It doesn’t need crypto, it only needs IPFS (but we could change underlying protocol in the future, if someone creates a better alternative to IPFS).

“no transaction fees” is listed as a feature because blockchain-based social media exists, and unlike them a plebbit full node doesn’t have to sync (because it’s a IPFS node), it just runs immediately like a BitTorrent node would, and it runs on 4GB of RAM even on a raspberry pi, on consumer internet (consumes less bandwidth than YouTube) and it only uses a few GBs of storage. Blockchain social media fundamentally cannot scale because of node requirements, that is if you want the platform to be “decentralized” (enough full nodes).

We do have crypto features, as an addendum. Mainly, we use crypto domains such as .eth (ens.domains) end .sol (sns.id) to resolve plebbit author/community addresses to readable names, because they are IPNS public keys (very long and impossible to memorize, e.g. 12D3KooWMLCgrZT8Ucaw2DWnv1HsQianf9tVi8sK6JCbCod3XK8T). Unlike DNS, crypto domains are censorship resistant. They are cryptographic property, you hold them in your wallet, which means if you change the address of your plebbit community to one such domain, you are tokenizing your community. In theory, the more users your community has, the more people have saved your domain, the higher its value. Compare that to Reddit for example, where all subreddits are owned by Reddit, they can ban your community with millions of subs, because it’s not your property, it’s theirs.