Walking the talk, talking the walk

After more than two years on Medium, we decided to migrate to Ghost - an open-source, reliable alternative that’s been growing in adoption by other Blockchain projects.

Please note that part of this migration needs to be done manually so it will take us ca. 3 more days to have our blog as it stood before. However, we’re not shutting down Medium.

Friday was just a day like any other, except for when we started getting messages from friends and community members, that our blog was down. We started our Medium blog on April 28th, 2016. Back then, there was little talk about regulations in the blockchain, and lesser talks about ICOs and crypto censorship on social media. Medium was the #1 platform as it provided the possibility to show up in the links of other publications and articles; which was perfect to grow our audience. Then of course, as the market exploded, more and more mainstream services started being concerned about the crescent overflow of crypto projects and platforms for promotion - and as any centralized authority would do, they decided to adapt and impose certain norms or bans.

AdWords was one of the first to do it, rightfully so, as the space at the end of 2017 was infested with scams who would put their ads on top of token sales and prey on people that fell into the ICO fever. Others followed: Facebook, Mailchimp, and even Twitter temporarily shuts down accounts a piacere with no reason - for instance, the super reliable Evan Van Ness, who exhaustively provides us every week with the best ecosystem news gets his Twitter deactivated every week, and he had to migrate from Mailchimp because they would no longer approve his newsletters.

This phenomenon is commonly known in the space as deplatforming. It is a standard procedure to avoid hate speech and other ethical norms infringements, every platform has the right to dictate what to tolerate or not, especially under those circumstances. However, we are building technology, the tools of the future. We are building better and fairer systems. Blockchain communications should never be prone to deplatforming.

Self-hosting our communications platforms and choosing better tools are part of our duty to maintain the information flow with our community untouched and as frequent as possible. Hence the migration to Ghost.

While Medium has only disabled the feature of redirecting our blog’s domain (https://blog.golemproject.net), we are aware that crypto projects have migrated not only because there is the danger that one day, they will lose all your articles (and for us, this means almost three years of material!) - and above all, because we believe in Open Source and being in control of our data.

If we are building open source, censorship-resistant, fairer and more secure tools; then we need our platforms to reflect this. We migrated with great results to a self-hosted Rocket Chat, a bit more than a year ago, and now it’s time to say farewell to Medium.

Ah! We are not done yet - we also just got a Peepeth account (microblogging on the blockchain) so you can follow us there as well :)

If you are interested in Decentralized Project Communications, we recommend this brief intro that John Light from Aragon has prepared for the community.