For us, Bitsocial just means BitTorrent for social media, nothing political.

We chose BitSocial because it’s closer to “BitTorrent for social media”

the “bit” part is about peer-to-peer distribution and protocol design, not politics or ideology.

We are not trying to mirror Truth Social or target any specific political audience.

Our goal goal is a neutral, open-source, decentralized social media protocol.

on moderation : the protocol is not private or anonymous. It’s peer-to-peer, and IPs are visible in the swarm. anyone trying to post illegal content is not hidden and will get caught. Also, each community has its own mods, and clients can enforce their own rules similar to how Seedit is SFW by default.

There’s also a character limit, so you can’t base64-dump images posts.

. The proper landing page is going live next week.

We are building in public and taking feedbacks seriously.

we are still in the process of rebranding and the main info page (intro, docs, roadmap, links, etc.) will go live on bitsocial.net next week.

when running a community, the owner has to configure some anti spam options, like for example it could be a whitelist of him and his friends. if he wants an open community, it gets more complicated, you have to let unknown people post, but also not let unknown people spam, so one of the option is SMS confirmation. eventually we will add more options like social login, confirming ownership of a domain name you own, owning cryptocurrency, etc. it’s a work in progress, but this anti spam mechanism is completely optional and arbitrary, it’s something that each community owner can configure in any way they want. you can even code your own anti spam mechanism or use one someone else coded.

Nostr still relies on federated servers, while Plebbit is fully peer-to-peer. It runs on IPFS, which works more like BitTorrent, basically pure P2P.

The problem with federated platforms is that their servers (instances) are not easy to set up, and regular users usually have zero motivation to run one. And even if they did, those servers aren’t really censorship-resistant at all. They behave pretty much the same as normal centralized sites.

Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get taken down by a DDoS attack, or cut off by the SSL provider, the datacenter, or even the domain registrar.

we plan on having as many “web of trust” like features as possible at some point, like for example you could get recommended content / communities that users you upvote participate in, this can be implemented easily, and it’s very open and P2P.

but in our opinion it’s not technically possible to have moderation/discovery that is fully web of trust for a few reasons:

• you need to bootstrap from somewhere, you can’t just start “syncing/downloading” content. randomly, and then start manually liking/disliking stuff to build your personal web of trust from scratch. people dont want to download gbs of data and like/dislike stuff for hours to get started.

• pure web of trust is easily gameable, you can make millions of bots that upvote each other to rank themselves to gain better rank in other people’s web of trust.

• pure web of trust doesn’t have DDOS resistance, someone can completely DDOS the gossip network and prevent you from ever bootstrapping a real web of trust.

also assuming someone would develop a scalable, ux friendly and ddos resistant pure web of trust algorithm, it probably would have a UX that’s very different from reddit (and message boards in general), and our goal is to recreate the UX of reddit/message boards exactly, because we like them. The thing we don’t like about them is the centralization/commercialization/etc. For example we don’t like that reddit killed apollo/rif, we don’t like that they ban very popular subs that a lot of people enjoy, etc.

I agree, this is a problem we haven’t addressed yet. We’re working on it, soon Seedit will have its own communities specific to a reddit-like user experience. All the 4chan-like communities will be transferred to the Plebchan client. I’m talking about “default communities”, i.e. those recommended by the app when first opening it (when the user isn’t subscribed to any subplebbit address yet), but of course nobody can stop users from connecting p2p to any community, no matter from which client.

Yet is hosted on Github and presumably requires a working DNS and HTTPS system to download.

Incorrect, Seedit works similarly to a BitTorrent client, you just open the app and you’re connected p2p to the communities, similarly to how you connect p2p to torrent seeders.

Except your ISP and/or government.

Your ISP and/or government can’t stop you. Just like they can’t stop you from downloading a torrent or using Bitcoin with a full node. They can make you life harder, tracking you, sending you to jail etc but they can’t prevent the initial p2p connection.

So your supposedly non-centralized project requires external hosting? It’s like NFTs where the images were just worthless links. :P Also, uh, base64 encoding is a thing and clients will absolutely start supporting it.

Posting images isn’t required. Why would you want to decentralize media hosting anyway (which is impossible)? To share CSAM? Not sure why you’d want to do that. Also, no, base64 encoding isn’t allowed in the protocol, you literally can’t publish it to the p2p network because there are character limits.

… Isn’t this what you’ve been trying to avoid?

Nope, how would that make any sense? A community is such if it’s moderated. If it’s unmoderated, it’s not even a community, it would be fully unusable because of spam.

Finally, a mention of content discovery. How is your recommendation system implemented? What decides whether a community is worth being recommended?

Our clients use https://github.com/plebbit/temporary-default-subplebbits also you can query the ethereum and solana blockchains for .eth and .sol domains respectively with text records/subdomains of value “subplebbit-address” (see: https://dune.com/plebbit/plebbit-protocol) and we’ll support more decentralized domain systems later.

Wait… Isn’t your whole pitch that it was censorship resistant? Can you clarify your threat model here, who are you actually worried about censoring your platform?

Again, it works like torrents. Torrents are censorship resistant, yet torrents aren’t private because your IP address is in the p2p swarm. Law enforcement can use expensive fingerprinting software to catch the big fish, for very illegal content sharing.

And using a completely unknown new service and protocol isn’t? I’m sure there’s tons of documentation out there for hosting Mostodon or Lemmy servers.

Well, which is harder in your opinion, opening a reddit-like app and create a sub (and that’s it, it runs a p2p full node automatically for the sub) or: buy a domain with ssl, set up the server, pay for the server, set up moderation for the whole instance, get censored, get sued, get defederated by other instances, prevent spam, etc.

I agree with this, but not for the reasons you’ve stated.

You’ll see the light.

P2P scales much worse than centralized systems. Centralized systems scale at N connections per node, while P2P systems scale at N^2 connections per node.

Wrong. Real-world P2P systems don’t use full mesh and don’t require O(N²) connections. They typically scale with far fewer connections per node (e.g. O(log N)), while centralized systems hit bottlenecks at O(N) connections to a single server.

You know what, I don’t mind this project. We need a place for far right people to go to to avoid “censorship” (getting banned from a subreddit for doing nothing but throwing slurs at people) and collaborate on their “plans” (killing minorities) on a platform that is “private” (easily traceable, unencrypted and linked to your IP address).

Plebbit is neutral, anyone can use it (left wing, right wing, apolitical etc), nobody can stop anyone from using it. And it can’t get taken down nor shut down, it’s eternal.