Are you a blogger seeking a change? Do you feel limited by your current blogging platform or feel like you cannot fully express yourself due to possible de-platforming? Perhaps you’re looking for new features like censorship resistance, wish to monetise your content through bitcoin, or want to grow your audience by syndicating on a new platform.
Whatever the reason, migrating to Nostr might be an avenue you’ll want to explore.
In this complete guide, we’ll walk you through the entire process, from exporting your Substack, Medium, Ghost or WordPress blog-hosted content, setting up your nostr account, and finally, building out this new home for your back catalogue of articles.
What is NIP-23?
Nostr is known for supporting short-form social media clients that act as Twitter replacements, but the protocol can be configured to host other forms of data as a custom event. NIP-23 is a custom event focusing on support for long-form content like blogs.
This custom event requires users to publish content along with the following metadata:
- “title”, for the article title
- “image”, for a URL pointing to an image to be shown along with the title
- “summary”, for the article summary
- “published_at”, for the timestamp in unix seconds (stringified) of the first time the article was published
Thankfully you do not need to be a coder to submit a NIP-23 custom event, and there are nostr blogging clients already available that make it easy for you to log in with your nostr public key and start creating content using a GUI.
Why migrate to nostr?
- Have a distributed backup of your content.
- Reach a new cohort of users.
- Instantly monetise your content with zaps.
- Have a place to post more controversial content.
- Build a list of followers that cannot be taken from you.
- Syndicate your content on multiple platforms instantly.
- Maintain anonymity through private/public key pairs; no private data is needed to create and manage an account.
How to migrate my content to nostr?
Now that you’re ready to make a move, the first step is to export your content. This process is straightforward and can be done in just a few clicks. Start by logging into your preferred blogging platform account and locating the “Settings” option in the top right corner of the screen.
From there, select “Export” and choose the date range for the content you want to export.
You’ll either be prompted in your browser to download a file or receive an email with a link to download your exported content in a .zip file.
It’s important to note that the exported content will include all your blog posts, comments, and any media files associated with them. While the data might all be there, there are obviously specific data that would not make it through the migration process.
Once your content is safely exported, it’s time to move on to setting up your nostr account and then using a migration tool to begin adding your content to relays with your nostr keys. If you need more detailed help exporting your content, please refer to your preferred blogging platform below and follow the instructions.
How to export your content on Substack?
Anything you publish on Substack sits with them; if they decide to remove your content, you will have no way to access it. You would have to try to contact Substack directly and request an export of your data, and hope they honour your request.
If you do not have copies of all your content in documents on your drive, cloud storage, or made downloaded monthly exports of your content, you are always at risk of losing all that work should the site go down or you get de-platformed.
If Substack is your blogging platform of choice, you can request a data dump of all your content. To download your posts, comments, subscriber list, and related statistics, head to your Settings page and click on Exports in the left navigation bar.
Select “Create new export” in the Exports section.
A zip file containing your publication’s data will be generated, which you can download in this section. Once the report is ready, you’ll be notified by email.
How to export your content on Medium?
Medium is another popular blogging platform that allows you to host your content and syndicate it through their service and even have it curated by their team. All your content is hosted on their domain, and you only have permissioned access to it by tying your account to an email address.
This means Medium can revoke your access at any time, and you would be stuck without your content. You could try to archive your posts regularly or keep copies of them yourself.
Medium, like Substack, allows you to export your data and stories as HTML files in a .zip archive. You must perform the following actions to request a backup of your content.
- On your homepage, click on your profile picture and click Settings.
- Click the Security and apps tab.
- Click Download your information.
- Confirm by clicking Export.
- A link to download your archive will be sent to you by email when it is finished.
How to export your content on WordPress?
If you’re running your blog on a WordPress.com cloud CMS or a WordPress.org self-hosted version on your domain or a third-party subdomain, the process remains the same. WordPress has a built-in export tool that lets you export your blog content easily.
- To use this, simply go to Tools » Export in your WordPress admin.
- Next, you need to select the ‘posts’ option.
- Then select the export file button.
- This will export all your posts, comments, categories and tags
- You will then have a file ready to download.
- Save this file to your device.
How to export your content from ghost
Log into Ghost Admin for your self-hosted in production and navigate to the Labs view, and click Export to download your content.
This will be .json file, with a name like my-site.ghost.2020-09-30-14-15-49.json.
How to import your content to Nostr
Once you have your content file saved, you can head over to the nostr migration tool and start an upload; this will tie all these files’ readable data and match it to NIP-23 long-form events and then tie it to your nostr private key.
To start this process, you need to do the following:
- Visit migrate.nostr.com
- Select the platform you wish to migrate from IE – Substack.
- Upload your post csv file
- Upload your .HTML file
- Sign with your nostr keys
Note: This a WIP tool, so please use it at your own risk! For now, the migration tool is limited to the migration of Substack accounts, but other platforms are being worked on and will be released in the future.
You need to create an export of your Substack posts, extract the .zip file, and upload the export/posts.csv file and the .html files in export/posts/ folder.
The tool will convert the files to markdown and let you select which ones you want to upload to Nostr.
Each article you specify will then be uploaded to the relays you tie to your public key and that are willing to support NIP-23 events. Once uploaded, each blog will be syndicated on nostr NIP-23 clients and assigned a note public key for each article that is successfully uploaded.
You will need to check every article via a client you prefer and ensure that the migration tool has moved over all your content successfully. If not, you will have to edit the content in the blogging client and make the adjustments and re-broadcast by signing the update with your nostr keys.
Where can I access my content once it’s migrated?
Once you’ve successfully migrated your content to your nostr account, it should automatically be syndicated to any nostr client that supports NIP-23 events and the relays you broadcast on, be that your own relay, a public one or a paid relay.
To check that all your content has been added, visit one of the following clients and log in with your nostr account or search for your account using your npub and see if your posts display under the account.
Do your own research.
If you’d like to try out Nostr or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources to kickstart your research.
Are you on Nostr?
If you are a Nostr user and want to hang out and chat with us or follow our content on your preferred Nostr front end, feel free to add us using our PubKey below.
npub10mxnle348mzv2dnj0ylgz3zu9gceenc29x9fr4m6mnars66j7vxsnkn8mj
The Bitcoin Manual’s Nostr Pubkey
Please give us your notes.
If you have used Nostr, which client do you prefer and why? What apps and services would you like to see form part of the growing ecosystem?
Let us know in the comments down below.
