The communities moderate themselves with their own admins, just like on reddit. The difference is, there’s no global admins that can censor communities or enforce global rules. However, the plebbit app developer can basically act like a global admin by blacklisting connections to certain communities. I predict the most popular plebbit apps won’t include such blacklisting functions.

Plebbit is like BitTorrent, there’s no global BitTorrent admin. You use a BitTorrent client (like uTorrent) to download torrents, and the client could technically blacklist your torrent. You use a plebbit client (like Seedit) to download a subplebbit, and the client could technically blacklist your subplebbit.

It’s entirely possible that more centralized plebbit clients will be created, to be published on app stores for example, and they will implement whitelists of safe communities to participate in, blocking any other community.

I was there for the early days of Voat, which was an earlier version of a Reddit clone. Those first few months were nice, but it quickly devolved into a hate-filled N*zi safe haven.

Fediverse has an early version of a bot problem, which is ubiquitous in all social media these days (thanks to state actors and also corpos that want you to think/feel a certain way). idk how the fediverse is handling the bot problem, but for now it seems to be less noticeable here than other places.

If the platform is truly “free speech” without any moderation, then it will quickly devolve into worse than 4chan.

Voat is gone now, which is a good thing, but if you have an programming background you can use an LLM to study the way it self-destructed by looking at the archive.org snippets. See how it quickly became theDonald but worse.

That is what will happen to this un-moderated decentralized social media protocol.

Well from their site

Moderation

Since there are no global admins, the administrative control of a subplebbit rests solely with its creator. No one else can moderate content or accounts unless the subplebbit creator grants them permission.

So, it’s not that there’s no moderation. It’s just “subplebbit” creator/delegates controlled as there is no over arching site wide company able to moderate it on the whole.

It will mean, as a user, you’ll have to be liberal with removing subplebbits from your own feed though. I’m sure there will be some… not so pleasant subplebbits appearing.