Aragon against censorship — Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost
By: Tatu Kärki
Tags: Medium, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain

On the journey that we are on, making Web3.0, the decentralized web, a reality, there will be obstacles we need to overcome. Hurdles set by those clinging on to their power by any means necessary, even going as far as putting on blanket bans on all crypto projects. This effectively is censoring content by those trying to make the world a more free and open place to live.

Our support of free, libre, open source software and the open source ethos has been evident and of great importance to us all the way on this journey. We have shown before with our migration to an open source messaging platform that we’re not afraid of going against those who seek to oppress us by switching to an open source alternative.

This blog post is published at https://blog.aragon.org/aragon-against-censorship-goodbye-medium-hello-ghost and we will discontinue publishing our blog posts on Medium after this.

The recent changes on Medium have forced us to pursue other platforms where we can express ourselves without the fear of not reaching our audience. On the Cryptocurrencies on Medium policy page you can see some alarming notes of how Medium is restricting our freedom of expression. I will list the most alarming ones for us here:

Posts and accounts which do not meet these standards may be considered spam and are subject to suspension, depending on context.

You must:

Include only one wallet address maximum in a post.

You may not:

Advertise or participate in bounty campaigns , pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity

, pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity Include multiple wallet addresses (or similar) in a post.

What this means, for example, is that as we move closer to the Mainnet launch of the Aragon Core platform and we want to write a blog post about our live bug bounties, Medium would censor that post with the threat of suspending our account.

We are creating a platform for thousands of decentralized organizations to exist and in some of our posts we might want to mention multiple DAOs by their addresses for people to view or join them. Soon addresses could even be ENS names, but they are still wallet addresses, and that would be against the Medium policy.

And these aren’t just hypothetical concerns of what might happen. This has already happened to our friends at Status who had their blog post censored and never published on Medium even with several re-iterations of changes to the post.

Announcing the move of Aragon blog(s) to Ghost

Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication

As we recently split off the foundational team as a for-profit company Aragon One there will now be two distinct blogs, one for the Aragon Project and another for the Aragon One team. In the future as our plans of onboarding more teams progress, they might have their own team blogs, but these teams will also be a part of the Aragon Project as we are and will be posting on the Aragon Project blog as well.

Besides the policy of Medium, another blocker for us was the fact that you no longer can set custom domains to Medium blogs. With Ghost, we can have the two blogs served on their respective proper (sub-)domains.

Ghost, being open source and stewarded by a non-profit organisation is a perfect fit for us and our values. We are looking forward to joining them on their journey of creating the future of online publishing!