lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month
1y 19d ago by crazypeople.online/u/FrostyTrichs in fediverse
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?
The sad thing is that nobody knew there was a doomsday clock.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell, they only called for new admins/mods 4 months ago and not since then. I agree that if you care about something, you should support it and not wait until they cry for help, but there is also a matter of being proactive and transparent about how volunteer recruitment is going (well or badly).
Completely. This feels like a major communications fail. It's a basic technique of fundraising and mobilization: put a big ticking clock on your campaign and people will step up in time.
I think you're missing the point. The call for new admin volunteers was stickied by the instance for an extended period. Even using an app rather than the web interface, it was stuck at the top of my feed until I hid the post.
The group of people who ignored that call to action yet would have volunteered with a follow-up post of a "big ticking clock" as it were, aren't necessarily the type of people you want to admin an instance. Especially one as big as lemm.ee. Certainly, if any admin will do then increasing recruitment efforts makes sense.
Fair enough. But whether this is a technical problem or a human problem, it is a problem. Silly for people to be denying that IMO.
If servers are going to come and go every 3 months at the whim of individuals, then - IMO - maybe there are are too many servers. Anecdotally, I picked my particular one for this very reason. Seems I anticipated well.
I guess it depends on what your individual priorities are for this sort of platform. I already created and later abandoned @gila@lemmy.world after they blocked piracy comms, and in hindsight feel that was the right decision - hence creating this account after learning I'll soon be unable to access @gila@lemm.ee. At the end of the day, the ability to migrate to another instance with a different approach on issues like federation, moderation & administration is part of what drew me to this platform. If lemm.ee compromised on their approach simply to remain active - I'd likely have migrated away from it anyway.
Yet, they're entitled to their own decisions, triumphs and failures. So, they can shutdown the instance. Now, it would be a different thing if people really want them to be around again, raise some money, grab a backup, buy the domain name, let's gooo!! ..or not. Fine by me. If only 2 users from the instance decided to start a new one this is a huge win :)
actually starting a new instance on the same domain name would be... very weird, potentially extremely problematic. The system would not be able to tell apart users from the old site and the new site.
... They are literally saying they don't have admins/mods enough. You want to strain your mods? Allowing comments on that sort of post is how you do that.
it could have been a cool free 4 all like in the good old internet times xD
Yeah sure its all fun and games until people start posting csam.
He said he's fine with csam on lemmy, as it will be voted away
"Think of the kids"
Seriously, I have enough of people using this kind of reasoning for censoring everything and having strong moderation. I’m pretty sure nearly no one does that
then block them with your user power. i dont see the problem?
The problem, besides that just being gross, is that hosting csam is a very serious crime in most places. Leaving that unmoderated can very easily end with alphabet agencies from around the world shutting down lemmy instances.
And hosting CSAM is immoral.
I don't think the people here whining about moderation, defederation, and "Freeze Peach" care about any morality than their perceived right to say whatever they want without consequence.
CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material (child porn under its old moniker).
I'm going to assume you didn't know what the acronym meant because saying "just block them I don't see the problem" to CSAM posts is very idiotic.
Yes officer, this one right here.
good
Was it?
its probably because its just an important announcement post they plan to pin for the whole month and they dont want it to get filled with people talking in it which could led to the comment derailing the discussion
❤️
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!
Also, have a look at this post: https://piefed.social/post/667044
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.filmcontent is still there, and lemmy.film went down more than a year ago
Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.
Hmm. Yeah, if anyone's posted images there to the pict-rs instance on lemm.ee, those will presumably be going down too.
checks
Yeah, like, you just posted this image yesterday. Like, post text federates, but other instances won't have copies of the images.
EDIT: Normally, though, people are going to be posting to pict-rs on their home instance, so it's just users on lemm.ee who are going to have the problem; images posted by people elsewhere should stay up.
how'd the migration work?
Have a look at this post: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876780
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.
Blaming the community for that is not fair.
I'm not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.
What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn't happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it's a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You'd have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess...
We can not change "human behavior", so I don't see how/why we should expect things to "be different at .ee" compared to anywhere else.
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.
Niche topics were always going to be dependent on numbers.
I'm the single contributor to lego@lemm.ee , 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, every time there is a post on the topic, moderators say that the tools they have are insufficient.
It'd be great to have some community focus on that going forward, whether through direct Lemmy changes or creating better bot mod tools. I'm not in a position to contribute right now but maybe in a few months.
There is a subset of Lemmy that absolutely hates any idea of automod tools because it reminds them too much of issues they had with Reddit. But as Lemmy grows (and given it's volunteer nature) it feels inescapable at some point.
they mostly fester in any community that has political discussion in it.
Sad to hear of your problems, but thank you for the time you did put into it! Nothing lasts forever but that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.
I think people really underestimate how much work it is to maintain a community online. It's something that is so outside of my skillset and capabilities that I feel awe when I see it done successfully.
I'm sorry to hear about your health issues. I don't know shit about dick, but if there's some way a 10 yr sysadmin could do to help out, please let me help! I'm a big hoarder of data and don't believe information should be gatekept or lost if it can be saved.
For posterity's sake, please don't abandon hope in keeping your labor of love alive!
Thanks for the offer and kind words! I've tagged you in the comment above...
I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard,
I'd say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there's a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It's certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.
handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own.
Reddit was known for years to leave the moderation tasks to the volunteers admins. I'm still a mod in a quite active sub, the mod queue is around 2600 items now.
We hav sub mods here too. The difference is the admins
reddit has admins, AI moderations, aggressive filters, and COMPLIcit mods in many subs to do the policing.
the auto-removal and auto-bans take much pressure off of reddit admins and mods, regardless if you were in violation of policies or not.
Yup, good point.
i think lemmy is skewed, because the people that got banned from reddit for expressing such trollish/spammy , or propaganda(like conservatives and ml and hexbeared) come here thats why there are such strong opinion.
and theres the recent arrivals: from reddits indiscriminate bannings.
When I looked through the list of lemm.ee communities I was subbed to, my first thought was: omg I hope JohnnyEnzyme takes this ok...
¡Hola, compa!
Yes I'm bummed, but we'll see what happens. Blaze has offered some help, and linked some kind of 'PieFed migration project,' above.
At this moment I'd say that even if a migration *is* possible, there's a very strong chance that EGN+ will need a new mod(s) to run the place. Aside from that, and if my health picks up, I'd be happy to keep contributing content, and maybe help out here and there.
I'll probably be posting that message to the community soon, but am mentioning it to you first, and for anyone else reading. =)
Perhaps I wasn't paying appropriate attention but it also seemed unexpected to me. Everywhere has a background level of "we want more mods and admins" so it gets easy to ignore, and it feels like we've gone straight from there to "right we're shutting down now" without an intermediate "we're really struggling here folk and may have to consider shutting down if it doesn't improve".
Yeah, fair point!
Still, as has been commented in this thread, Lemm.ee indeed called for admins at some point in order to help out, but evidently got an underwhelming response. Perhaps part of that due to the fact that Sunaurus & Ella stating right up front that it was a thankless type of job.
the problem is the people who have trolled, spammed on reddit with right wing propaganda/ or pro-israeli also fled to lemmy causing problems here too. reddit now is just overmoderating to the point its not usable for most people now. reddit used to be a good place to go to, but they have been banning people so easily now, you cant even create a account without getting shadowbanned for some people.
I think somebody shoukd do an academic study on Lemmy, how it differs from Reddit, its weaknesses, and why it might be failing. So that there is a definitive cause to its weakness that can be pointed to for anyone willing to give it another shot.
Secondly, I think it might be a good idea for the admins of the servers to have a video call. This will make the (at least admin) community feel much more personal in a way that comment threads cannot and will lead to a stronger sense of community. Actually I'm impressed that Lemmy as a project has made it this far without the developers having ever been able to plan the project together in a group.
How is this failing? If lemm.ee was a traditional forum it'd be over, but because of federation everything lives on.
Yea, I'm really surprised as well. Was there any build up to this? Any calls for help?
Yes, actually. I probably could have stepped up to be an admin, but tbh, my plate is already overfull.
Yes, actually.
Link? Just out of curiosity.
That's four months ago. Unfortunate that they didn't call for more urgent help after that. But I suppose it's too late now.
I always just assume there are hella ppl clamoring to do it and I wouldnt be picked
As a rule of thumb, there typically are very few people clamoring for volunteer leader positions. It's a constant problem you see even in irl non-profit organizations, unless they're fairly big/famous
It just turns out that, it's actually just a lot of responsibility and work. Most people realize this, and don't have the capacity to do the work, so often there even are no candidates for the leader positions.. until someone reluctantly steps up because otherwise the organization would die
At least, that's my experience in the real life organizations and clubs I've volunteered in
But you get the illusion of power and all that comes with it, smh
I messaged sunaurus a year ago about potentially being a mod, and he told me it'd be difficult and I ended up chickening out. Now I wish I had stepped up also
a comment tree with the same confusion as you (and me lol) https://lemm.ee/comment/20911153
Lemm.ee is recruiting new admins!, from four months ago.
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.
This instance will live on. Definitely understand the burnout and hope @sunaurus@lemm.ee and the other volunteers here stick around.
Sail into the sunset lemm.ee
You will be missed
Definitely
Really nice that they're doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy's first major "shutdown" we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I'd hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.
and they don't support voyager
Voyager doesn't support them
Mastodon handles it pretty decently where it automatically gets your followers to follow your new account, there's no reason why communities/groups couldn't do the same thing
Individual users' follows are not very useful in the threadiverse compared to backlog of content.
The historical backlog isn't going anywhere. It will still be viewable on other instances.
For example here's an old thread from a community on vlemmy.net, an instance that disappeared more than a year ago.
Yes, but people can no longer engage with that content. It creates the appearance of relatively dead communities.
Yeah and that kinda looks bad at first glance. Just clicking on what seems like the biggest community (most subscribers) and seeing that it’s actually dead (instance went down or the community was migrated elsewhere).
feddit.de disappeared a while back. As did the original UK one. (Both have been replaced)
Was there an original uk one? This one is the only one I'm aware of, it had a moment of doubt a year back but we got new admins before we needed to move.
It reminds me of DMV.social's shutdown, and for similar reasons (admin feeling overwhelmed). I don't recall how big that one was though.
What a loss. =(
It's a strange quirk of lemmy that we will continue to be able to see content from lemm.ee even after they've shut down. It'll feel like seeing ghosts.
Sad to hear, had a very inspired name and the admin was very strong with hosting tech. Unfortunately however a generic instance with lax federation rules and no solid ideology, is a recipe for burning out your admins. The owner seemingly losing interest in lemmy also didn't help.
For lemm.ee users who will be migrating to new instances: You can export your subscriptions and blocks to import them to your new instance! You can export that info in your profile settings panel, and import it from the same page on your new instance.
yep, if you're a lemm.ee user then your Export button will be here: https://lemm.ee/settings
the bottom of the right column
Also PieFed can import those exports that Lemmy makes.
so you have to create a new account as well, when you join said instance.
Yes you'll have to create a new account somewhere else, so that you can import settings
i just created on another instances, 2 im waiting for approval.
Thank God I don't have to reblock all the furry communities.
it seems that this will save your subscriptions list and some other settings but not your list of blocked communities. at least, it hasn't worked like that for me. edit - disregard! they showed up after a while.
also, you need to save your avatar pic and re-upload.
I actually decided it's fine, I'll just reblock all the annoying things. Never had an avatar, never will prolly
all the kink porns/furry porn yea, i had to block alot of nsfw, and a whol host of users i blocked
Do you know if saved posts/comments are also included in the exported settings?
After checking just now, it appears that it does! :D
Fantastic! Thank you for checking! Now on to picking a new instance...
I was sure it wouldn't but it sure does!
Doesn't work for piefed though it seems. Or I just don't know where to find it :D
This is sort of unfortunate, but as long as the fediverse remains genuinely decentralized, I expect it's just going to be a fact of life. Instances are going to come and go, alternately riding in on waves of determination and enthusiasm and out in sluggish streams of burnout and ennui.
And in a way, I think it's arguably even a good thing, or at least not a bad one. The basic structure of the fediverse prevents centralization through ownership, but there's still a risk of individual instances gaining enough clout to effectively act as a centralizing force. Not that Lemm.ee was in that position or even headed that way, but still, broadly I think that the understanding that instances are likely ephemeral — that they come and they go, and much more to the point that that's as it should be — is an important one.
And it neatly illustrates a large part of the reason that I have at least a dozen or so accounts scattered around the fediverse, including, for a little while longer, this one.
My 2nd cake day was going to be a few days after shutdown :(
Lemm.ee was a fantastic instance, it will be greatly missed. Huge thanks to the admins and owner that made it happen for so long.
A shame the communities will be lost in the transition, the movies/television communities are genuinely cursed. This is the 4th or 5th time people moved that community.
I guess now would be a good time to give Piefed another shot. I love Lemmy and all, but new features have stalled for too long and I'm ready for some change.
So long, lemm.ee
A shame the communities will be lost in the transition, the movies/television communities are genuinely cursed. This is the 4th or 5th time people moved that community.
It's okay, it's routine now
the great movies/television migration starts again
Posted a meta poll on movies@lemm.ee, same for television@lemm.ee
thanks for letting me know
We are currently preparing the 1.0 release which will have lots of major new features, such as private communities, multi-communities and much more. Although 0.19 is also getting constant updates with smaller improvements, for example 0.19.11.
What are some good mobile clients for piefed?
Thunder is coming, but for now only Interstellar is official iirc (last I saw Thunder support was only available as a fork of the code).
The web interface is great though.
Interstellar - https://interstellar.jwr.one/
Yeah hope ppl remake them quickly
Huh. One of the least expected instances I thought would shut down :(
First thank you for the work (always keeping server up to date, fixing issues quickly, blocking spam,...).
Now time to think about migrating, any advices for another great instance?
General instances:
Sopuli.xyz is a great medium sized general purpose instance. Good admins that update to the latest Lemmy release consistently.
Lemmy.cafe could be another option if you'd prefer a smaller general purpose instance (to help spread the load and prevent the burnout that lemm.ee experienced) that's also run by a solid admin.
Themed instances:
Retrolemmy.com - a cool place for retro tech/game enthusiasts
Literature.cafe - For book lovers and readers!
lemmy.dbzer0.com - fantastic instance for Anarchists and those who like to go Yarr! 🏴☠️
Programming.dev - For techies interested in programming and linux
Mander.xyz - Focused on Science and Nature
Lemmy.zip - PC Gaming and Tech focused
You can find more over at Lemmyverse.net
Piefed:
If you're willing to try an entirely new way to interact with Lemmy and the threadiverse, consider giving Piefed.social a try, a completely independent project from Lemmy. It's still a little behind in some ways, but also has a bunch of features that lemmy doesn't. If you're a community mod looking to migrate, Piefed apparently makes it particularly easy!
Lemmy.cafe could be another option if you’d prefer a smaller general purpose instance (to help spread the load and prevent the burnout that lemm.ee experienced) that’s also run by a solid admin.
Some feedback on lemmy.cafe: it used to be my alt for a few weeks end of 2024. I liked the idea of the instance, and the them, and Illecors (the admin) was indeed quite nice to talk too.
That being said, there was an issue that lasted from 22th of November to 18th of January with the thumbnails not loading, while other instances running the same version didn't have those issues: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198
I know that Illecors did his best, and people should definitely give the instance a try if they are interested, but this is just a warning to keep in mind that this is an instance mostly run by one person, so troubleshooting can take a bit of time.
That's a good point. On a similar note, Programming.dev had pretty severe database breakage that took quite some time to fix, but thankfully both instances seem to be healthy and working well nowadays. :)
Oh yeah, that was quite something too 😅
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.
Thank you!
Tagging so I have this pinned. I need to find a new instance
Many thanks for that curated list
I'm migrating to lemmy.zip, at least for the short term. They also have public instance reports, which was the major reason I joined lemm.ee. Transparency and accountability is essential. I guess the fact that those reports got more and more sparse at lemm.ee was a canary in the coal mine here....
Enjoy lemmy.zip, it's great!
I may be biased, but lemmy.ca is pretty great
I may be biased
So far everyone has recommended their home instance. 😆
I recommend... Wait, shit
i might join it, eventhough im not canadian.
These days, join-lemmy is pretty good at narrowing down instances to match your likes.
I disagree. Some of its top recommendations include lemmynsfw.com (I have nothing against NSFW but go there and read their admin posts - they have been struggling for a long time so like lemm.ee not stable), beehaw.org (a fantastic instance but I feel like one not to be casually recommended to people without explanation), hilariouschaos.com (are you fucking kidding me with this neonazi shit?), lemmy.ml (certainly nothing ever controversial can be said about that one - at least not while on that platform!😜😞), and all of this is just what I noticed today but in the past iirc multiple times even it has suggested hexbear.net to me.
So no, I don't recommend the recommendation of this site to people.
::shudders:: hexbear...yikes!
I moved over to piefed.social - it's another platform, but federated with lemmy, and has some nice features like subscribing to whole topics instead of individual communities.
I'm very happy with infosec.pub. If I had to pick a different one, then I would choose lemmy.dbzer0.com.
I need a recommendation as well. Lemm.ee was my gateway to Lemme.
Me too. I'm wondering where to go next. I can't really search until I get home later.
Discuss.Online has fantastic admins. The uptime rate there is breathtaking. I hopped across many instances before I settled there.
PieFed is also pretty fantastic too, with so very many features that Lemmy lacks - like flairs (post and user), voting polls, categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable, etc.
sh.itjust.works has lived up to its name
Sad to see it go, one of the biggest instances. But I totally get it from the admins' point of views.
I literally just woke up and opened Lemmy to see this. As a lemm.ee user this is sad news but I respect the decision of all those involved as they navigate this
Wow. This is by far the biggest loss I’ve ever witnessed on lemmy.
I totally understand it. It’s a shame it has to happen. Sending much love to the lemm.ee admins.
Also, generally, lemmy can feel very gloomy, there are a lot of fights and stuff as well. I know we can’t prevent this. But whatabout fostering a slightly less cynical culture? Lets compliment more, be slightly less snarky in our replies. Don’t only comment to criticise. Also comment to praise when you see something you like. :)
It's possible that lemm.ee grew too fast for its own good. Also possible that it lacked an "identity" as it was very general purpose. Certain instances attract users that behave better. Perhaps lemm.ee did not (no shade on anyone, just speculating).
I've certainly seen some toxic .ee users which jives with your theory.
I think a big part of it is because they defeded basically no one. Made it a great instance for modding from but also great for being an alt for people in undesirable instances.
allowed to many ml and hexbear to show up in ee feeds, im not surprised. .world has some questionable people too.
The rare time I venture to reddit to talk about Lemmy I saw lemm.ee posted the most.
We get trolled a lot, that's mostly what you're seeing. They seem to be off schedule lately or the admins are handling them better, not sure which. I agree with being better commenters though, it would help the atmosphere.
I don't think it has to be like that. We can discuss things while still being positive. Ideally discussions aren't about disagreements only, but understanding, seeing things from other's perspective, finding middle grounds and so on.
I agree on principal, but in reality it would feel like chatting to tech support or chatgpt.
Besides, bitter sweet, the bitter makes the sweet so much more sweeter.
It was the first foray into the fediverse and helped wean me off reddit. Sad to see it go.
I wish a sincere “fuck you” to all the Russian trolls that caused this outcome.
After the call for admins, there was never an indication that the search wasn't going well. Honestly, I would've put some time in (& I'm sure many others would've) if we'd known closure was imminent.
Is transferring it to someone else in the cards? I have an LLC intended for my own future instance plans, but I'd be more than happy to take over .ee under it to prevent the loss of another good Lemmy-verse instance
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.
but just handing it over isn't really appropriate.
Well I would hope, if they were open to it, they would have internal discussions with the main mods and maybe some sort of vote amongst their user base and/or giving those who'd rather not time to delete their data before anything changes hands
This sounds like a real nightmare.
If the admins have had enough then I imagine there's not much appetite for something like this.
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.
Yeah, I'd love to see if something like that were possible. I'd even volunteer....
It may also be relevant to note that content from lemm.ee will not be deleteable once they go offline. If you are a user on lemm.ee and there is any content at all that you may at some point in the future want to delete, now is the time.
Very sad to see lemm.ee shutting down. I liked it here, the instance was easy to pronounce. Good luck lemm.ee admins with your future endeavors.
Well that was super painless. Downloaded my .json settings, imported, and it's like nothing even happened. All sublemmy communities I was subscribed to before have migrated successfully.
Although defederations are an issue. Sopuli for instance blocks both Hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml - which imho is very much a good thing.:-)
I guess this is a nice test of the migration feature for a lot of users :)
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.
Lemmy probably needs support for different levels of permissions, like Discord has, and PieFed has this too (but I don't think it's as in-depth as Discord yet)
Relevant issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3375
It seems like nutomic is in favor of this idea. He stated that he wanted to implement such a thing in the future when most bug fixing is done. So we definitely could see this during the v1.x.x releases: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3303#issuecomment-1607459130
Dang it! Lemm.ee was formed in summer 2023 alongside the other instances that became the Lemmyverse's biggest, sad to see it go. Thank you for everything!
What's really disappointing is that I just made my Lemm.ee account because Lemmy.One had announced they were closing down. Kinda disheartening to make a new account only for the new instance to also shutdown.
I’ve only been on Lemmy for a year, but this feels pretty significant. How do we prevent this from happening to other instances? Or do we not see it as a huge problem if we assume most active users will migrate to other Lemmy instances?
Also side note, I think Voyager defaults to lemm.ee.
If the ability to make your own feed without much defederation behind the scenes so to say I'd recommend lemmy.zip as an alterative. When I made my account I specifically looked for an instance that would defederate only illegal and mega fucked up shit like cp and gore. This instance offers that, and is federated with almost everyone.
Lemmy.today offers smooth Lemmy experience without defederations. Loving it, using for well over a year.
so where do i go now?
im going to miss lemmee also this is going to led to more lemmy.world centralization sadly
I would hope that the users would not go immediately to lemmy.world, but rather other instances. But you may be right unfortunately
I went to world since thats what popped up the most in the all feed for .ee
But they're already the biggest :/
At the very least if you're going to make communities please do it elsewhere.
Reddit refugee here, can someone recommend to me a place that is not heavily censored but also not filled with racists and white supremacists?
This hits so deep.
Where can I migrate to? I want a similar instance, that doesn't block other instances, instead lets users decide what content they see on their frontpage, as how lemm.ee did it.
I'd be very glad for any suggestions...
(edit: ended up migrating to lemmy.zip . Thanks everyone for your suggestions!)
aww man, this is actually depressing. Hope Lemmy as a whole grows back better after this blows over. o7
I almost joined you. Thank you for all you did and I'm sad to see you go. I guess there's a reason why it's not that toxic on Lemmy, you guys were/are taking the brunt of it.
as someone who barely understands this whole fediverse stuff and had a difficult enough time just choosing and getting into an instance after leaving reddit, what does this mean for me?
is my account and all its posts, comments, activity and bookmarks just gonna be gone?
can that stuff be imported into a different instance?
this sounds like a huge pain in the ass, and my plan in picking a bigger instance in the hope it wouldnt just go off the rails or shut down apparently backfired.
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?
So long, and thanks for all the fish! o7
I was taking a break from browsing lemmy the last few days and just saw this. I'm absolutely devastated. I knew the admins were looking for new mods and such but never knew it was this severe. I don't think I could've spent my time doing this work but I definitely could've given a few dollars if that helped.
Such a shame. 💔
Well that's sudden and unexpected. Was there any calls for admins? I'm sort of surprised that lemm.ee couldn't find enough volunteers with their sizable user base.
NOO! I loved this place.
Very sad to hear but totally understandable. Unfortunately, this will make the centralization of lemmy world even worse.
How much effort is it actually to host a small instance? I am thinking about hosting one mostly for my self. Mainly because I am interested in the technology. Also my country doesn't have one so that could be a topic too if there is some interest. But hearing this I am not so sure anymore. I can't put many hours into it each week just to keep it running.
Dear lemm.ee and the wonderful admin,
I'm sad to see you go, but thank you, sincerely, for being the springboard that allowed me to dive into the refreshing waters of Lemmy.
Stay golden, pony boy
That is unfortunate :( they were one of the instances I could easily recommend to new users. Sad to see them go, but I get it. Moderation is hard job
Forgive me, I’m still not sure what this means. Is this site just dead at the end of the month?
Big thanks to lemm.ee, great job to the whole team
Kinda scary that the threadi (??) instance with the (probably) second-highest active users struggled enough to warrant a shutdown :(
Thank you and the admin team, past and present, for their time and care.
Gonna miss it here. The admins were chill as hell and so were the communities hosted here. Especially the car one.
Who the h*ck are you.
Very unfortunate, lemm.ee had a real promise of being a flagship lemmy instance.
Bit of an off topic question though, as someone who really has no knowledge on software development, what are the chances lemmy as a whole could fork?
What does forking have to do with this instance shutdown? They were lacking admins for running the instance, not developers.
Because a couple weeks ago, the lemm.ee crew made a post asking for donations and their comment section immediately went dumpster fire mode. Not saying they can't ask for donations, but I can imagine its very problematic considering that the lead developers themselves are very hateful, transphobic and have questionable political opinions.
You cannot possibly convice me that didn't somehow influence this decision to shutdown the instance. And if lemmy doesn't find a way to keep that stuff down we're def gonna see more instances shutting down.
Iirc the request for donations was a repost from .ml the instance run by the devs of lemmy software, not a request by the admins of lemm.ee for support.
I think we're talking about different posts, here is the one I'm talking about: lemm.ee/post/63041344
Same post. There is a link from that post to the ml post. In your link the admin says money is good for lemm.ee donate to ml.
No, that post is a request from the lemm.ee admins to donate to Lemmy, the software. Not to donate to lemm.ee. You're talking about the same post.
Yea I never said specifically to donate to .ee, dingus. I said "asking for donations". It's a very ambiguous. My point was the backlash from that comment section definitely took a toll on the admins.
I think you're retroactively reinterpreting your vague phrasing, but whatever dude. I don't think that particular post has anything to do with it.
Because a couple weeks ago, the lemm.ee crew made a post asking for donations
They didn't, that was a post asking to donate to lemmy, the software.
You cannot possibly convice me that didn’t somehow influence this decision to shutdown the instance.
I can because it's completely irrelevant, and what stopped this instance seems to have nothing to do with the development, but rather to do with the amount of volunteers and their work load.
There are already lemmy compatible solutions.
Don't need another fork / competitor unless it has killer features that other don't have.
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.
Well now I feel awful for not helping when they needed admins :( I don't manage servers or even have experience managing communities.
I moderate a community. Do I need to move that community? Or can I just give it over to my new account?
I'll need some time to find where to migrate, if at all. Lemm.ee was very well managed and I would've gladly volunteered to help out. My bad for not paying closer attention sooner.
Does anyone know if saved posts and comments are also exported with the account settings?
Good question.
I imported my account to piefed (very easy to do) and none of my comments or posts, saved or otherwise, came over. All my subs and blocks did though, which is a fine trade off.
Shit fuck
I volunteered to mod and the admins didn't contact me. So I thought they had enough people.
Thank you for been there
Soon to be homeless noob here, shopping for a new home. Is there an easy way to see what instance X has defederated from? I'm looking for an instance that doesn't defederate much (as I just aggressively block the specific communities inside of questionable instances). Looking for an instance with few technical issues/downtime that doesn't defederate from NSFW/piracy, etc
Damn, even if it was to be excepted with how the admin issue was evolving, it's still sad.
But i guess the strengh of the fediverse come from the fact that such an issue can happen without impacting the entire lemmy community as a whole.
I'm just worried that the lack of moderation becomes a recurrent issue in the future of lemmy with the userbase growth and the lack of revenue.
I wish best luck for communities moderators and EE users!
Maybe we can take this as an opportunity to understand the importance of separating "instance for groups" and "instance for users"?
Doesn't really solve the issue, admins will all want to manage an instance for groups rather than instance for users as that would avoid much of the drama.
Doesn’t really solve the issue, admins will all want to manage an instance for groups rather than instance for users as that would avoid much of the drama.
And that is bad why...?
The people that want to be in charge of large groups of people are often the people you least want to be under.
This argument applies more to "instance with lots of users and groups" (what we have now) than "communities with lots of users on topic-specific instances", so I don't think this is the problem here.
Let's say we are in a different universe where lemm.ee is a users instance, and not a groups instances.
Drama still happens involving lemm.ee users.
Admins still get burnt out.
They still shut down the instance.
So indeed the communities wouldn't have to move, but the 5.5k monthly active users of Lemm.ee (out of 47k total) would still have to find a new instance.
They still shut down the instance.
Only the users on lemm.ee are affected by it, in this scenario. It is bad, but the current scenario is much worse.
Drama still happens involving lemm.ee users.
User-only instances are less dependent on each other, defederation is not as big of an issue, so a lot of the drama would go away.
Admins still get burnt out.
Less communities on their instances means less traffic, less activities, less moderation reports (they would have to deal only with users on their own instances) and if even then they are overloaded with work, they could decide to scale down the operation before reaching burning-out point: close the instance for new registrations, make user registration conditional on payment/donation, etc.
Less communities on their instances means less traffic, less activities, less moderation reports (they would have to deal only with users on their own instances)
Those users are the same as in our universe for lemm.ee as a user instance. They stir the same dramas, create the same number of alts, violate rules in a similar way.
if even then they are overloaded with work, they could decide to scale down the operation before reaching burning-out point: close the instance for new registrations, make user registration conditional on payment/donation, etc.
That was available to the lemm.ee admins in our scenario as well. They preferred to shut the instance down rather than reduce.
I've had this idea as well, and I definitely see some benefits though as stated in the thread by someone else, most admins would want to be on a groups instance and not a users instance and I'm not sure how to combat that. The thought that occurred to me was a lemmy federation compatible community only instance server that could augment the current thrediverse landscape. Essentially making it easier to spin up a community for your topic than it is to spin up a while new instance. It would still be easiest to just make a community on your main user instance but it would introduce a new difficulty level for communities to run separate without standing up a whole Lemmy instance.
It's sad. I'm really going to miss this place. I migrated to lemmy.blahaj.zone. I hope I'll continue to have great experiences there.
Uh so where am I gonna go?
Ok, I can export the settings of my profile, but how do I export posts and comments and transfer them to a new instance?
Cool, now we'll get an influx into lemmy.world and I'll finally have a reason to abandon this account lol
Idk how viable it is, but I wish they had asked if someone wanted to take over and let them
This is a massive loss for the Fediverse.
Going to be interesting seeing the community shift around. Thanks for all the hard work Lemm.ee admins.
oh shit :(
Welp, time to switch accounts again. I made 3 during the early days when I was trying different instances out, and this one's the third one.
well ig i have to move back to my thelemmy.club account
So long, & thanks for all the fish!
I would never in a million years moderate or become an admin of an online community. You couldn't pay me to do that shit. Respect to the selfless people who make the effort.
I started on .world but lemm.ee was truly where I've found my fedi home. Thank you for the good times.
RIP. Thanks for all you've done.
Sucks, made a new account on world. The app i use defaults to .ee so thats why i chose it when i joined lemmy.
Please say it ain't so. I know it's hard work, but hang in there. The trolling is on hyperdrive now so that people don't act at this critical moment. Reddit sold out because of Elon Musk, and there is a new need for Lemmy because of it. I would forgive you if you did ads or used AI to moderate. The point is, either we fight the trolls online from the safety of our homes or we will have to deal with them in real life. Trust me, you don't want that. These are real people with a sick agenda, they are 1000 times worse in the flesh. If you need help, PM me. I'm sure others will step up to the plate. Anyone here willing to help Lemmy, please say you will in the comments.
This is sad, but also not unexpected. I'd noticed a lack of engagement from their admin team for a while, and very often they wouldn't respond to reports. Still sad to see them go, and also slightly worrying since there are a lot of active communities on there and many many users.
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 think I might be based there, but how do I know? I’ve literally only used the app to access this place. Laptop is strictly reserved for porn. lol
I am reborn!
What will happen to the remaining donated funds once everything has been settled (assuming there's funds left over)?
How does one delete their lemm.ee account?
Sad to hear, and thank you for the time we had. I don't want to be dismissive, but can anyone explain how to select an instance with best chances at longevity? Are there other instances with a more structured or longterm roadmap?
Is lemmy.world the same thing as lemm.ee?
At this point, I will just pack a kit and go into the woods, cut all human contact
all good things gotta come to a end sadly this good thing came to a end because bots an rusdian trolls with to much time on there hands
This is like closing a nature reserve due to insufficient landscapers.
Lemmy needs private servers
and you cant exactly go .world, with them have a political agenda in some of the communities. im guessing alot of people from ml/hexbear and world was gatekeeping comments on this instance too. and the high amount of wierd sexual kink communities on some of the feeds i have to block.
.world is the enxt largest instances, but i tried creating an acct once, but they seem to have a narrative too.
They’re going away with the lemmy money 😮
is there anyone for center leaning folks?
I'll take this as a sign to switch to reddit instead!
Looks like I'm quite late to suggest, but couldn't we use AI to admin instances & mod communities, if not fully then at least the bulk of it? Also charge users on a freemium model so as to pay for admins / mods? Every instance needs an incentive structure to maintain a healthy & happy community and a way to pay for the operations required to run the instance.
And nothing of value was lost
Censorship kills another server. rip.
there needs to be less of it and more discussion. if someone posts something you dont like, ignore and downvote it and move on. i rather be allowed to read the other sides comments than not at all.
why even are lemmy servers so overmoderated, jts not like we get flooded with users. whats more important, the fediverse success or thay you can ban another user because he doesnt fully support and yield to the current thing?
it seems the issue wasnt the server cost that will shut down lemm.ee.
im sick of mods. nobody likes mods!
Found the guy who's never moderated a large community. It's not discussions with opposing viewpoints, it's ad spam, harassment, CSAM, gore, literal neo-nazis, and once in a while someone spamming racial slurs.
im more than a decade on the web. i think i can take it. if you cant, then dont do it?
Wow a whole decade??
This dude has lived a post-Tubgirl life and thinks he's tough.
Yeah wow 2015 how impressive
I think you should try it then, see how much fun it is.
the last decades been heavily moderated lol
im sick of mods. nobody likes mods!
Then self-host your own instance.
the time isnt right. i can still freely say what i want on the fediverse. if i were a radical then the time would probably be right.
9 day account complaining about mods 🤣
blocked
People who complain this loudly about mods tend to be living proof of why mods are important.