Plebbitor

They pay the devs via bounties and meeting milestones.

We tried iroh but it wasn't fit for purpose. We have tackled the moderation exactly how you've described it. Allowing multiple people to control a community. We're in the process of implementing it. Our version of this allows people to create multicommunities where it shows similar communities in one sub.

Activity pub would be interesting but plebbit is so technologically different were not sure it would be technically possible. We forgo the concept of instances entirely allowing Plebbit to work closer to Reddit, where you just search a sub. Global admins don't exist on Plebbit. Subs can still share ban lists if they wish but its optional

Plebbit is always looking for new devs, join our telegram group @joinplebbit to discuss with the main dev about joining the project.

Communities can defend against bots using captchas, minimum karma limits and whatever else they can think of. We're constantly improving this aspect.

People can make up Communities and purposely fill them with bots and astroturfing, however they can already do this on your typical social media. Its upto the user to spot this and move to a better community. We of course will do what we can to discourage astroturfing.

In terms of monetisation and building it around NFTS. All of that is optional. Communties can choose to only allow users to have NFT profiles or allow them to have whatever image they want. The tipping is optional. The domain name is a valid point, however its the most decentralised, non censorable option. We intend to allow domain names from different blockchains so if games.eth is taken people can use games.Sol.

About your point concerning community splits, this sort of thing happens in reddit all the time. A few communties get created in the splinter but eventually everyone moves to the one with the most activity and decent mods. And as we said we will facilitate the best ran subs gaining prominence from our side by adding it to the recommended list.

In terms of monetisation, the dev has spent $600k of his own money on this and is still spending. He doesn't care to make any of it back. Plebbit is a non profit company. Any money made from plebbit via pleb domains or donations or plebbit gold will go to funding devs or other aspects of plebbit, but profit isn't the goal.

The internet sorely needs a fully decentralised social media. Most of the social media has been taken kver by corporations, speech is stifled, what you see is controlled by shady algorithms. Plebbit gives all that control back to the community. Lemmy is a good stepping stone, but Plebbit is the end all be all. Improvements are always happening but a P2P social media is such a simple yet novel idea its surprising its not been done before.

we use IPNS for mutable data (like upvote counts, reply counts, etc) https://specs.ipfs.tech/ipns/ipns-record/ and gossipsub for an author node to communicate their publication to a community node https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/

Plebbit differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas Plebbit is P2P (fully decentralized). Plebbit uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well.

The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don't have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS'd, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.

Whereas running a node on Plebbit is as easy as opening up one of its desktop clients, which automatically run the custom IPFS node in the background, and seed all the protocol data automatically (similarly to how a BitTorrent client seeds torrents). It runs on a raspberry pi, on 4GB of RAM and consumer internet. It scales like torrents, i.e. the more users connect p2p, the faster the network gets. And most importantly, nobody can stop you or block you from connecting to another user, because there's nobody in between. This means nobody can stop you from connecting to a subplebbit (subreddit clone). If you run your own community, you're always reachable by any user on plebbit.

Plebbit doesn't use a blockchain, it's explained in the first paragraph of the whitepaper. Plebbit actually proves why a blockchain makes no sense for social media.

It doesn't need crypto, it only needs IPFS (but we could change underlying protocol in the future, if someone creates a better alternative to IPFS).

"no transaction fees" is listed as a feature because blockchain-based social media exists, and unlike them a plebbit full node doesn't have to sync (because it's a IPFS node), it just runs immediately like a BitTorrent node would, and it runs on 4GB of RAM even on a raspberry pi, on consumer internet (consumes less bandwidth than YouTube) and it only uses a few GBs of storage. Blockchain social media fundamentally cannot scale because of node requirements, that is if you want the platform to be "decentralized" (enough full nodes).

We do have crypto features, as an addendum. Mainly, we use crypto domains such as .eth (ens.domains) end .sol (sns.id) to resolve plebbit author/community addresses to readable names, because they are IPNS public keys (very long and impossible to memorize, e.g. 12D3KooWMLCgrZT8Ucaw2DWnv1HsQianf9tVi8sK6JCbCod3XK8T). Unlike DNS, crypto domains are censorship resistant. They are cryptographic property, you hold them in your wallet, which means if you change the address of your plebbit community to one such domain, you are tokenizing your community. In theory, the more users your community has, the more people have saved your domain, the higher its value. Compare that to Reddit for example, where all subreddits are owned by Reddit, they can ban your community with millions of subs, because it's not your property, it's theirs.

plebbit.com is just a landing page made by a member of the community, to explain the project. To use plebbit, you can check out its clients, like Seedit.

worse content searching

It's pure p2p so it can't have content searching straight out of the box, but it can easily have indexes like 4chan archivers to search in known subplebbits. It's entirely possible to crawl all active subplebbits and archive them all in a central database, and use that for search. This will happen, and plebbit clients will probably implement multiple such archivers to run search in them. And search engines will be able to index.

worse scalability

It's orders of magnitude better scalability than regular sites such as federated instances. Because it works like torrents, except you always seed, so plebbit nodes will inevitably improve the network speed more and more as more nodes join. And running a node works on a rasp pi. And all content is just text (including links from which media is embedded by the clients), so there's no scalability issue relatively to storage, either.

worse moderation

It has way better moderation, because it's just like reddit in that every community moderates itself, except there's no global admins able to censor a community/node or impose global rules. Plebbit clients are simply static HTML tools to browse the p2p network to connect to each community directly. Every community is incentivized to moderate itself effectively, or they become unusable, and to enter the homepages of the clients they must get voted for by holders of the plebbit token, via a gasless governance system using pubsub it's this page, you'll be able to vote for communities, i.e. downvote communities that aren't well moderated to remove them from the homepage for everyone). Right now, this homepage default list is centrally controlled by the developers, it's the only remaining centralized part of the project.