The Current State of Chia News and Discussions

Chia has a information decentralization problem. Announcements, news, and updates from both Chia Network Inc. and the community are spread out across multiple places. Each with their own inclinations and none of them are a one-stop shop to stay up-to-date.

Here are the popular places I’m aware of:

With the recent news of CNI taking over the ChiaForum.com domain name and their intent to restart the forum with a clean slate run by the community (via XCH Foundation), this seems like a good time to discuss the issues and propose some solutions.

Issue #1 – Information Fragmentation

To create a snapshot of the current state of Chia news propagation, I took a dozen recent events and looked at which of the above places they were mentioned on.

(XCH.today and This Week In Chia are grouped together since updates are syndicated on XCH.today weekly).

Event	Chia Discord	Chia.net Blog	Twitter X	r/chia	Old ChiaForum	XCH.today TWIC
XCH Foundation Launch	✅		✅	✅		✅
Chia 2.5.0 Release	✅		✅	✅		✅
Prefarm Transfer of 44,325.69 XCH to Market Maker	✅			✅
New Plot Format Details	✅	✅	✅	✅		✅
January Announcement Details	✅		✅			✅
Chia Signer and Cloud Wallet Release	✅	✅	✅	✅		✅
Oxygen Hunters WalletConnect for in-game NFTs			✅			✅
CircuitDAO new release			✅			✅
Warp Green pre-funded bridging			✅			✅
Sol’s Lot new dashboard with Stripe payments			✅			✅
Chia Toronto 2025 Conference	✅		✅			✅
XCH.network launch	✅		✅			✅

From this recent sample, there are some takeaways:

Chia Discord has full coverage of CNI announcements with some community updates surfacing organically as part of conversations.
Chia.net Blog is a partial news source of only the most important updates that warrant a more thorough write-up.
Twitter/X has the best coverage but interestingly has no mention or discussion of the prefarm transfer.
r/chia has coverage of official CNI announcements but most community updates are absent.
The old Chia Forum is not inactive but is completely devoid of project and community developments.
TWIC sources its updates from Twitter but it’s a big effort from one man. Shoutout to @steppsr for this labor of love!

Issue #2 – SEO and Free Speech

One observation I’ve seen is that newcomers learning about Chia can stumble onto r/chia or Chia Forum and get the impression that the project is dying or dead. I’ve also heard complaints that some places are overly moderated and even “stifling free speech”.

Let’s examine the different resources along these dimensions.

Resource	Search Engine Friendly	Moderated / Curated	Discussions
Chia Discord		✅	✅
Chia.net Blog	✅	✅
Twitter/X			✅
r/chia	✅	✅	✅
Old Chia Forum	✅		✅
TWIC		✅
XCH.today	✅	✅	✅

From an SEO perspective, Reddit and Chia Forum seem to rise to the top of results in search engines due to both being easily indexable. This Week In Chia, although indexable, is not search engine friendly due to all updates existing in a single page and links are often disjoint from relevant text.

As for discussion, it’s interesting that the least moderated platform (Twitter) also has the most discussion and Chia news coverage yet the people that I’ve seen have issue with moderation of the Chia discord do not seem to be active on Twitter. This site (XCH.today) supports comments but it’s barely used.

Issue #3 – International Accessibility

The previous analysis is entirely from an English speaker perspective. Non-native English speakers (with makes up a majority of farmers) may feel disconnected from developments and updates on the project.

Let’s look at the ease of accessing translated content across these places.

Built-in translations:
- XCH.today
- Twitter/X
Manual translation (e.g. Google Translate, browser plugin):
- Chia.net Blog
- r/chia
- Old Chia Forum
- This Week In Chia
Difficult to translate:
- Chia Discord

Besides the language barrier (which is solvable), there is also the question of access. For example, China does not have access to all of the above sites without using a VPN. Hence there are also community-led efforts such as ChiaInChina who painstakingly translates articles into Chinese and posts them to China-accessible platforms like Weixin (WeChat).

Issue #4 – Lack of video and audio content

Chia lacks diversity of mediums. Since Digital Spaceport decided to remove crypto content from his YouTube channel, there isn’t a prominent video creator to create Chia video guides and content. The FoMO show has been doing a good job recently with deep dives into Chia events and interviews.

As for audio content, there are daily Chia Twitter Spaces, including some hosted on a regular schedule, but these are isolated from the rest of the web and not always recorded. I created the AI-powered XCH.coffee podcast but it’s not at a frequency to be useful for sharing recent events. Though transcripts were made available to ensure the content indexable.

Potential Solutions

Here are some ideas to help address the above issues, including some that are sourced from :

Encourage the community to cross-post news and updates across all platforms.
Add one-click share buttons to platforms (e.g. mojofeed) or make use of the existing ones (e.g. XCH.today).
Make use of AI to generate more video and audio content, including shorts.
Take part in community efforts to start a Chia podcast. Hop in the XCH Foundation discord to join the ongoing discussion.
Create a scalable solution for crowdsourcing updates for TWIC.
Create public and open Chia related assets (images, logos, branding guidelines) and materials for creators to use.

Is Chia Forum the future?

The Chia Forum reboot with community moderation is promising as a central place for discussions and has the distinct advantage of being indexable, globally accessible, and translatable. So make sure you sign up and participate when it is relaunched later this week to give it the best chance to succeed.

What other ideas do you have?