Selfhosted

I've thought about this idea for my own project, and my best solution is to have a network of trust where people rely on curation from their peers and thus only see the content their peers have approved.

The main benefit is also the main downside: content you disagree with is still there, you just don't see it. That means there could absolutely be pockets of CSAM and other content on the network, but your average user wouldn't have that on their system since they only store curated content.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I think it's the best you can do without centralized moderation.

Seedit is a serverless, adminless, decentralized reddit alternative. Seedit is a client (interface) for the Plebbit protocol, which is a decentralized social network where anyone can create and fully own unstoppable communities.

In the plebbit protocol, a seedit community is called a subplebbit. To run a subplebbit, you can choose between two options:

First, they take the dinglebop, and they smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then repurposed for later batches. They take the dinglebop and they push it through the grumbo, where the fleeb is rubbed against it. It’s important that the fleeb is rubbed, because the fleeb has all of the fleeb juice. Then a schlami shows up, and he rubs it and spits on it. They cut the fleeb. There’s several hizzards in the way. The blamfs rub against the chumbles. And the ploobis and grumbo are shaved away. That leaves you with a regular old plumbus.

I’m going to post it again.

For anyone else looking for a reason to stay away from plebbit- uh, look at their X account https://x.com/getplebbit It’s 4chan crypto hashwash

where anyone can create and fully own unstoppable communities.

One man's "unstoppable communities", are another man's "spam and NSFW content" 🤷

I think you need to make up your mind what you actually want. Gatekeeping access under the guise of fighting spam seems directly contradictory to the stated goal of your project, and assuming it wouldn't be flooded with such content when most of the internet consists of such was pretty naive.

After opening things up more on Plebbit/Seedit, we got hit pretty hard with spam and some NSFW content. It got out of hand fast and honestly, its worse than we expected.

It's a p2p decentralized social network. I'm honestly surprised you got anything that's not kiddie porn and drug spam.

did we not tell you that this is exactly what would happen?

I integrated cloudfares captcha thingus to foregejo and my spam dropped to 0

I'm not sure which clients are used to connect. Perhaps some proof of work challenge for the connecting client to solve first? Anubis does this for http(s) and browsers. I've seen it in the wild quite often in the last weeks, so it seems to be effective (until the scrapers learn to use selenium to mimic browsers or so).

I’d suggest looking at 3 things:

1. CAPTCHA. Not a perfect solution and AI will beat most of it soon, but it will help.
2. Anti-bot tools. Something that will do the equivalent of miring up AI web crawlers.
3. Identity systems. Not in the sense of a verifiable ID like a driver’s license, but in the sense of establishing a strong link between a pseudonymous ID and the community it owns or interacts with.