lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month
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Unfortunately, that's not what I'm talking about, either.
What I'm talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing... how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn't going to last indefinitely.
As a personal example of a 'motivated user,' I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I've populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.
For the most part it's been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it's still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it's been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn't necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.
At one time I thought community spirit (for what that's worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I'm not pointing fingers; I'm observing.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction.
Community is not enough. I wrote that in 2022 with Twitter and Mastodon in mind, but the same principle still applies for Reddit vs Lemmy.
Lots of people say they want to "stick it to the man" but very few are actually going to put in the work and/or money required to actually succeed.
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One scenario is hypothetical. The other really happened. It makes no sense to say "they are both true".
Then let's stop discussing hypothetical scenarios altogether if we can't assess them?
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I can't comment on whether the admins are likely to be open to this, but it's definitely more drama than simply shutting down.
The data users provided to lemm.ee was entrusted to the admins of that instance. It might not seem like a big deal, but just handing it over isn't really appropriate.
The first thing they'd do would be to defed ml, grad and hexbear anyway.
Although I wouldn't blame them for the later two, but the whole point of .ee was it's reluctance to defed.
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65824884
Hey everyone
We’re really sorry to say this, but lemm.ee will be shutting down on June 30, 2025.
What you need to know
As of now:
- New user registrations are disabled
- Creating new communities is disabled
What you should do:
- You can export your settings at https://lemm.ee/settings to take them with you to another instance.
- If you're moving to another instance, consider adding a note to your lemm.ee profile with your new username. Your old profile will still be visible from other instances even after we go offline.
- Alternatively, if you want to delete your lemm.ee profile, now is the best time to do it, so the deletion can federate out before we go offline.
- If you're one of the folks supporting us with a recurring donation, please remember to cancel it (Ko-Fi donations should have been cancelled automatically already). Our leftover funds are already enough to cover our bills for next month, so we can keep things running without any more support.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
Why this is happening
The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.
The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.
We know this sucks. We're genuinely sorry it’s ending like this. Thank you to everyone who spent time here and helped make it better.
– lemm.ee team
Well now I feel awful for not helping when they needed admins
I don't manage servers or even have experience managing communities. -
I chose lemmy.zip at the end. I hope this one will stay longer (I started on vlemmy.net which was put offline without notice and then I switched to lemm.ee...).
Just do it like me and create a couple accounts here and there while also migrating settings.
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Wow a whole decade??
Yeah wow 2015 how impressive
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65824884
Hey everyone
We’re really sorry to say this, but lemm.ee will be shutting down on June 30, 2025.
What you need to know
As of now:
- New user registrations are disabled
- Creating new communities is disabled
What you should do:
- You can export your settings at https://lemm.ee/settings to take them with you to another instance.
- If you're moving to another instance, consider adding a note to your lemm.ee profile with your new username. Your old profile will still be visible from other instances even after we go offline.
- Alternatively, if you want to delete your lemm.ee profile, now is the best time to do it, so the deletion can federate out before we go offline.
- If you're one of the folks supporting us with a recurring donation, please remember to cancel it (Ko-Fi donations should have been cancelled automatically already). Our leftover funds are already enough to cover our bills for next month, so we can keep things running without any more support.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
Why this is happening
The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.
The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.
We know this sucks. We're genuinely sorry it’s ending like this. Thank you to everyone who spent time here and helped make it better.
– lemm.ee team
I wish a sincere “fuck you” to all the Russian trolls that caused this outcome.
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Huh. One of the least expected instances I thought would shut down
Right? Where will I go? What will I do?
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@WatDabney @FrostyTrichs I started my friendica instance after facebook banned me for pointing out issues with the Covid-19 vax, then I started my mastodon instance after twatter did the same prior to Elon's ownership. I've had some hardware issues along the way but we've got those straightened out. There seems to be the this false assumption on many peoples part that fediverse instances should be echo chambers like the old facebook and twitter were. I think it's healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed, but I believe it is unhealthy to allow to degrade to ad hominem attacks, I run my sites accordingly, others don't feel this way they prefer an echo chamber and there are instances that accommodate those folks well, and to me this is the beauty of the fediverse. I personally prefer long format posting because I don't believe short format provides the opportunity for the depth of discussion needed to explore opposing view, historical perspective, cause and effect elaboration, etc, which is, of my nodes I spend most of my time on friendica. Friendica is however not efficient, it takes a lot of hardware resources to run it efficiently.
I think it's healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed
Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.
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I was not expecting to wake up to this
On one hand, it makes me want to recommend Lemmy.World even more. On the other hand, if Lemmy.World ends up like this too...
It's a really tricky situation.
I don't see us going down anytime soon, and at current user numbers I don't think there's going to be a major difference in moderation workload with the influx of users compared to what we already have, but it really is not great for decentralization. We already try delegating the majority of moderation to community moderators where applicable, where on a lot of other instances the admin teams seem to be more involved in addressing community reports on admin level as well. For the most part we're dealing only with instance level topics in the admin team and provide some additional tooling to improve report notifications to community mods. There are even various benefits from a moderation perspective when users are all local and not remote, as with federation a lot of signals that would allow various types of abuse are unfortunately lost. That said, I would still prefer if there were more stable and larger instances overall, while not having a single instance stand out as massively larger than any other one. Friendly "competition" is almost always beneficial for everyone involved.
lemm.ee being the second largest instance and the shutdown only being announced less than a month before is unfortunately also not something that gives people looking for a stable instance much confidence. I hope this won't scare too many users away from Lemmy and that most will just find a new instance in the Fediverse.
Instance moderation and moderation in general are unfortunately tasks that can be very challenging at scale, even with just a few thousand users, especially when dealing with drama. It's not really a surprise that there are somewhat frequently posts from larger instances looking for new admins, while older admins on the same instance are becoming less active. Even if people aren't exhausted from their involvement, their circumstances in life may change, or they may no longer be interested in Lemmy as a platform in general, leading to a number of reasons why admins may not be as active as it seems when looking at the list of admins in an instance sidebar. It's often a thankless job with a lot of things happening in the background to deal with spam, trolls and other issues, which most users won't even see when done right.
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@WatDabney @FrostyTrichs I started my friendica instance after facebook banned me for pointing out issues with the Covid-19 vax, then I started my mastodon instance after twatter did the same prior to Elon's ownership. I've had some hardware issues along the way but we've got those straightened out. There seems to be the this false assumption on many peoples part that fediverse instances should be echo chambers like the old facebook and twitter were. I think it's healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed, but I believe it is unhealthy to allow to degrade to ad hominem attacks, I run my sites accordingly, others don't feel this way they prefer an echo chamber and there are instances that accommodate those folks well, and to me this is the beauty of the fediverse. I personally prefer long format posting because I don't believe short format provides the opportunity for the depth of discussion needed to explore opposing view, historical perspective, cause and effect elaboration, etc, which is, of my nodes I spend most of my time on friendica. Friendica is however not efficient, it takes a lot of hardware resources to run it efficiently.
issues with the Covid-19 vax
healthy for opposing viewpoints
Vaccine skepticism is not a "healthy viewpoint", but quite the opposite. Vaccines and inoculations are about as much "proven science" as we have, with hundreds of years behind the science. Spreading anti-vaxxer propaganda kills people.
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I wish a sincere “fuck you” to all the Russian trolls that caused this outcome.
Context?
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At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction.
Community is not enough. I wrote that in 2022 with Twitter and Mastodon in mind, but the same principle still applies for Reddit vs Lemmy.
Lots of people say they want to "stick it to the man" but very few are actually going to put in the work and/or money required to actually succeed.
Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn't really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It's also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It's too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.
Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don't give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who -- as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts -- are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.
These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is -- the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.
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Context?
In case you’re not actually here to sealion I encourage you to read through the modlog of lem.ee communities.
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issues with the Covid-19 vax
healthy for opposing viewpoints
Vaccine skepticism is not a "healthy viewpoint", but quite the opposite. Vaccines and inoculations are about as much "proven science" as we have, with hundreds of years behind the science. Spreading anti-vaxxer propaganda kills people.
“proven science”
Vaccines are a good example here. Handwashing is another. We've had empirical proof on the latter since the 1850s, but it's STILL super hit or miss whether people will bother
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Then let's stop discussing hypothetical scenarios altogether if we can't assess them?
You brought hypothetical scenarios. I was just pointing out a fact: the second largest Lemmy instance is going under and taking with it all the communities that were created there.
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In case you’re not actually here to sealion I encourage you to read through the modlog of lem.ee communities.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Oh I had no idea. But it makes sense, cause I never see any Russian troll shit on there*
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Niche topics were always going to be dependent on numbers.
I'm the single contributor to [email protected] , one of the most popular toys on the planet. And I didn't expect another regular poster to appear before we reached 60k monthly active users.
"Build it, and they will come" isn't really true nowadays. We're competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.
“Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.
And that's fine. At a certain point I understood that what I was running was essentially a 'blog+,' and didn't have a problem with that, evidenced by my willingness to keep posting and composing content on a regular basis, seemingly much like yourself.
FWIW, and not unlike as with Legos-- European Comics are indeed a major industry and consumed around the world, altho not so much in the States and Japan. So, "niche" in the FV-sense, but by no means the real-world sense. This gave me a certain amount of motivation & hope to keep on truckin,' no matter what...
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65824884
Hey everyone
We’re really sorry to say this, but lemm.ee will be shutting down on June 30, 2025.
What you need to know
As of now:
- New user registrations are disabled
- Creating new communities is disabled
What you should do:
- You can export your settings at https://lemm.ee/settings to take them with you to another instance.
- If you're moving to another instance, consider adding a note to your lemm.ee profile with your new username. Your old profile will still be visible from other instances even after we go offline.
- Alternatively, if you want to delete your lemm.ee profile, now is the best time to do it, so the deletion can federate out before we go offline.
- If you're one of the folks supporting us with a recurring donation, please remember to cancel it (Ko-Fi donations should have been cancelled automatically already). Our leftover funds are already enough to cover our bills for next month, so we can keep things running without any more support.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
Why this is happening
The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.
The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.
We know this sucks. We're genuinely sorry it’s ending like this. Thank you to everyone who spent time here and helped make it better.
– lemm.ee team
Forgive me, I’m still not sure what this means. Is this site just dead at the end of the month?
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65824884
Hey everyone
We’re really sorry to say this, but lemm.ee will be shutting down on June 30, 2025.
What you need to know
As of now:
- New user registrations are disabled
- Creating new communities is disabled
What you should do:
- You can export your settings at https://lemm.ee/settings to take them with you to another instance.
- If you're moving to another instance, consider adding a note to your lemm.ee profile with your new username. Your old profile will still be visible from other instances even after we go offline.
- Alternatively, if you want to delete your lemm.ee profile, now is the best time to do it, so the deletion can federate out before we go offline.
- If you're one of the folks supporting us with a recurring donation, please remember to cancel it (Ko-Fi donations should have been cancelled automatically already). Our leftover funds are already enough to cover our bills for next month, so we can keep things running without any more support.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
Why this is happening
The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.
The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.
We know this sucks. We're genuinely sorry it’s ending like this. Thank you to everyone who spent time here and helped make it better.
– lemm.ee team
Cool, now we'll get an influx into lemmy.world and I'll finally have a reason to abandon this account lol
