I like the concept. But something without any central admins is probably going to be full of all kinds of awful stuff, and I don't want to have to spend time strictly moderating my own feed, because if my client happens to cache anything illegal then I'm now potentially distributing that illegal content P2P which is a huge problem.

The mention of cryptocurrency or blockchain also provokes quite a negative feeling, it's basically just a haven for scams and useless things, and any kind of integration with it I do not want to be involved with.

Wait until regulations hears about your decentralized social media not regulating CSAM content sharing.
Pure decentralization is a libertarian wet dream. We are not into that here.

Plebbit is text-only, images are not hosted on the protocol anywhere. Although you can embed a link to an image within your comments or posts. Eventually we will think of a design for p2p image hosting but it's not high priority right now, also it could be abused easily.

Locate bob given a name or some other ID
At the moment we use key-value trackers similar to bittorrent trackers, Bob in this sceneario would post their content CID (content identifier, similar to hash) with addresses they can be reached through (quic, webtransport, websocket, https, etc).

If we assume Bob in this is a community with human name like cats, then the backend of Plebbit will resolve the text records of the domain to find its IPNS address, which then can be queries from trackers to find Bob, or anyone else who has the content of Bob's community.

Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)

Plebbit uses IPFS for its backend, which is based on content-addressing. You always get what you ask for.

Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
Each comment/vote/edit published by users to communities is signed with ed25519 keys.

Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it

Depending how you connected to Bob, if you connect over a websocket or any encrypted protocol it will encrypted and nobody can snoop on you.

It still looks like you're relying on IP addresses, which means if you want to host a Plebbit server (sorry, "always on peer") you need one of the following:

• Use a hosting provider, which is something you want to avoid according to your pitch.
• Serve it from your own personal network under your own IP. Given that you're worried about censorship from even the DNS system, I imagine this is something you absolutely don't want to do.

Plebbit is text only protocol. Images aren't hosted anywhere on the protocol.

Images are just bytes. Just encode an image via base64 and now you can send it via text. People will find ways.

I agree crypto has a bad rep, which is why we're not associating with it. Our goal is to replace both web2 and web3 socials with a p2p solution that actually scales to the masses. Using blockchain for some aspects of it might raise some eyebrows, but it's worth it imo

I wanted to coldremoved the guy.

God, Lemmy's word filter is so asinine.

A while ago, I posted about my plan to build a Lemmy client using the Plebbit protocol.

The response was, honestly, full of hate. I wasn’t expecting praise or anything, but I didn’t think people would react so negatively to the idea of something truly decentralized.

But here I am again. Still believing that Plebbit is the only real self-hosted social media protocol out there.

Let me explain why, in the most direct way I can:

– Plebbit is serverless.
– There are no global admins.
– It does not rely on any central server.
– It can’t be censored or taken down.
– It works like BitTorrent, but for social media.
– No subreddit can go offline as long as one peer is online.

Every subreddit (called a "subplebbit") is its own world. Mods can ban users, remove posts, or run things how they want. But there’s no “head office.” Nothing above them.

And yes, Plebbit already has support for NSFW subs like /pol and others. It doesn’t need approval from anyone.

I see Plebbit as the Bitcoin of social media. Pure, peer-to-peer. No middlemen. No backdoors. No central kill switch.

It reminds me of what the internet was supposed to be—free, open, uncensorable.

Sadly, most devs I’ve met online don’t really understand peer-to-peer tech deeply. Some barely know cryptography. That’s okay, but it also makes real decentralization hard to appreciate.

If you’ve never read the Plebbit whitepaper,

https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper

please do. It’s not just another protocol. It’s a whole different way of thinking about social interaction online.

I’m still planning to build that client. I don’t care if the first reactions were negative. I’m not doing this for approval. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe in it. But reviews matter too.

Naw, there are several good use cases for blockchain. Ask a blockchain hater how to implement an auditable change log, and they'll re-invent blockchain and claim it's not.

I'm only saying: you specifically mentioned Bitcoin, and then later said design goals included cryptocurrency integration. I'm not opposed to crypto, conceptually - I'm just giving a possible reason why you may be garnering downvotes.

you specifically mentioned Bitcoin
I did not, I believe that was OP

included cryptocurrency integration
Only for things we believe web3 does better; such as name systems, uncensorable financial transaction