Two years ago when I launched Exploding-Heads, Lemmy offered a way to let me play a small role in fighting back against:

• censorship
• deplatforming
• propaganda
• Big Tech tyranny, and
• to help spread suppressed stories.

I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger.

Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr:

• it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers
• it makes censorship very difficult
• it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly.

As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are

• petty tyrants, or
• benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment)

I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative.

So Exploding Heads is moving to Nostr.

Exploding-Heads.com will go offline August 31st 2023.

Please join us on Nostr.

Exploding Heads address on Nostr is npub1qprptnnuwnqc6h6wxc2q07rfwcmj7cfc6g4r5dgnlkxaysmpr0mqc5365p

Sounds complicated, but it is pretty easy. Here is what I recommend to get started

Amethyst App

• Lets you follow people
• Lets you follow #hastags (I have been using communities as a substitute for #hashtags on Lemmy
• Has evolving support for communities

Habla.news

• a Nostr alternative for Medium for long form content

Damus app (Apple IOS)

If you have any questions about getting up and running on Nostr, please ask them here https://exploding-heads.com/c/nostrblog

In closing, I sincerely apologize to all of you who are going to lose their profiles and content (please get anything you want off by August 31st), but it proves my warning about the problem with relying on benevolent dictators.

Please make sure to say hi to us on Nostr.

I hope the majority of our wonderful Exploding Heads community will make the move to Nostr with us.

Check out the list of communities with the most active users - it is certainly very different to what it was a year ago.

I just wanted to thank you all for making Exploding Heads what it is today - a mechanism to use humor and facts to expose the truths the ruling class is trying to hide.

Plus a few bonuses thrown in. Case in point, I never imagined a community on Relationship Advice would be one of the 15 most active communities on Exploding Heads.

This proves the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That ultimately the future direction of Exploding Heads lies in the hands of community members like yourself.

Thank you all for everything you do.

In case anybody is interested.

If you participate, please be respectful.

Check out the huge list of this huge instances that federate with Exploding Heads. You posts, comments, & wisdom are being enjoyed by many more people then ever before.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/524105

Just a short note to let you know, we upgraded the server to the latest version of Lemmy today. Here are the upgrade notes:

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Take it for a spin and let me know what you think

As a precautionary measure, Exploding Heads has added threads.net to its block list.

I like a lot of other users, was concerned about data harvesting and privacy implications of federating with Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Threads.

But actions taken yesterday by Threads convinced me there was no upside for Exploding Heads allowing threads.net to federate with us:

• censoring content - how much Exploding Heads content would they let Threads users see.
• discouraging users from following certain users - would Threads users really be allowed to follow Exploding Heads content or would it be a one way street where Threads pump propaganda into Exploding Heads.

As you know defederating runs against the grain here at Exploding Heads, but I think this is the best decision till Threads proves (and demonstrates by its actions) the above concerns are unfounded.

There are lots of Lemmy instances that will allow threads.net to federate, do you have a choice if that is important to you.

Thank you for your understanding.