It's a terrible analogy, I think of Plebbit as the Bittorrent of social media. Plebbit is not built on top of a blockchain, it's a pure p2p network

Lol pretty sure if we're funded by these guys we would've been way faster with our development. P2P is hard, many pitfalls

Our core problem with mastodon design is the same issue we have with email, eventually big hosters consolidate and they start banning people they disagree with. Now, in contrast you have a full p2p protocol like Bittorrent where you can download anything you want as long as you can find people to download it from. This is the model we're going for in Plebbit

Federated has many of the pitfalls of emails like a few providers holding most of the network captive, we believe a full p2p design similar to BitTorrent is the best way forward for full sovereignty of communication.

Feel free to check out Seedit, it's the most mature Plebbit client so far. There may be bugs here and there but we're working on it every day to make it better.

We're still working on it and getting very close to releasing MVP

I’m not familiar with Plebbit, but it seems to me they’re trying to establish a cryptographically verifiable distributed ledger - a distributed blockchain. There’s no proof-of-work in this, because the blocks are content, so the energy cost people associate with bitcoin is missing.

Plebbit is not a ledger, it's a P2P protocol and has no DHT. Peers find each other by coordinating over HTTP routers, which are similar to bittorrent trackers. HTTP routers are essentially key-value stores so they're very easy to deploy.

Plebbit is not a blockchain, it's P2P and all content on the network is content addressable. There's nothing to "sync"

Not true, it’s free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js

I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all

If community owners want to set a blockchain name like hello.eth or hello.sns it's possible, but it's optional.

It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation?

Not true, it's free software released under GPL V2, check out plebbit-js

but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

What is the problem with DAOs? I think they're a great way of facilitating coordination between anons on the internet

The reason why we picked Blockchain name systems is because they're the only way of having a full control over a name. There are lot of examples online with people getting their DNS revoked. What do you think the problem is with blockchain components?

Also, blockchain are only used for resolving names, which is a small part of Plebbit, the rest of stack is P2P.

posts would be markdown files

Seedit, which is a plebbit client actually parses posts as Markdown, try it on Seedit

images would only be allowed as links to an image hosting platform

It's already this way with Plebbit, we only allow text.

Having it be open source and every member with a fork (I don’t know if there’s a way to auto update forks) so we don’t risk losing everything if the host shuts down (I don’t use mastodon because apparently you can’t export posts)

On Plebbit all clients are open source with GPL V2, they can also be self hosted easily with a single click. Check out seedit repository Seedit