Bitsocial is very similar to bittorrent and inspired by bittorrent, it uses content addressing (files are addressed by their hash, like the torrent infohashes), trackers and DHT. it also scales infinitely and becomes faster and more censorship resistant the more peers there are.
It's also text-based by design. You can’t upload media directly. If someone wants to share media, they have to link to an external host and the UI just embeds it. That means it’s hosted on centralized sites (like Imgur, etc.) that know the uploader’s IP, can remove illegal content quickly, and report it to the authorities.
If it gets taken down, the embed just 404s. There’s also a character limit, so base64 is not really practical.
Because it’s decentralized, it can’t be taken down, censored, or controlled by any single authority.
But that’s just the beginning, the protocol is designed to support any kind of community space. The goal is to have UIs for things like Facebook-style groups, events, meetups, Discourse-style discussions, and old school forums/message boards, internet archive, wiki...etc .
With Bitsocial , moderation is also left to the communities themselves, so each group can decide its own rules and tools.
Bitsocial is not private, just like bittorrent isn't
Bitsocial works like torrents, so very illegal stuff can't thrive on it. Your IP address is visible in the p2p swarm and can be tracked by authorities. If you decide to use Bitsocial via Tor or VPNs, the liability falls on them
Anyone can run their own node and create their own community .
They cryptographically own the community .
Also and the most important
Because Bitsocial is ipfs based people can selfhost their website on it. It uses the same underlying infrastructure as torents. It can also be used to communicate with other users.
Bitsocial Github
https://github.com/bitsocialnet
We mainly use 3 technologies, which each have several protocols and specifications: IPFS (for content-addressed, immutable content, similar to bittorrent) https://docs.ipfs.tech/ https://specs.ipfs.tech/
IPNS (for mutable content, public key addressed) https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/
Libp2p Gossipsub (for publishing content and votes p2p) https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/
main goal is to enable truly censorship-resistant communities that aren’t controlled by any single platform.
I’d like to see people build all kinds of spaces on top of it, forums, old-school message boards, niche communities while keeping everything peer-to-peer and decentralized.