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.
They moved to lemmy.zip: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45890744
— 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.
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.