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.
Since many are expressing disappointment in this site going down, can I take this opportunity to promote my forum, Rabbit Hole? It's a simple phpBB forum that supports free speech, allows guest posting from Tor, and aggregates the content on the landing page. I'm afraid many won't make the transition to Nostr and the community will fall apart. I made RH partially as a Saidit alternative, since that site has many problems. However, it hasn't taken off. Saidit still works so people seem to be sticking to it in spite of the flaws. If this community migrates there, there will be enough activity to make it more appealing for other users to join and I can more easily advertise it on a couple of related communities. My goal is to combine the conspiracy / freedom niche with imageboard culture and an imageboard-like design (but using phpBB for the extra features).
migration paths discussion: https://exploding-heads.com/post/792397?scrollToComments=true
Thinking of making my own forum with a more modern looking ui at this point because Lemmy is just reddit with extra steps.
We don't need to go more modern, we need to go retro! 💪
YESSIR!!
Problem is that Lemmy UI works really nice. I never liked the oldschool forum design. Old Reddit UI did some dumb shit but threaded comments are a must have these days.
I'm considering switching to either Lemmy or Kbin. The latter is also nice for integrating microblogging and boosts. One problem however is that votes can easily be manipulated. I feel like at one point it would have to default to a chronological sorting of comments, to mitigate manipulation.
Basedcount admin didnt fix the federations so im willing to hop over if you can support the instance for at least a while without wacking it within a month of growing popularity lol.