I am old enough to remember the time when r/bitcoin was the primary discussion forum. After a series of unfortunate events, there was a move to r/btc. After another series of unfortunate events, there was an exodus from reddit to telegram.

For all its flaws, reddit has a discussion structure that makes productive community conversation scalable in a way that telegram simply cannot replicate. Important topics naturally bubble to the top of the boards and important conversation threads naturally float to the top of those topics. This mechanism operates at any scale. You can glance at the boards for the first time in a month and immediately see the most relevant discussions and events with the simple flick of a filter, regardless of how many people are involved.

With telegram, each channel is just a never-ending stream of consciousness. The only ordering is chronological and the only way to find nuggets of value is to scroll through potentially thousands of comments reading them one by one or look for those that have a few reaction emojis. This problem necessarily gets worse as the number of participants in the space grows. The signal-to-noise ratio can only decrease as more people talk in the same room at the same time. What would the BCH telegram channels look like if the number of participants in the BCH space were to 10x?

So I am extending an invitation to the BCH community to try Lemmy instead. It is a decentralized (self-hosted) discussion platform with reddit-esque topic and comment prioritization. It’s FOSS, so no ads, no profits, no tracking, etc. Each instance has a collection of Communities that service the need to organize sub-topics into dedicated spaces (like channels in Telegram - think one space for Selene, one for Cauldron, one for Bliss, BCH Podcast, etc)

https://join-lemmy.org/

Specifically, there is a Lemmy instance dedicated to Bitcoin Cash that has been up and running for more than a year. In addition to offering the conversation-organizing mechanism I described, it also has an anti-bot system requiring a pittance of BCH to be sent before gaining access.

https://realbitcoin.cash/

So this post is an invitation to start and/or participate in conversations there, and also an invitation to discuss here the potential pros and cons of migrating to the platform. Obviously it’s a decentralized community so everyone will and should just do whatever they want, but I am tossing this out into the universe as an idea possibly worth exploring.