainly overlaps in the two concepts and certain parts of them can be compatible to a small extent: a bunch of people have compared Bluesky Social's AT protocol to SSB despite the former being federated & the latter being p2p. But similarities aside they can't really be compatible at protocol level.
George83728 3y ago
Is it true that Lemmy censors casual profanity like "bitch"? I first heard of Lemmy a few days ago, in the context of somebody dismissing it because it allegedly performs such censorship.
- Acrobatic_Road 3y ago
  there is a regex filter in the code to censor many words
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  The default instance is worse than reddit for censorship.
- FireInsight 3y ago
  It does. This doesn't make the concept doomed, though, being on the Fediverse it's already interoperable with Kbin, a hybrid microblogging and link aggregation platform. A capable person with different views could fork Lemmy while keeping compatibility, and that has happened many times with other Fediverse software.

londons_explore 3y ago

Visually nice... Content is terrible... Speed is atrocious... Alas, I don't think it's yet ready for primetime. Is it fixable in a week?

estebanabaroa 3y ago
>Alas, I don't think it's yet ready for primetime. Is it fixable in a week? We are 4 devs working full time on it. In my estimate it should be pretty smooth in around 1 year. We should also have an old.reddit interface as well for people who hate the new interface.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Who pays for your time? Or is this 3 years of free work?
  - estebanabaroa 3y ago
    I'm paying for it from my savings, around $300k so far
    - zadler 3y ago
      Nice going! How can I get in touch with you?
      - estebanabaroa 3y ago
        twitter: estebanabaroa tg: estebanabaroa discord: estebanabaroa#2853
    - ranger_danger 3y ago
      LOL
    - wise_young_man 3y ago
      You spent that much on this so far? How do you plan to get a return?

londons_explore 3y ago

Technically this project is very impressive... But the user experience is terrible. I think to have any success, you need to let the p2p features take a backseat, and build a lot of centralised content moderation tooling. You can plug the p2p bit into the centralized bit with a config URL for "List of allowed moderators" and have it default to a bunch of trusted people, who effectively have whitelist/blacklist/supervote abilities. Then you need to populate it with a bunch of good content to start off with.

Havoc 3y ago

Congrats - seems pretty functional from a technical perspective

mvdtnz 3y ago

[dead]

AHOHA 3y ago

People are arguing about the contents, which is kind of shallow, it can be always managed in some way later. I’m more interested in the technicality, what’s the protocol, the architecture, how file are saved and served, encrypted? How about the minimum X to run the service, is it P2P as in all clients serve or only select few nodes? Who manages and operates these nodes? Is it a honeypot? Among others. Regardless, It’s always good to see new concepts or alternatives sites, just like old days with forums.

estebanabaroa 3y ago
high level whitepaper: https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2 https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2 the protocol is a light protocol over IPFS/IPNS/Libp2p Gossipsub IPFS files (JSON/base64): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#schema https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#schema Gossipsub protocol messages (CBOR): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types There's also a FAQ https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md
- imtringued 3y ago
  There is a disdain for federated protocols but I hardly see how this is any different except that there are no explicit federation features. The "subplebbit" owner acts like the operator of a Mastodon or Matrix instance except as mentioned above, those were designed to aggregate data across instances. The fundamental problem with these decentralised platforms is that they want to get rid of the human element but if you just let anyone get away with anything and everyone rehosts everyone else's data unconditionally, then you get something like zeronet which has its own Reddit clone. The problem with zeronet is that people advertise their illegal porn on your supposedly "family friendly" Reddit clone and your users involuntarily download it and make themselves criminally liable. Whether something should be legal or not is a philosophical question, someone has to make a decision and then enforce it. Any platform where users are allowed to upload arbitrary information requires moderation. There is no way around this. The only benefit of a decentralized app is that you can have smaller self hosted communities. I spent a lot of time evaluating the technical viability of decentralised apps and honestly you should avoid it even if your use case requires it.

12345hn6789 3y ago

Hate to be that guy, but why opt for the new reddit look? This is already coming out of the gate on the wrong foot. The UI is slow and has so much unused white space.

SadTrombone 3y ago
Not a fan of their UI being absolutely covered in NFT/.eth links either.
shagie 3y ago
Old reddit, while nice and textual is server side rendered. If you are dealing with P2P not fetching everything in one go (and thus suffering some async performance issues) is better than trying to render it all at once. That's part of the "why of new.reddit"... which makes sense for some aspects of its infrastructure. Yes, I prefer old.reddit because it renders everything at once and the layout is simpler. But if you're waiting on the network more than the CPU, new.reddit style is probably better. The UI being slow is because loading stuff from cloudflare-ipfs.com is slow. Trying to get it all at once for a 30 card rendering would be even slower if you're waiting for ipfs.
- George83728 3y ago
  Old reddit had a compact design that filled the page. New reddit and plebbit both have huge margins on the side, tons of white space between boxes, etc. It's got nothing to do with server-side rendering.

londons_explore 3y ago

Musk claims the only solution to bots in 2023 is paid accounts. I kinda agree with him. There is no captcha that's going to keep out determined spammers. Even reddit is filled with bots. You either try to eliminate bots through paid accounts, real ID verification... Or you filter based on quality of content (ie. bots are allowed to post, as long as what they say and do is indistinguishable from a human - like reddit does). Whats the anti-spam plan?

estebanabaroa 3y ago
>Whats the anti-spam plan? the community owner must configure some challenge exchange between his node and the users publishing to his node. the challenge is completely arbitrary, it can be a whitelist, a password, a super complex interactive game, sending a picture of your passport, account age, minimum karma, a combination of all these things, etc. Since it is arbitrary, it will evolve with time. Any method (already invented or invented in the future) that centralized platforms use to filter AI spam can also be used, but over P2P.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
> Whats the anti-spam plan? User moderation in focused spaces! Its the same reason Discord/Telegram kind of works, the same reason small niche subreddits (and Hacker News) are still OK, the same reason dedicated game servers are so much nicer than public matchmaking in video games... They have a hierarchy of users who are motivated and empowered to police their own reasonably sized niche space. Twitter can't do this, but maybe Twitter should not exist as it does now. Reddit the company wouldn't really like this either, as they would have rather have mainstream mega-subreddits over collectively smaller niche subs.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > User moderation in focused spaces! Remember the bots can make their own spaces too... And then lure real users in with a bunch of chatgpt-like and/or stolen content...
  - 3y ago

RobotToaster 3y ago

So do you get a captcha every time you vote? that's quite annoying.

estebanabaroa 3y ago
soon we will add the ability for the community owners to let users bypass challenges if they have X amount of karma or account age.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  You should look into POW captchas like mcaptcha or powcaptcha. It's a far better user experience.
  - estebanabaroa 3y ago
    the challenge exchange between the authors and community owners are arbitrary, they can be anything the community owner can code and that the author client understands, so POW is possible, but I'm not sure it would stop spam properly, a server can do a lot POW for cheap. Maybe combined with another challenge.

squarefoot 3y ago

Already vandalized through shitty trollish posts. Sadly, in this Internet and era you can't build a healthy community without some form of moderation.

smackeyacky 3y ago
When was it ever true that public discussion didn't require moderation? We live alongside a pile of mush brained, mouth breathing dullards whose single and only goal in life is for somebody to vote up their latest brain fart and be told what to think. Largely we excluded these people from conversation with social cues and sold them back their prejudices via red-top newspapers, which mostly kept their brain farts and prejudices suppressed. For better or worse, you can't do that with the internet. Facebook and twitter seem hell bent on not only encouraging their appalling behaviour but amplifying it. The only way to stay away from them is to stay ahead of them and stay away from any medium these idiots think is "their place".
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Unfortunately, those people vote.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    They do vote and they should vote. That to me is quite different from deliberately inflaming them to other actions. edit: what I mean by that is that facebook, twitter and reddit and 4chan should be held directly responsible for the violence they foster. "we're just a communication mechanism" doesn't cut it anymore. Their promotion algorithms are very different from being a telephone company
    - mikrotikker 3y ago
      Yes they do not deserve section 230 protections as the algorithm makes them a publisher.

dom96 3y ago

Every time I see social media recreated in a decentralised fashion I realise why the successful ones are centralised. The loading times of this are dreadful and I don't see how you'll be able to solve that problem when you're relying on P2P. In any case, it sounds like we'll be getting many new Reddit clones so I may as well plug what I've built recently: a Reddit alternative API that is free. Check it out if you're a dev that is being caught out by the Reddit pricing changes[1]. 1 - https://api.reddiw.com https://api.reddiw.com

smt88 3y ago
> The loading times of this are dreadful and I don't see how you'll be able to solve that problem when you're relying on P2P. It's easy enough to centralize a caching layer, perhaps through a popular CDN.
- all2 3y ago
  Why not a bittorrent style peering mechanism? Popular content will always have pools of people who are consuming it. I've had an idea in the back of my head for what would make a decentralized video service work, and it plays with the idea of peer driven networks. So, there a few kinds of people on the network: advertisers (hang in there, I'll explain why), leechers (or consumer), content producers, and seeders. The prime relationship is between a consumer and a content producer. Every other part of the network is designed to support and benefit their interaction. First, a content producer creates a piece of content (or steals it, let's be realistic) and publishes it on the network. Attached to the content is a pay-per-view requirement; the producer has elected to require payment to view this content. This money can come from one of two places: first, an advertiser can bid on slots the producer has chosen, second, the consumer can pay the producer directly. The producer doesn't have a choice whether the consumer pays or not, only that payment is required. Requiring payment for the content is optional, but advisable. You see, the producer has a second order relationship with the seeders. The producer can't possibly feed a million viewers in the first hour. That would be a very difficult task. But what a producer can do is elect to provide a percentage of their required income to seeders. Now there's a financial benefit to seeding a popular video/song. The producer can set their payments to whatever they want. The market may equalize itself. Finally, we have advertisers, which are the monetary fuel for the fire. Most viewers will tolerate ads and wont want to pay money; so instead they pay time. An advertiser can bid on slots in as precise or general way as they want. If they want to bid on a specific creator's video slots, they can. If they want to bid on a broad category of creators or videos, they can. Etc. This won't ever be truly decentralized, and there is a whole ecosystem of services external to the network that would be needed for this to function well (payment processors, content collation and moderation -- kind of like how mastodon works, a bidding marketplace for advertisers to interface with the content network, a front end for seeders to select and re-seed, and so on). I don't have the technical hutzpah to build out something like this. I wish I did. Is there someone out there who wants to be a technical mentor? I'd be game. -- [edit] There should be more and less granularity in how different parties engage. Some people want to pay 10 bucks a month (Amazon Prime) and forget about the rest. Some people want to pay per view. Advertisers might want to target specific creator's channels or whole segments of created content. Creators might want to be able to never even think about ads and just check a box that says "put an ad in front of every video I upload" and then forget it. Or a creator might want to put ads in videos longer than a certain length. And so on. What I've specified above is loosely conceived and would need a lot of thought to turn it into something useful.

superkuh 3y ago

notabug.io was significantly better than this. The code is still on github for anyone who wants to try now that there's another wave of reddit exodus. https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

jetbalsa 3y ago

While impressive, I don't think IPFS can scale to any kind of real load that even a fifth of the users of reddit using this could handle. Its a super heavy daemon and if its just gateway users there is still a little bit of centralization going on. Like who runs "pubsubprovider.xyz" that most of the data is being relayed with? same with "plebpubsub.live"

estebanabaroa 3y ago
you can see the list of providers in the settings page, and you can add your own providers to the list (for example your local IPFS node) https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/settings/plebbit-options https://plebbit-test.netlify.app/#/settings/plebbit-options the idea is that if there's 100 providers eventually, and only 1 needs to not censor you to get your content, then it's unlikely you will be censored we plan on adding IPFS webrtc and webtransport at some point, to reduce the need and load on the ipfs gateways, and whatever new that comes out that can help the browser/mobile clients. For example https://iroh.computer/ https://iroh.computer/ seems promising the desktop client is fully P2P, it bundles an IPFS node, and the only requests it makes are through the IPFS node. (technically it makes one request to github for default communities, but we will remove that at some point). Also if your community or username uses a human readable name (optional), then you need to resolve that name somehow, we can technically support any name system anyone makes, and that might or might not be P2P.

b59831 3y ago

Rdrama has already done it... did it better too

euix 3y ago

The site is definitely slow, but not so much that it is intolerable (at least in my experience). It's a interesting idea but I think 4chan, as the internet watering hole, has the core audience captured already and has done so for the last 15ish years. I am curious as to what the marginal value is here.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwaway81523 3y ago

I don't think technology is the problem here. Rather, it is the evergreen gullibility of humans, showing their willingness to trust their communities and memories and volunteerism to corporations which then seize control of everything. We had a P2P and open source Reddit alternative 40 years ago, called Usenet. But people fell for a centralized one run by a company once it came along, like they always do. May Reddit's fate end up looking something like Digg's and AOL's.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
I agree with your main point: tech isn't the problem here. But a minor quibble: USENET wasn't exactly peer-to-peer. I mostly got to USENET through my university or ISP's NNTP servers. If I wanted to start a new group and get you involved, I would've had to set up my own NNTP server for you to connect to, using either your NNTP client or your own NNTP server.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  OR you could talk to the newsmaster and have that one set up and propagated.
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    Right, but she could reject or ignore my request.
slg 3y ago
[dead]
charcircuit 3y ago
usenet didn't have a karma system
- alrs 3y ago
  Sure it does, that's why people PGP-sign their posts.

est 3y ago

Lots of 403 in api. Monthly capacity limit exceeded. Visit alchemyapi to upgrade your scaling policy for continued service.

dbg31415 3y ago

The first post I read was full of hate speech. Instant turn off. It’s not the technology that is hard to replace, it’s the community and it's the moderators. Reddit took what, 10+ years to sort of clean up? You want a discussion site, but you don’t want the top posts to be from horrible alt-right incels… it’s a hard problem to solve. Also, the load time on that site was abysmal.

smackeyacky 3y ago

This might be a rather obvious and stupid suggestion, but why don't all the 3rd party apps just get together, agree on a "new reddit" and move to that. If their users are more loyal to the app than to reddit, problem solved. It just can't be that hard to hack together a nested newsgroup-like system in this day and age.

shagie 3y ago
Spinning up the backends that are strong enough to support the load that the 3rd party apps put on it isn't a trivial undertaking. Note also that many of the apps were designed to not have advertising or monthly subscription costs. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca... > Apollo made 7 billion requests last month What does it cost to stand up that server? Establish the core group needed to moderate the site to not have it turn into eternal spam or content that they'd rather not serve site? Pay the lawyers needed to make sure they've got NSFW and copyright take down requests handled? It's not impossible... but the "bunch of people start up a new site" misses a lot of the technical and social aspects of barn raising ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising ). The advantage of reddit for the backend is: > BarnRaising is part of the difference between SlashDot and wiki. With SlashDot the barn is already raised - the OpeningStatement already written - before you start, and everyone just sits around bitchin' about it.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  Fair enough, it's not a trivial undertaking and I suspect reddit knows that as part of their shakedown strategy. I still feel like the various protests going on indicate the space is absolutely ripe for an alternative and being a bad alternative might just be good enough.
- tayo42 3y ago
  7 billion averages to about 2300/sec and most of that is reads. I also looked at the requests appolo makes and it polls the inbox a lot. The only maybe difficult part is paying for storage. But this isn't large scale at that size, scaling is solved anyway.

gmerc 3y ago

[flagged]

webinvest 3y ago

The loading time need to be improved & sped up to under 2 seconds. Ideally a quarter of a second. It’s doable — one thing to do is serve a cached page first. At the time of writing, the 1st page load is 14 seconds and subsequent page loads are 7 seconds.

sammy2255 3y ago

Aaand its down

tsuujin 3y ago

The first post I saw on this site was an anti-trans post using some really offensive terms. I did not bother exploring further.

sedatk 3y ago

There is Aether since forever for that. https://getaether.net https://getaether.net

dvasdekis 3y ago
So sad he never went Open Source, it would have been so instructive for us mortals
- FireInsight 3y ago
  Who is he? Aether is FOSS. https://github.com/aethereans/aether-app https://github.com/aethereans/aether-app
  - dvasdekis 3y ago
    Apologies - you're correct, but it's a very early version on Github. The author hasn't updated the public open source repo in yonks.

maria1998zx 3y ago

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maria1998zx 3y ago

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maria1998zx 3y ago

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RF_Savage 3y ago

How does this compare to Aether?

FireInsight 3y ago
Being less functional and more offensive? Oh, and this one has a literal official 4chan-style UI.

FireInsight 3y ago

This shows why I choose to believe in federation rather than full peer to peer decentralization after years of searching for a good enough peer to peer social media protocol. Not to even mention the content, the site is slow asf, and instead of allowing people to host their own "instances" with multiple communities, they host just the communities with IPFS and pay for ENS domains. This makes the barrier to entry to creating new communities way higher. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36204984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36204984

csomar 3y ago

I am not sure why you went for the new Reddit UX which is both horrible and hated instead of the more "simple" text only UI. This had also the side effect that you managed to do it worse (probably by combining a bunch of React components) and the whole thing is slow and non-responsive.

simfoo 3y ago

I think decentralizing and p2p is the wrong approach to solving the issue with commercialized social networks. What we really need is a non-profit & transparent & independent governance setup. Financing should happen through donations, maybe grants but certainly not ads. A bit like Wikipedia mixed with Mozilla, but even more transparent.

medo-bear 3y ago
we need centralized communications even more than we need centralized file sharing. while we are at it, centralize the whole internet. heck, centralize and regulate every form of human interaction, digital or otherwise

peterpost2 3y ago

And there is already nazi shit on the frontpage. No thanks!

nottorp 3y ago

Hold on, judging by the comments here it just a different Reddit frontend right? Can’t call it an alternative if it browses reddits content.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bestest 3y ago

Terrible. It's slow, UI is jaggy, everything feels so clunky. I didn't know it's possible to make it worse than current reddit. Apparently I was wrong.

azangru 3y ago
No ads tho!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dvdkon 3y ago

I don't think full P2P or Lemmy-style federation is the right way to make a decentralised Reddit alternative. P2P systems aren't great for mobile devices that can't/shouldn't be full peers, not to mention moderation issues. And ActivityPub-style federation where accounts belong to one instance and content is copied across instances has many problems, which a Reddit alternative needn't have. Reddit content is already perfectly stratified into subreddits, so I think anything that's primarily a decentralised Reddit alternative should use the same principles. Instances should host subreddits with floating user identities, and content from one instance should always stay on that instance. This solves things like moderation (it basically stays the same as on Reddit, but you get to choose your instance) and legal content attribution. In a way, it's a continuation of the "independent web forum" model that Reddit supplanted.

remram 3y ago
What you're describing is actually very much like Lemmy. Communities are on a specific server, you just use federation to post from your account (instead of creating a local account every time) and as not much more than a frontend. Your local instance just provides your customized browsing interface and identity and talks to the server hosting the community over the API.
- dvdkon 3y ago
  I'll admit I don't know much about the specifics of Lemmy, so I assumed it has the same issues as Mastodon. There's still the issue of defederation? And notifications (new post/reply) are sent to the home instance of every subscribed user and include content, right? I think it would be better to send only small "something's new" push notifications, having the client reach out for any data or even metadata. Also, having user identities be cryptographic keys could solve the defederation problem, but I understand that the user experience would be very atypical. Restricting moderation drama to one particular instance is to me a very important feature of decentralised systems, and the possibility of being excluded from the larger community over such drama is a serious fault, even if that's probably less likely with Lemmy.

opatdchan 3y ago

It improved a lot since the last version I tried, much faster especially. Nice work, and good luck.

Randomizer42 3y ago

SIA decentralized solution.

Meph504 3y ago

Captcha challenge to upvote is a pretty poor design choice. having it consistently not recognize accurate input is problematic also.

pvo50555 3y ago

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