this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Why haven’t we seen a peer-to-peer (P2P) social media platform yet? (lemm.ee)
submitted 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I’ve been day dreaming about a social media platform built entirely on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, leveraging the existing BitTorrent protocol. The idea is to decentralize content creation, distribution, and moderation, eliminating the need for centralized servers and control.

Here’s the high-level vision:

  • Posts as Torrents: Every original post creates and seeds a torrent file on behalf of the OP.
  • Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a post downloads and seeds the post, reinforcing its availability.
  • Comments as Torrents: Each comment generates and seeds a torrent file somehow linked to the original post.
  • Comment Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a comment downloads and seeds the comment, amplifying engagement.
  • Text Only: to avoid exposing users to potentially graphic content (due to lack of centralized moderation) this platform would initially be limited to text content only. This would also drastically reduce the compute and bandwidth requirements of the seeder.
  • Custom BitTorrent Clients: Open-source Social Media BitTorrent clients would display the most popular social media content by day, week, month, or year. These clients would allow users to seed only the content they find valuable thus organically moderating the network of ideas. Relevant content continues to be seeded and shared, while outdated or unpopular content fades due to a lack of seeds.

This setup seems like it could address key issues in traditional social media—privacy, censorship, and centralized control—while naturally prioritizing high-value content.

Why hasn’t a system like this been widely adopted? Is it a matter of technical limitations, lack of a viable economic model, or something else?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I used a platform called Aether which I used for a while but it seems the developer kinda abandonned it.

The idea was interesting, all participants would hold a copy of the network data locally and sync between eachothers (kind of like a blockchain, no it's not related to cryptocurrencies).

Writing a comment, a post, upvoting and downvoting required conputational power, which limited the ability to spam the network. There was the idea of having elections to decide who could act as a moderator in each communities (and the ability to impeach an existing mod), but it never came to be.