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Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

plebbit-test.netlify.app

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Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#211

Post by remram »

dvdkon wrote: post #206

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…

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.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#212

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

nicce wrote: post #158
pwdisswordfishc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitter page: full page layout with all text loads in about half a second, images load in the next three https://nitter.it/rauschma Mastodon page: requires unblocking JavaScript, takes one second just to load the basic layout (without post contents), then takes four to ELEVEN seconds to fully load https://fosstodon.org/@rauschma I expected better.

Hmm, compare for https://elk.zone , is it still slow? For me it is almost instant.

With an empty cache, five seconds for the full layout, one further second for images. With a populated cache, four seconds to load everything at once. And also requires unblocking JavaScript for no good reason. Sure, not as bad as twitter.com, but that’s damning with faint praise.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#213

Post by moneywoes »

sam0x17 wrote: post #113
programmarchy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive feat! Does reddit have rate limiting, or other hurdles in place similar to the hoops youtube-dl has to jump through? Curious what your thoughts are about maintaining a project like that.

As history has shown, you can only do so much to stop this. If you perfectly mimic the GoogleBot and use google IP ranges by hosting on google cloud, they either take an SEO hit or let you bot them at the end of the day. GoogleBot looks like a DDoS attack a lot of the time too You can also go the route of looking like a pool of users, then it's just a game of cat and mouse and one providers don't really have time to…

The google scraper ips are very different no?

> If you perfectly mimic the GoogleBot and use google IP ranges by hosting on google cloud

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#214

Post by moneywoes »

dom96 wrote: post #62

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…

Is this open source? I’d love to help out

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#215

Post by dvdkon »

remram wrote: post #211
dvdkon wrote: post #206

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…

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.

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.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#216

Post by estebanabaroa »

imtringued wrote: post #174
estebanabaroa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high level whitepaper: 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 Gossipsub protocol messages (CBOR): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types There's also a FAQ https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md

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 y…

>The "subplebbit" owner acts like the operator of a Mastodon or Matrix instance

- Mastodon and lemmy instances can delete your account/community data (they own your data), on plebbit you own your data, it's on your device and you seed it P2P, community owners cant delete it

- Mastodon and lemmy instances can block you from accessing and interacting with other instances through their client, which forces you to use multiple clients to interact with all instances you want, on plebbit, the client accesses all content directly and p2p, community owners can't block you from accessing any content. You only have to use a single client.

- Mastodon and lemmy instances require a domain name, a static, public HTTP endpoint, an SSL certificate, DDOS protection to run. All which are complicated to set up, cost money, sometimes require KYC, sometimes require the command line and linux. Your server, domain, ssl and ddos protection provider are intermediaries that delete/block your account.

Whereas plebbit is a GUI executable like a bittorrent client, you download it, open it, that's it, you're done. No payments, no kyc, no command line, no config, no intermediaries that can shut down your account.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#217

Post by estebanabaroa »

imtringued wrote: post #176
George83728 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Yes I know this is "my fault" for being a weirdo who doesn't blindly let his browser hit…

Welcome to dApps where everything requires centralized gateways or you must run half a dozen of your own full nodes with 1TB storage each.

plebbit doesn't require you to sync an entire ledger, it uses content addressing (IPFS), which lets you only download and seed the content you use, not the entire network. A plebbit "full node" is just an IPFS node (similar to a bittorrent client), it takes no space and has no sync time.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#218

Post by estebanabaroa »

RobotToaster wrote: post #138
estebanabaroa wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should look into POW captchas like mcaptcha or powcaptcha. It's a far better user experience.

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.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#219

Post by rahimnathwani »

rcarmo wrote: post #182
rahimnathwani wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OR you could talk to the newsmaster and have that one set up and propagated.

Right, but she could reject or ignore my request.

Re: Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative

#220

Post by interestom »

moneywoes wrote: post #214
dom96 wrote: post #62

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…

Is this open source? I’d love to help out

github.com/plebbit

Lots of repos, everything is open-source

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