lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month
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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
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https://join-lemmy.org/ can help you find an instance based on your interests.
Can it rate them by financial stability or admin burnout?
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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.
This is why we don't need vaccines.
We just need gradual exposure to a lesser form of bullshit, so we can develop immunity to the greater whole of bullshit!
/s
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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.
It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.
Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.
If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.
I don't think that the problem is we're "too small to be a job". I think that the problem is that the average "enthusiast" is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.
We have tens of thousands of people who (...) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.
Sure, but what I don't get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?
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It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.
Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.
If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.
I don't think that the problem is we're "too small to be a job". I think that the problem is that the average "enthusiast" is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.
We have tens of thousands of people who (...) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.
Sure, but what I don't get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?
Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it's too small to be a job.
But in the end, I believe people aren't willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don't have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don't pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they'd milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.
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Forgive me, I’m still not sure what this means. Is this site just dead at the end of the month?
Not this specific site, but another instance of lemmy.
I think. -
Forgive me, I’m still not sure what this means. Is this site just dead at the end of the month?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You are a lemme.ee user, so you will need to find another instance (it's like a server) if you want to keep using Lemmy - and I hope you do!
https://join-lemmy.org/ has a listing of instances, though I'm sure others will hop in here and recommend some.
Edit: This comment describes how to migrate your subscriptions, blocks, and saved posts
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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
This is like closing a nature reserve due to insufficient landscapers.
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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.
Well, yeah. In .ee's case, one might surmise that Sunaurus was a whiz at backend-stuff, but maybe didn't have enough experience as lead admin in the specific capacity of dealing with multitudes of 'people fires.' (not that he wasn't absolutely wonderful and professional in everything he handled IMO) But, a lead admin would ideally be a manager dealing with direct-reports, not the guy who had to do it mostly alone for a long time, as I think he did.
What the community contributed (in the positive sense) to Lemm.ee was more than enough AFAIK. What was critically needed, rather, was a robust admin crew, be it fully volunteer and/or partly paid by donation. Maybe various tasks could have been rotated too, such as: "I'll handle the reports this week, Ilona will handle requests, Tomaso will handle documents, and Rafo will handle mod interactions, then we'll switch roles next week." Or something like that... Anything that worked, really.
Indeed, it would be really interesting to see how other big instances are handling all this, specifically the bad actors that all sites must deal with, and which ultimately seemed to bring down Lemm.ee.
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Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it's too small to be a job.
But in the end, I believe people aren't willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don't have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don't pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they'd milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet
Yeah, but we are not "most people". I thought "we" understood if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. I thought "we" understood that "Free software" was not a "free lunch".
And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.
This is also why I think we should flip the script and stop cheering admins that run "free" instances. We should stop helping admins who can not make rent and we should start telling them to start valuing their work and demand proper compensation.
