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.com
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    1 year ago

    What’s the best way to get on Nostr on TOR?

    Far from an expert but I think I was reading something earlier on one of the github tickets about that not being possible, at least not at present.

    If MOB or somebody more knowledgeable wants to chime in great… TBH, I would love to be wrong about this as I too am very interested in accessing over TOR.


    As for the rest of it, my understanding was this was mostly a case of switching for a tech that made us more censorship resistant. If there’s a story or more to it than that, then I guess I’m out of the loop too.

    AFAIK, the problems with EH going down sounded like a problem with federation (read: a bug in the underlying lemmy code, possibly only showing up in certain configurations since not all instances appear to be affected). I am not involved in server admin and this is based on what I remember from some of MOB’s comments I saw on the nostrchat.io site before.

    • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
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      1 year ago

      I have not ran tor much. You connect to nostr relays only through websockets. I believe you can use websockets over tor so it “should” be possible. I connect over a VPN.

      • T_y_rannyLoverLOL@exploding-heads.com
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        1 year ago

        hey can you help me out? how do i access the EH public address on nostr? all the web clients I tried dont have a place anywhere to past a public key. Am I missing something??

        • Masterofballs@exploding-heads.com
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          1 year ago

          Yeah you can search up npubs in basically any client. You can just search up Kapow’s npub npub1qprptnnuwnqc6h6wxc2q07rfwcmj7cfc6g4r5dgnlkxaysmpr0mqc5365p To get his profile to follow. I have a chat a community with folks from here but both are pretty spamy lately while I test some bots out.