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.
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.