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.

      • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Hey there. BasedCount admin here! I can confirm, we are not a leftist instance. We are also not a rightist or a conservative one. We are just pro free speech. Our admin team is made of people with different political affiliations and we try to not let that get in the way of how we run the instance. Although I don’t consider myself one, I probably would be a leftist myself, from an American point of view.

        Anyway, we opened our instance to give [email protected] a new home safe from the tyranny of the Reddit admins, but we are open to creating new communities. Anyone, feel free to shoot me a PM if you’d like to build anything on our instance.

        • markeuzu@exploding-heads.comEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Any chance you can defederate from the instances hosting iffy material? I would like to host an account there (I like the rules) but some stuff is just plain illegal to have or see in my country and I dont want it on my pc tbh.

          exploding heads has them deferated so its easy to copy them over.

          • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            Could you define “iffy material”? Are we talking porn or what? We can discuss it, but generally speaking we are against defederating unless the instance is malicious or is hosting illegal stuff.

            If you are worried about the legal implication of having an account on an instance that (potentially) hosts content illegal in your country you should be alright, we are the ones hosting the stuff, it’s saved on our server. If you don’t visit the bad communities and stick to your “subscribed” feed you aren’t downloading anything illegal. However

            I dont want it on my pc tbh

            Is a more than fair argument.

            • i-liek-french-toast@exploding-heads.comEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I assume that’s what he’s talking about.

              EH block list is super short since Kapow also didn’t like to defed. I think he only did spambot sites and sites with illegal stuff (IIRC, burggit.moe for instance has what most countries outlaw as child porn but was legal in some very specific locale that they set up shop in; have heard others say that loli/shota stuff, while gross, is not illegal do there might be some variance based on country?; discussion of them from another instance, the first comment in turn links to another discussion of them on lemmy.world).

              Current EH blocked instances:

              Blocked Instances Name Software Version

              lemmy.juggler.jp lemmy 0.18.3

              burggit.moe lemmy 0.18.4

              threads.net

              pornlemmy.com lemmy 0.18.4-nsfw

              • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
                3·
                1 year ago

                Yeah I’d say we have a similar policy. Child porn is among the stuff I would instantly block without any problem, fuck that. As for Meta I thought I had blocked them already. Evidently I haven’t, time to fix that.

          • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
            1·
            1 year ago

            Would you be willing to moderate those communities? That’s our policy, I’m fine creating communities for other people but you have to take out your own trash. That means no illegal shit (our rule 0) and try to keep it not off topic. Plus any other rule you might wish to add as a mod.