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.
I really wish you would consider keeping Exploding-heads active for a bit longer, Nostr has a lot of potential but the Twitter format isn't ideal. We need something like Reddit on the Nostr protocol (like how Lemmy is based on ActivityPub) that has communites and emphasis on those communities and thread based discussion, currently on Nostr we don't have that, I know recently it seems like they've started supporting communites but that still seems like it's in its infancy. Would be great if we could just hold on a bit longer until we get the full forum experience on Nostr, I really hate Twitter and the cluttered feeling of having posts just free-flow and can be about anything at all instead of being organized in communities and having clear subjects in different communities.
Hashtags aren't like communities either because they're just a sorting tool for the random hodge podge of posts spread to the world, they aren't a place like communities where people deliberately post about specific things, they're really just fancy flairs for annoucements.
I know that Nostr has put effort into communites but honestly I don't think it's quite ready yet, which is why in my opinion we should try and hang on a bit longer, otherwise I guess it's goodbye for me on August 31 😢