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
I think it’s pretty well studied that pseudonyms are much better for human interaction than true anonymity. I’m not a social scientist though so I don’t have the references offhand.
It can be fun to be anonymous but there’s a reason Yikyak shutdown, 4chan, 8chan are how they are, etc. they just don’t tend to work well long term.
With pseudonyms ban evasion is possible but registering an account is at least some friction deterring some bad behavior, and mods have more tools. And on the other side you do have some reputation building that occurs when people have stable usernames.
Oh sure, there are absolutely benefits to pseudonyms for the reasons stated, I just don’t think serial abusers change their behavior much either way. As long as the barrier to creating a new account is pretty low (i.e. consequences are minimal), toxic people will keep being toxic.
My issue is that moderation is a flawed concept, at least in the way Reddit/Lemmy do it. You either need strict rules (min karma, min account age, etc), all of which can be worked around, or you require very active moderation, which just attracts control freaks and power struggles.
I’m interested in distributed moderation. Everyone wants something different out of moderation, from content they agree with (echo chambers) to constructive content (challenge their opinions). And a distributed platform where content filtering happens on the client has a lot of potential for experimentation. This relies on steady accounts, but it doesn’t require me to actually know who I’m trusting, and it can happen behind the scenes (e.g. begin to trust users that moderate similarly). If done well, I think it will sidestep power hungry moderation while providing most of the benefits, with the risk that users will accidentally silo themselves. But I really like the idea in general of something between full anonymity and persistent pseudonyms.
Sounds like an interesting thing to try! I do think it might tend to group users into a groupthink / exclusion mentality, maybe, or maybe it won’t, but definitely cool idea.
I’ve seen plenty of mod drama / trolls over the years, seems like a fundamentally human problem, kind of like good vs evil in a way, almost impossible for one side to win over the other.
Yeah, that’s my concern as well, so I intend to have something like Steam’s “discovery queue” to allow users to provide more information (which moderation decision do you agree more with?).
And yeah, we’re dealing with a bunch of human problems here. Humans are tribal, possessive, and resist discomfort, so maybe there is no technical solution here, but I’d like to try.