Last week this instance decided out of nowhere that it deserves a break and vanished.
After multiple attempts of troubleshooting, I was about to put up a static html to announce the move away from “the broken ass lemmy”, when i figured out the real problem (nginx config was changed for some reason and no longer correct).
That being said, I still would like to move away from lemmy. At the time of setup, it was the closest to a reddit replacement we had available but by now nostr has matured a lot and it would be in everyones best interest to start building a community on there instead of a federated platform like lemmy on which you lose your entire online presence when the instance goes down.
If you have any suggestions on what specific nostr frontend we should host here on monero.town, please feel free to share them!
Personally id like to deploy an instance of https://monstr.land/ but sadly it is currently not FOSS.
Moving away from Lemmy is a very bad idea.
you can just directly ask on nostr if anyone knows of some good forum style nostr frontends. this is a very in-demand type of client and lots of people are already interested in getting one. here’s an example of a conversation where people asked:
try to be more open minded. it does not have to be similar to reddit with a voting system. it could be more like a simple bulletin board or a traditional web 2.0 forum as well.
Nostr is fine, but it’s really a twitter competitor and not really a reddit competitor like lemmy is. The top 20 hashtags are dominated by bitcoin, nostr, and photography/offgrid living, so it’s not for normies. Most XMR posts have comments from bitcoiners and BTC vs XMR threads dominate so nostr is something I occassionally follow but get bored with all the repetitive arguments and little information that I wouldn’t also find on Matrix.
Matrix and SimpleX are where Monero has a real community with real forums on important topics and it is normie friendly even if normies don’t tend to go there unless they’ve already convinced themselves that Monero is valuable.
Twitter apparently has a good monero community although I don’t know anything about it since I’ve never gotten or want a twitter account and it’s closed up so I can’t see it.
That leaves Reddit as the place normies would go to and discover XMR. If the lemmy instance disappears, then reddit and twitter are the only mainstream XMR instances out there.
If no-one wants to help, then I think we all understand that the burden really should be just on one volunteer and it’s entirely reasonable to shut it down. But I do challenge the “your entire online presence when the instance goes down” statement since monero.town was still visible on lemmy sites like feddit.nl due to caching. Similarly sharding and co-hosting exists for lemmy so it is possible to make monero.town more resilient if people are willing to step up. Taking over all of monero.town is a huge burden but dividing up the work and taking a tenth of it (which can be given up if life gets in the way and returned to when it doesn’t) is much less of a burden.
There is nothing inherent about Nostr itself that makes it only a Twitter competitor. Nostr is just a protocol. The clients can behave and look however you want them to. There are already Reddit-like clients for Nostr (Satellite.earth, chorus.community, oddbean) and even encrypted messengers built on it (0xChat, Keychat, White Noise, etc)
Yes but Nostr is mostly a maxi community which is very niche compared to lemmy. These smaller Reddit-like clients are every more niche. Since most of those forums are incompatible since there isn’t a standard, that’s even more of a niche. At that point, what’s the point? Matrix and SimpleX might be niche but they have a large Monero communities. Reddit and X have large communities that don’t care about being managed. Nostr currently has a twitter like community for people that like interacting with maxis. Lemmy had a place for reddit refugees who still liked the concept of reddit where different communities could stumble on each other.
I love Nostr. I use it every day.
But I also like Lemmy for its purpose. (I just don’t use it as often because I don’t think to.) It has a good sense of community and not a lot of extra noise vying for our attention.
I like Lemmy, it’s more of a message board and I think it’s more adapted to the size of this community. I don’t have any experience with monstr.land, but Amethyst feels more like Twitter, and we would lose the connection with the rest of the federated world.
Why not deploy a nostr instance on a sub domain of monero.town? That way we can try it out.
If this instance disappears could you please give an advance notice so that we can migrate our accounts based here?
Note: during the outage we had no way of contacting you to get more information or help out, and that was a bit frustrating. Could we agree to meetup for example on lemmy.ml/c/Monero if there is an outage next time?
Thanks
Matrix/IRC room for live discussions: #monero.town:monero.social
Are you going to shut down the instance?
I think switching to some obscure platform is a bad idea, but if you want to do that, at least make a post with a list of alternative communities such as https://lemmy.cafe/c/monero and https://lemmy.ml/c/monero
I never loved the idea of hosting everything on one server, even in a federated system. I had asked on matrix before if anyone would want to but there was nobody willing to pick up hosting the instance. I don’t want all of this to depend on me and people to lose touch because I am unavailable. For now we will keep the instance up and running, at least till we find a suitable replacement software that is more decentralized.
Does it need to look like Reddit?
I am working on an ActivityPub client that doesn’t depend on a single server. Groups are planned, but the interface will be different from Reddit/Lemmy.
I noticed the site was down, and I was very sad :(
Thanks for your work. Lemmy is a piece of shit to host and moderate, but is there really a better option in 2025?
I still would like to…start building a community on there instead of a federated platform
I definitely think federated is the best solution. Specifically ActivityPub. Is nostr not federated?
Nostr works via multiple different relays, which makes it way more decentralized than a federated system. This explains it pretty well: https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a
I still call it federated because it’s not P2P (plus other factors, like the “relays” don’t actually relay to each other afaik)
But it’s definitely less centralized than fediverse
Any move from Reddit to ANYWHERE is a good move, be it here, nostr, monstr or whatever. I hate Reddit with a passion, and wish the whole r/monero sub would move to nostr if as you are saying, lemmy instances can just vanish. Would a nostr community be more accessible by Tor than monero.town is? Also, just to clarify and without trying to ruin anyone’s privacy, are admin and monerobull here one and the same?
Nostr’s tor compatibility kinda sucks currently, but it’s there for sure. I’d say it works better with Tor than Lemmy does
