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-liek-french-toast@exploding-heads.comEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Forgot to ask earlier if I understood correctly, but is it safe to assume that you and MOB are not the ones running the satellite.earth server and the EH room there is basically backed up via relays?

    E.g. the community on that server is essentially a guest but if they ever decided to censor, we’d just grab our posts/etc from the relay and move the entire thing, history and all, somewhere else?

    • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
      3·
      11 months ago

      Neither of us are hosting the web ui satelite.earth. I could host a instance of it if you we need one. But someone else is developing that ui. I host a relay and some others here do too. Which is the backend. the wss://relay.nostrwolf.com We can backup my relay. I’m happy to give you a copy of the whole database if you want. And source code. But the way nostr works is you can broadcast your post to as many relays as you want and those post will be copied on all those relays.

      • i-liek-french-toast@exploding-heads.comEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Mostly I was asking in case I pissed off the owners with my usual shitstorm of memes.

        I haven’t figured out how to get amethyst app + netguard+ vpn working so I am pretty much only accessing it via desktop (Linux+vpn+ firefox) and the site currently doesn’t let you edit the relays in user settings.

        If you have any suggestions for a Linux client, will take a look. But just figured that this currently means I’m probably at least somewhat at risk if I piss off the site owners, unless I either get a better setup working pr make another account.

        Edit: nvm, just saw another comment with the link to https://nostr.com/clients, including the 3 desktop ones. Will take a look

        • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
          2·
          11 months ago

          Hmm, yeah I see relay edit isn’t supported in satellite.earth. Looks like it respects your relay list you post with other clients though. So if you edit on iris it should copy over. I’ll fork any clients that try to do any censoring. Any that I use. It’s the easiest lowest hanging fruit to help speech flourish. Because everything is over websocket you can actually host these ui’s on github pages for free. Should still work.