Selfhosted

I don't get why people are so interested in the fediverse. I guess it's a sizeable amount of content, but it's not really all that popular and has a host of its own issues. I think people like the idea behind it more than the actual implementation.

That said, I'm working on a similar project (distributed Reddit clone), and one of my goals is to eventually connect it to the fediverse to get access to content. That said, a distributed service isn't directly compatible w/ a federated one (there are no servers in a distributed service, only simple relays), so I'd have to build a bridge to get it to work, and bridges are notoriously awkward to deal with in the best case (see Matrix bridges), and adding P2P on top of that makes things even more awkward.

unmoderatable free-for-all

I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say "adminless," but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.

So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it'll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.

If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you'll be more right than wrong.

On an unrelated topic, I'm working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn't have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it's fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn't manually handled, it's handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I'm deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).

Just because moderation doesn't look similar to what you're familiar with doesn't mean it's ineffective. We'll see if Plebbit works out, but I'm still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn't have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.

Something tells me the "I don't host CSAM I just host posts that embed/link to CSAM (from other hosts)" argument won't hold up in court.

I think it's the same in most aspects, just less developed. However, it looks like the devs lie about the benefits and use a less secure alternative to dns.

It's garbage with a funny name

...i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

*AI generated ASCII CSAM