Both are terrible for this purpose. You don’t need fancy features for a Q&A.

And I have never used Discord for getting tech support.

Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they’ve prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I’m not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn’t.

Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don’t know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it’s similar to Lemmy.

They day they’re not using DHT

I thought they’re using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.

I’m working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I’m using a DHT. If they’re using something else, that’s potentially concerning. I haven’t looked into Plebbit a ton though, I’ve just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I’m a bit of an outlier since I’m playing in the same space.

I’m pretty sure it’s just for community names. If you check out one of the clients, you’ll see <community>.eth. So I’d look at the code for creating a community to start.

Yeah, Markdown is pretty rad, and most of these Reddit alternatives use it. I’m working on my own and Markdown is definitely what I’m using.

There’s no real / true decentralization

That’s not exactly true.

That said, you do need some form of centralized service to connect peers, but you can federate those. It’s only job would be to connect peers, and a STUN server w/ TURN fallback is usually the approach here. These instances don’t need to store any data long term, they just need to connect peers, and the client is free to choose any instance they want, or host their own.

That’s how Tor works (entry nodes), and most decentralized systems use a similar system.

One of the best parts here is that offline often just works, and you can sneakernet around firewalls (e.g. if you visit China or something), and all you need to do is connect to a local relay to find local peers.

Blockchain

My understanding is it’s only used for name resolution, so the number of data points here should be in the thousands, not millions or billions, so the resource usage should be minimal.

Basically, the blockchain is functioning as DNS here.

Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,

This isn’t quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.

They’re not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.

Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).

DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures

I haven’t looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.

I assume they’re using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.

I really don’t think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you’re going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.

Also, if you’re doing the UUID thing, you’d have sort everything every time locally. That’s fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it’ll get bad, especially if you’re dealing with files.

Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.

My understanding is the blockchain bit is optional and only used to establish ownership over a name. The posts and whatnot are not on a blockchain, that would be silly.

That’s a reasonable reaction if it was true. But it’s not, plebbit is FOSS.

Yeah, that’s a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they’re linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there’s no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.

For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It’s a good solution.

Bluesky. If you’re okay with Twitter/X, you should be okay with Bluesky.

Yeah, I’m not too worried about Proton support, but that will likely cause me to wait a bit to see how it ends up working on Proton.

Exactly. The focus should be on data privacy, not on what technologies a service chooses to use.

Maybe in the short term, but longer term, I don’t think your vision of what the community wants to be will necessarily match what the community wants to be. I guess we’ll see how it turns out, and ib sincerely hope I’m wrong because I want an improvement on Reddit and Lemmy.

That’s a big reason why I don’t use their security layer, mostly just their domain registrar. They have a ton of products that don’t involve tracking your users.

They don’t need most of the date, they need a statistically significant sample to have a high confidence in the result. And that’s a small percentage of the total population.

And you could have something on file where you opt in to such things, just like you can opt in to being an organ donor. Maybe make it opt out if numbers are important. But it cannot be publicly available without a way to say no.

Eh, I have repurchased some games on Steam after getting them free from Epic. I rarely play them, but sometimes it’s fun to dig through and find something I claimed. It takes like 30 sec on the web, so I do it when I’m in a meeting or something.

I have to re-login every time

Really? I don’t. Maybe that’s why I’ve bothered claiming them nearly every week. I just open the web page, click the free game, then check out.

New games drop every Thursday at 9AM PST, so it’s easy to remember. I WFH Thursday and Friday, so it’s easy to remember to claim it in the morning. But honestly, any day of the week works since it’s one drop per week.

It’s more frequent during their Christmas sale, and I always forget when it starts, and I don’t care enough to figure it out. So around Christmas, I check the next drop date and when it says the next day, I go on every day.

Eh, Cloudflare provides a pretty good service for a very reasonable price.

But yeah, the web doesn’t have a business model in the same way a town square doesn’t, yet you can make a business work in both areas. Make a compelling product and people will pay you for it.

Idk, I have never installed EGS but have claimed hundreds of free games, and played several through Heroic.