“No bans means it's a free-for-all.”
Communities moderate.
- Each community sets and enforces its own rules, with its own anti-spam.
- There's just no single admin above the network who can ban you everywhere.
Bitsocial is an open-source peer-to-peer network for social apps, with no servers, no global bans, where users and communities are cryptographic property.
Core Features
Bitsocial is free and open source software: the protocol and clients are public, forkable, and open to outside contributions. Anyone can inspect the code, ship improvements, or build a compatible app without asking permission from a company.
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.
Bitsocial does not require every community to rent a datacenter box, buy a domain, or manage SSL just to stay online. A community node can run from home on consumer hardware, and there is no single company-run backend that can take the whole network down.
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.
Profiles and communities are controlled by private keys, not by revocable platform accounts. You can delegate hosting without giving away ownership, so your identity and community behave more like wallet-controlled property than a username rented from a company.
It just works.
No servers to rent. No domains to buy. No chains to sync. A Bitsocial node runs on a Raspberry Pi. And each community can enforce its own anti-spam challenge: captchas, reputation, SMS, payments, tokens, IP checks, or anything else that can be coded.
Federated
Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy
Self-hosting cost
Server + domain + SSL
Who keeps it online
Service / instance operator
Scaling model
Bigger instances, higher bills
Custom anti-spam logic
Not built into the protocol
Takedown choke points
Host, registrar, SSL, DDoS provider
Chain / Hub
Farcaster, Lens, DeSo, Steemit
Self-hosting cost
Expensive node, hub, or RPC
Who keeps it online
Chain, hub, or RPC infrastructure
Scaling model
More state, heavier infra
Custom anti-spam logic
Tied to chains, hubs, or fees
Takedown choke points
Validators, hubs, RPCs
Bitsocial
Pure P2P with arbitrary anti-spam challenges
Self-hosting cost
Extremely cheap, runs on Raspberry Pi
Who keeps it online
Community owners + helper seeders
Scaling model
More peers, more bandwidth
Custom anti-spam logic
Built in: challenge can be anything
Takedown choke points
No single choke point
“Your community literally cannot be banned or blocked by anyone, even a government. We solve that problem.”— Esteban Abaroa, Bitsocial founder
Anti-spam? Future-proof.
Each node runs its own anti-spam challenge, exchanged purely peer-to-peer with the user. When spam evolves, nodes adapt without changing the protocol.
User
publishes a post
RequestChallenge
RequestChallenge
Bitsocial node
runs the challenge
Challenge module
any code-backed test
Plug in any challenge
- any code
- AI-powered moderation
- SMS OTP
- whatever comes next
“The only Bitsocial innovation is solving spam and DDoS using arbitrary challenges like captchas over p2p.”— Esteban Abaroa, Bitsocial founder
Freedom has moderation.
There's no global admin and no server to seize, so nobody can ban you from the whole network. Moderation just moves closer to you.
“No bans means it's a free-for-all.”
Communities moderate.
- Each community sets and enforces its own rules, with its own anti-spam.
- There's just no single admin above the network who can ban you everywhere.
“Open clients mean no accountability.”
Apps moderate too.
- Client developers can hide known-dangerous communities.
- Developers can run opt-in reputation and scoring services to increase safety.
“People will spread illegal content.”
Not a hidden network.
- Peer-to-peer is not fully anonymous: like BitTorrent, your IP can be visible to peers.
- Text-only protocol: images and videos are embedded from external websites.
“No one can force a community to censor you, and no one can force it not to. If a community has bad mods, you can use another one.”— Esteban Abaroa, Bitsocial founder
Why would anyone use it?
It can't be censored, it never goes down, and you keep everything you earn. Here's who shows up — and why.
Nobody can deplatform you
No protocol super-admin can erase a profile or seize a community.
It never goes down
No company backend or instance can take the whole network down.
You keep 100% of what you earn
Run your own ads and keep every cent. Nobody can demonetize you.
- Innovators: Testers, developers, and protocol builders prove the apps while earning first-mover visibility.
- Early adopters: Communities arrive when adminless reach lets them keep their audience through the next ban.
- Early majority: Creators and operators follow when monetization makes a community worth building around.
- Late majority: Mainstream users trust the network once resilience proves it works every day.
- Laggards: They join once their people are already there and switching stops feeling risky.
Monetization is what carries Bitsocial across the chasm, the gap where most networks die.
“What's the point of creating a company or product to make the world better, if centralized social media apps can just ban you, and then you can no longer reach your customers?”— Esteban Abaroa, Bitsocial founder
A Call to Action
Bitsocial wins by attracting as many builders as possible. Run your own unstoppable community, develop your own decentralized social app, or even launch your own business on top of Bitsocial. The tide rises with every builder.
01
Phase 1 — Ongoing
Decentralize imageboards and forums
Imageboards are the simplest form of social media to decentralize: anonymous posting, few default boards, and no profile graph. 5chan proves Bitsocial can replace centralized imageboards while removing global admins from the equation.
Bitsocial Forge will launch the first non-custodial RPC service for Bitsocial apps. Bitsocial RPC will let users manage nodes remotely, while preserving the option to self-host or run competing RPC infrastructure. Users will be able to create and manage unstoppable p2p communities from mobile.
Forums add persistent identities, post history, and community management. Seedit is the first prototype Bitsocial app for Reddit-style discussion, and public RPC makes those always-on P2P communities practical from anywhere.
02
Launch Bitsocial Network
In order to decentralize all social media, Bitsocial apps will need killer features and strong network effects: unstoppable financial structures, decentralized Bitsocial domains (.bso), awards and tipping, common liquidity, and practical monetization. All of this will be powered by Bitsocial Network, a decentralized appchain solution for Bitsocial apps.
03
Launch the flagship Bitsocial app
The flagship Bitsocial app should be the first profile-based client: posts, replies, follows, real-time public conversation, and communities that can pull network effects from every Bitsocial client. By default, it can feel as familiar as a modern For You social app, while still letting users switch RPCs, feeds, instances, algorithms, ads, or remove ranking entirely.
Through non-custodial RPC, each user can still act as a full p2p node without trusting the RPC with ownership. Anyone should be able to move to their own profile node on a low-spec machine, including a Raspberry Pi, whenever they want.
Because Phase 2 gives the app an unstoppable crypto financial layer, the flagship client can potentially become an everything-app without turning into a custodial platform.
04
Scale Bitsocial economies
The next layer is ecosystem funding and infrastructure pluralism. Bitsocial Forge's RPC should not be the only successful RPC: many businesses, independent teams, anonymous operators, and community entities should build RPCs, media hosting, discovery, moderation, and other services on top of Bitsocial. Funding should push that decentralization forward, so developers and operators can compete to make the network faster, cheaper, more reliable, and harder to capture.
05
Decentralize all social media
With the core apps, public RPCs, profile nodes, discovery, and monetization in place, Bitsocial can fund and build the long tail of social clients: blogging, crowdfunding, creator video and a credible YouTube alternative, niche experiments, and every format too early for the first four phases. Bitsocial Forge can build some of them, centralized clients can compete too, they do not all have to be FOSS, and decentralized community grants can fund as many developers as possible.
The end state is not one app. It is a market of clients, nodes, services, and communities that can replace platform ownership with protocol competition.
Social media finally finds its equilibrium: a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer social network that nobody owns; Bitsocial.
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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.