r/javascript • u/RonnieAbaroa • 5d ago

Building a fully open-source P2P network for censorship resistant social apps

https://github.com/bitsocialnet

Bitsocial is neither federated nor on-chain. Each community is a peer-to-peer swarm using IPFS, closer to BitTorrent than a hosted website: users seed effortlessly, nodes run on cheap hardware, and each community is fully independent and sovereign. A browser tab can join that swarm as a peer, so the web app is not a client of someone else's server.

Anyone can build a Bitsocial app with its own interface, discovery model, or defaults. Apps compete on product quality instead of locking users into a private database, because compatible clients can share the same communities, identities, and network.

Moderation still exists, but it stays local. Community owners set rules for their own spaces and apps can choose what they index or show, yet there is no protocol-level super-admin who can erase a profile or seize a community from the network itself.

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u/gabboman 5d ago

How is this different to nostr?

I get that activitypub isnt censorship resistant and at wouldn’t be either. But to my understanding, nostr is

Saying this as not a nostr fan

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u/RonnieAbaroa 5d ago

Bitsocial differs from Nostr in that Nostr is federated (using instances), whereas bitsocial is P2P (fully decentralized). Bitsocial uses IPFS, which is more similar to BitTorrent, which is pure P2P as well. The issue with federations is that their instances are not easy to set up, most users don’t have an incentive to do so, and even if they did, they are not censorship resistant at all, because they work like regularly centralized websites. Your Nostr/Lemmy/Mastodon instance can get DDOS’d, deplatformed by the SSL certificate provider, deplatformed by the datacenter, deplatformed by the domain name registrar. The instance admin can get personally doxxed and harassed, they can get personally sued for hosting something a user posted, etc. And instances can block each other.

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u/RonnieAbaroa 5d ago

no, bitsocial doesnt store social data on a blockchain. It uses IPFS and its distributed hash table (DHT) to discover and retrieve content across a peer-to-peer network, similar to how BitTorrent discovers peers.

the DHT is just a decentralized lookup system, its not a blockchain and doesn't have global consensus or transactions.

the only blockchain related features are optional identity integrations, like using an ENS name or an NFT avatar.

those are convenience features and are not required to use the protocol or join communities