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
The OP has comments disabled and it didn’t seem right to not say thank you and goodbye.
To the entire team past and present at lemm.ee- Thank you for the time and resources you poured into this platform. You will undoubtedly be missed.
why are comments even disabled in the first place?
Holy shit, that was unexpected.
It really wasn’t, sadly.
The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that’s typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.
From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.
A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.
Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I’m very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.
So, yeah. :/
More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.
I can help with that, if needed. I’m going to have to migrate my own communities in the coming weeks, so I can help with yours too.
Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.
Yes, I understand it’s already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.
As part of that, backing up the community’s many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.
Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.
Anyway, that’s for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I’m going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that’s good for starters!
Hm, if you need to migrate all of the content to a new community, that might require quite some work indeed.
What about gradually moving content over? https://lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film content is still there, and lemmy.film went down more than a year ago
Also, have a look at this post: https://piefed.social/post/667044
Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work.
Blaming the community for that is not fair. It takes only a few rotten fruit to spoil the whole basket. Even if 99% of your userbase are model netizens who are supportive and only make positive contributions, the whole system can be brought down by a few dedicate trolls/losers.
We need to build effective filtering mechanisms to get rid of abuse/spam and we need to maybe bring back the idea of Web of Trust. It’s too easy to create an account and start polluting the fediverse.
Yea, I’m really surprised as well. Was there any build up to this? Any calls for help?
Ahh, this is really sad. Lemm.ee was always an instance that shined brightly, and @sunaurus@lemm.ee has helped me out a couple of times.
Sad day indeed.
I know that instance had a policy of trying not to defederate from anything (unless very necessary). Is there another instance like this that will not be shutting down?
I think sh.itjust.works has a similar policy IIRC reading the various instance policies across Lemmy. I suppose Hexbear may also be in that category, but I don’t want to be subjected to constant pics of pigs shitting on their own balls.
Yeah tbh I feel like Hexbear/ML/Lemmygrad are all instances that will ruin/poison any other instances touched by them much. As well as any communities modded by the .World admin team.
On the topic of admjn burnout, I find it ridiculous that we choose to put so much burden on instance and community admins. Why don’t people just utilize their block functions instead of expecting admins to clean up bad posts and users as fast as possible?
Not saying admins should do nothing, but it should be sufficient for an admin to only do what’s absolutely necessary to keep the instance alive (including removal of illegal content). Anything else should be considered extra credit and no one should be entertained complaining about it.
If you see a community for the first time, and then see harassment and insults everywhere, you’re probably not going to block every offender, you’re just going to not visit that community again.
Libertarians envision a system where everyone takes care of their own trash without regulation or municipal waste services.
Normies come in and see neighborhoods with rubbish everywhere, overrun by bears and racoons.
Not just a metaphor, it really happened.
Not a libertarian if you were referring to me. I envision a system in which we all contribute and take part instead of throwing all the effort on someone already providing you with the space and expecting them to do it all, when you can more easily do it yourself.
Sure, if I want a community about cooking and instead of finding cooking content I find insults and harassment, then I will leave. That’s essentially an equivalent of the blocking feature I spoke about.
But I find it hard to believe that such a cooking community would become good by just having a moderator ban all the offenders, when they occupy most of the posts.
Cool, now we’ll get an influx into lemmy.world and I’ll finally have a reason to abandon this account lol
.world was already the closest thing to reddit on the fediverse.
lol yeah even has the shitty sociopath admins.
