cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65824884
Hey everyone
We’re really sorry to say this, but lemm.ee will be shutting down on June 30, 2025.
What you need to know
As of now:
- New user registrations are disabled
- Creating new communities is disabled
What you should do:
- You can export your settings at https://lemm.ee/settings to take them with you to another instance.
- If you’re moving to another instance, consider adding a note to your lemm.ee profile with your new username. Your old profile will still be visible from other instances even after we go offline.
- Alternatively, if you want to delete your lemm.ee profile, now is the best time to do it, so the deletion can federate out before we go offline.
- If you’re one of the folks supporting us with a recurring donation, please remember to cancel it (Ko-Fi donations should have been cancelled automatically already). Our leftover funds are already enough to cover our bills for next month, so we can keep things running without any more support.
Because of how Lemmy is built, everything posted on lemm.ee will still be accessible from other instances, even after we go offline.
Why this is happening
The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.
The sad reality is that while there are a lot of great people on Lemmy, there are also some who use the platform to attack others, stir up conflict, or actively try to undermine the project. Admins are volunteers who deal with the latter group on a constant basis, this takes a mental toll. Please understand why our admins chose to step down, and be kind to the admins on whatever instance you decide to join.
We know this sucks. We’re genuinely sorry it’s ending like this. Thank you to everyone who spent time here and helped make it better.
– lemm.ee team
I’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.
Normalising helping the instances out I guess, Lemmy acts more like a group/commune and it thrives when people step up to do more than their peers at their own expense to benefit everyone
With all the communists you think it wouldn’t be an issue if all you have to do is put in more work at your own expense
well they are all in thier own instances that nobody here wants to deal with.
Communists are just as selfish as anyone else. Their point is that if we want a better life we need to move beyond capitalism, communism is an appeal to our selfish nature as much as it is a call for cooperation.
We don’t, and we can’t. What we need is to stop acting like Actors/People/Groups are single points homed on a single instance. They should be a ring of mirrored instance entities, so the “source” Actor and content are still there when one instance drops out of the ring. Everything is already getting copied around, we’re just missing out on the biggest value of that: RAID for identities.
Ie, if I make my accounts on three sites, those should all be me, and it doesn’t matter to the fediverse which one I use at any given moment. Same for communities.
That’s real federation, not this ramshackle heap of points of failure where we just hope we don’t individually get bit too often by shutdowns, even though shutdowns are completely inevitable.
— lemm.ee admins 4 months ago
Being an admin is a job and deserves pay. We don’t have an infinite supply of good people to deal with an infinite supply of AI-generated trolling. That means we need donations in the short term, and to consider paid memberships in the long term.
Ads won’t work at all because we’re all using open source clients and browsers with Ublock. And even if they did, we know where that leads.
Evil suggestion: lock minor features behind pay walls, like profile pictures or bolding their name in comments. There are more people who will pay to look cool than there are people who will inconspicuously donate.
I suppose we should normalize lemmy instances closing new registrations, to keep the user count at a manageable level for the admins.
I’m not sure that would work. Admins need to manage their instance users, yes, but they also need to look out for the posts and comments in the communities hosted on their instance, and be one level of appeal above the mods of those communities. Including the ability to actually delete content hosted in those communities, or cached media on their own servers, in response to legal obligations.
True, it’s not a perfect measure. But surely an instance with fewer users also tends to have fewer active communities, no?
It might be better than nothing at least.
or have a more restrictive sign up process to limit spamming.
They moved to lemmy.zip: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45890744
I like Lemmy, but it’s not decentralised enough to avoid things like this.
I think it’s inevitable right now, even if it’s a lot rarer than it was during the great exodus from reddit. You’re reliant entirely on the goodwill of volunteers.
User accounts are unique only to an instance, and there’s no way to move them. If we want to avoid this, having multiple homes on an account would be a good first step. You probably don’t want them going everywhere (as that would need login details, which while hashed wouldn’t be immune to bad actors getting them). But making a new account elsewhere isn’t hard, it’s just annoying to lose your history.
Any lost communities are much harder to replace. Links get broken, etc. You can’t move those either, so have to make them anew and convince people to update any links before they vanish.
Honestly not sure if Lemmy’s approach is a good one or not. Recently we’ve had transphobic users from one instance harassing people on another, and without things like IP addresses, it’s hard to stop that. Your own instance also has to host a bunch of stuff from other places, and you can end up with illegal content being copied to your own hardware if hosting an instance. Maybe it should be on the instances to host communities, and on the clients to gather things from multiple servers.
Decentralization is a double edged sword, you just have to accept you give up some things to get other things.
Sorry this might be obvious, but even if an instance disappeared with all its communities, wouldn’t those communities and their content still exist as copies to other federated instances? My understanding is federation means I’m going to copy all of your content to my instance. So I’m assuming that means even if your instance stops existing, all those copies on my instance still exist. Or am I missing something?
Not 100% sure. As a guess based on how I think the Fediverse works, I think they’d exist, but new comments and posts would cease to sync around, so they’d effectively be only on your instance.
I guess my point is that historic data won’t cease to exist unless all the federated instances deleted the data or also shut down. And links would only be broken if you are access the data via lemm.ee. But if you’re accessing data via one of the federated instance’s APIs, I think you should be good? But I’m still relatively new to all this federation so I would appreciate if someone smarter than me chimed in.