I’ve been day dreaming about a social media platform built entirely on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model, leveraging the existing BitTorrent protocol. The idea is to decentralize content creation, distribution, and moderation, eliminating the need for centralized servers and control.
Here’s the high-level vision:
- Posts as Torrents: Every original post creates and seeds a torrent file on behalf of the OP.
- Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a post downloads and seeds the post, reinforcing its availability.
- Comments as Torrents: Each comment generates and seeds a torrent file somehow linked to the original post.
- Comment Upvotes as Seeds: Upvoting a comment downloads and seeds the comment, amplifying engagement.
- Text Only: to avoid exposing users to potentially graphic content (due to lack of centralized moderation) this platform would initially be limited to text content only. This would also drastically reduce the compute and bandwidth requirements of the seeder.
- Custom BitTorrent Clients: Open-source Social Media BitTorrent clients would display the most popular social media content by day, week, month, or year. These clients would allow users to seed only the content they find valuable thus organically moderating the network of ideas. Relevant content continues to be seeded and shared, while outdated or unpopular content fades due to a lack of seeds.
This setup seems like it could address key issues in traditional social media—privacy, censorship, and centralized control—while naturally prioritizing high-value content.
Why hasn’t a system like this been widely adopted? Is it a matter of technical limitations, lack of a viable economic model, or something else?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’ve heard of some, but like I’ve never heard of one being used by a leftist.
Torrents are made for static, unchanging data. They would not make a good basis for any communication platform, where mutability is necessary.
Also individual, tiny-torrents don’t scale up that well. Its an impressive torrent client that can handle more than a few thousand torrents. That’s about a single days worth of lemmy comments.
Reliance on domain names, database performance, storage, and probably a few other things are the main reasons why we can’t scale a typical fediverse server (like lemmy or mastodon), and have it run on a smartphone.
Great points! Although in a truly decentralized system, users wouldn’t need to seed everything—only the posts or comments they upvote. This would give upvotes more weight, as users would be actively supporting and “hosting” content with their compute resources.
No mutability required. Unpopular posts and comments fade when the OP (seeder) goes offline.
Honestly sounds like a disaster, what stops someone from controlling information by aggressively seed-boxing their chosen agenda?
No probs. I do some torrent projects in my spare time, and torrents are wonderful for what they’ve done: which is solving the static data distribution problem. But they have limited uses outside that. A social network very much needs mutability, and a message based framework. All the items are not static, scores, votes, users, posts, communities, comments, messages, a feed… all these are changing items.
Check out aether.
I really wanted this to be as popular as Lemmy, but it never caught on in a big way.
That’s not available for mobile.
Most people browse Reddit/Lemmy ontheir phone like 90% of the time, so that ain’t happening until they make a mobile client.
Facts. I’m on lemmy via boost app on my phone. I wouldn’t be otherwise
Same, was sad to see it wasn’t getting updated. Even wanted to donate to it, but the links all just went in a circle. Was hoping that someone might fork it into something active again.
There is Briar
There are Briar Public Forums with nearly dead activity, but like every few months, there be some posts. You download the app (Android only, although there are desktop clients) create a profile, paste the link to the website http://briar.retiolus.net/ and also you add their link, and wait for the bot account to connect you. (The bot is down frequently, so just wait like up to 2 days) Both profiles need to add each other to form a connection.
Then you use use text commands in private chat to the bot to request invites to the forums.
Then accept the invite. And in the forums, you post your profile link so others can add you, and you also can add others. You need a lot of contacts since the bot frequently goes down, the more connections, the stronger the network.
Or if the bot is down for a long time, you can add me at briar://ac5dsvvrwm4mnalxdonumapfwolvbjdxuosuxkn2yfizfiey6b6uq and comment your link so I can add you. I can invite you to all the forums.
You can join a forum and just ask a question and see if anyone responds.
Its not a lot of users, but it exist and that is already awesome! Theres like a thousand post/comments in the forums alread (well theres like the same 20-100 or so users in the conversations… so… 😅)
Edit: Heres what it looks like (the app blocks screenshots, so I have to take an actual photo):
The “Shared with X People” is just how many of my contacts have that forum, there could be like 100 people that I just haven’t added yet.
Also, there is zero moderation, so its real free speech there. Unfortunately, that also means that people could theoretically say racist things and theres nothing you can do unless everyone in the forum remove the racist, but even then, the messages already posted will remain. 🤷♂️
Maybe someone can work on the code and add some moderation features, I mean, its open source, any of y’all Lemmings who can code can work on it 👀
Stuff like that already exists, it just isn’t overly popular or mainstream. You don’t even need to build that on bittorrent.
Off the top of my head both https://getaether.net/ and https://retroshare.cc/ are p2p for social media/forums that sort of thing but I’m sure there are others.
Honestly? Because we have blogs (and RSS kinda counts as a platform if you squint).
If you’re tech/freedom minded and want to share your thoughts you’re probably just running a blog and following the blogs of other people you find interesting.
The only thing you miss out on with just using blogs is a content prioritization algorithm… but, tbh, are there that many things you actually give a shit about that you’d get overwhelmed and want to ignore some of it? Or did Facebook & other social media stuff just build platforms that constantly shovel random shit at users that requires such an algorithm.
So yea, probably just blogs… optionally collected into an RSS reader.
Such things already exist, but I can’t get anyone to try out Retroshare ( http://retroshare.cc/ ) with me because it isn’t modern, polished, effortless, and mobile like corporate media.
I had the same problem. Me: “Look at this cool thing…” Friends: crickets
I’d like the Retroshare folks and the Veilid folks to get together and make something…
That’s the crux of my question—why isn’t there a modern/beautiful social media platform built on the tried and true BitTorrent protocol? People already know how to torrent (or used to), and with a well-designed client, they wouldn’t even need to know it’s a P2P system.
Bittorrent is best for static data, building it into a p2p social media protocol would be pretty hacky and would scale poorly unless it was only used for sharing media content.
What you’re looking for is a friend-2-friend network with onion routing, that way you only connect directly to people you trust and messages for others get passed along to the recipient through the f2f network.
Scuttlebut was/is peer 2 peer. It’s the kind of thing that will never really be useful for the masses I guess.
As others have said, don’t build it on BitTorrent. You don’t need BT to do P2P, although you certainly can learn from it.
Bryer is peer to peer and can even be ran independent of a larger internet to be a part of. You can literally bluetooth/ hotspot it to one another.
I used a platform called Aether which I used for a while but it seems the developer kinda abandonned it.
The idea was interesting, all participants would hold a copy of the network data locally and sync between eachothers (kind of like a blockchain, no it’s not related to cryptocurrencies).
Writing a comment, a post, upvoting and downvoting required conputational power, which limited the ability to spam the network. There was the idea of having elections to decide who could act as a moderator in each communities (and the ability to impeach an existing mod), but it never came to be.
What about https://www.hyphanet.org/ ?
I used it a long time ago (when it was called Freenet) and it worked really good.
I think plebbit works a bit like that
Don’t know about social media, but sites exist in systems like this: https://zeronet.io/
Zeronet worked pretty similarly to how op describes. It was really clunky and barely usable when I checked out out, years ago. I thought it been abandoned. It turns out, relying on household grade internet upload speeds and having data spread across hundreds of peers that needs to be hashed and added to as people post is kind of inefficient.
Like most anything P2P scale, consistency, and adoption are huge factors.
This sounds like an idea related to the InterPlanetary File System, where files are peer-to-peer and cannot be taken offline. It’s not a terribly new idea, but I’ve not seen any widespread implementations of it.
I think people underestimate how difficult moderation is at scale. There’s a reason why The Algorithm exists: past a certain scale, even just wading through a chronological feed of posts and keeping illegal content out of it becomes laborious. You will see influencers on the fediverse complaining about that already. With a P2P system, moderation isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. Once something is out there it can’t be removed. Finding and maintaining a good balance is just a really, really difficult problem to solve.
Sometimes, that of course is a feature, like IPFS being used to bypass government censorship, but every coin has a flipside.
You will see influencers on the fediverse
Will you?
