exploding-heads.com have recently announced their intention to move to Nostr. Their plan is to leave Lemmy behind entirely, with exploding-heads.com poised to go offline on August 31st 2023.

Original announcement: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290 Lemdit link: https://lemdit.com/post/735021

According to their admin:

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.

Some users are questioning the transition to a micro-blogging-style platform like Nostr and the effect this will have on existing Lemmy communities.

About exploding-heads.com

exploding-heads.com is one of the larger Lemmy instances, with ~7.4k registered users.

They are a right-leaning instance which is centered around free speech:

Use humor and facts to hold the ruling class accountable

We are a fun loving community of free people tired of propaganda fed to us government, media, big tech, crony capitalists, and self anointed elites.

exploding-heads.com has received a largely hostile reception from other large Lemmy instances, many of which have chosen to defederate from them.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    301·
    11 months ago

    They can spin it however they like, but they were relentless bigots and I wasn’t willing to be on any instance that federated with them. What I saw on a lot of instances was a vote that went firmly towards defederation. That’s not some petty rulers, that’s the marketplace of ideas saying your ideas are obscene to the point we’re unwilling to interact with you any longer.

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    11 months ago

    The cencorship part doesn’t make sense since they can pretty much do whatever they want in their instance. They can probably federate with other bigotted instances.

    My guess is that they ran out of money for hosting.

  • isoAEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    Apart from heads, Nostr seems interesting. I’m curious how they will handle spam, CP etc. if they even become mainstream. I believe Lemmy, Mastodon is good mid point for decentralization. Users are getting moderated and refined content easily.

    We’ll see. I’m open to new toys :)

    • delendum@lemdit.comOPMEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      I agree, that’s the usual litmus test for a project like this. I’m keeping an eye on it too, it sounds interesting.

      I’m not big on the micro-blogging formula, but my understanding is someone could technically build something that resembles Reddit/Lemmy on it.

  • Gnubyte@lemdit.comEnglish
    31·
    11 months ago

    I can’t speak to what they were - maybe they were nazis or some far right wing thing? Not a fan of that myself.

    But I stumbled across Nostr recently too and I do like the idea of having this sort of immutable relay system. Take a look at the apps. Its a cool idea. There is an insane amount of decentralization among Mastodon and Lemmy that is souring the experience to me.

    I’m out in the USA and we have very far left and very far right extremes here. I prefer when the tug of war between the two lands right in the middle, a central neutral of policies rather than either sides extreme. That goes for social media too. I don’t worry about muting nazis, I worry about muting the people next to the nazi who has conservative believes, happens to sharing an instance with one, doesn’t care for the nazis beliefs, and gets defederated from even though they did nothing wrong themselves other than what server they picked. I worry about losing voices on far left like Twitter, or voices on the far right. Some of those voices on the far right are just farmers or simple folk working blue collar jobs. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, to want to hear both sides and bring them both to the table for an almost national/global temperature check, but damn is it hard to have that happen nowadays.

    I still like Lemmy: its reddit. I liked reddit. I just am adding Nostr to my decentralized daily scroll, too.

  • Throwaway@lemm.eeEnglish
    44·
    11 months ago

    Huh. Im not sure what to feel about this. I never saw much bad from them, but I did see a lot of a comments saying shit.