cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/2634649
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
And 65 communities. That’s crazy.
Also as much as everyone is like, “host everything on Piefed” didn’t you see how that burned out the other developers that have tried. We need more decentralisation, not more centralisation.
At least half of them are empty / inactive
At this moment, 9 out of the 10 most active communities are on LW: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
You have to scroll 3 times to see !television@lemm.ee, the first Lemm.ee community.
If all of the communities on Lemm.ee would move to Piefed.social, that wouldn’t change anything. Most of the communities would still be on Lemmy.world. Most of the users would still be on LW.
The main pro of Piefed is the community migration feature (https://piefed.social/post/667044), that I just used (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492)
Admins, not developers.
If the move you’re suggesting is to move to the network of instances managed by communick, that’s even more centralization, as all of those instances rely on a single person.
I’m suggesting moving one community.
Which is an issue
Which makes it even more unfortunate that lemm.ee is biting the dust.
It’s a bad practice. Spread the communities across Lemmy so things like mass migrations need not happen ever again.
“Pro” it’s rewriting history and undermining the integrity of the whole protocol, let alone platform. There’s a reason neither Lemmy nor Mastodon do it.
Is Rimu not both the admin and the main developer?
Fair
It’s unrealistic to expect every community to have a dedicated instance. I am looking for a place for the following communities
Should I really expect a “casual conversation” or “movies” instance to show up, when we only have a few active admins, on a few reliable instances?
Lemmy.film was specialized, and went down. Lemmy.one was specialized for privacy, and went down. Having to move 5 communities from specialized instances when they go down isn’t that different from moving 5 communities from a generalist instance that was up for 2 years.
I was trying to grow !photography@discuss.online for months. Then I let it go, because I was basically shouting into the void. I now prefer !photography@fedia.io , but as it’s on the flagship Mbin instance, it’s probably too centralized for you?
And don’t get me wrong, you know how I usually favor decentralization. It’s just that this time we have to migrate quite a few communities at the same time, so having features like community migration definitely helps. Also, having better mods tools (https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/) hopefully will also help with mod burnout compared to Lemmy.
Mastodon still allows account migration. Being able to migrate the content is valuable in this case.
Correct, but in Lemm.ee’s cases, they were admins, not Lemmy devs.
I didn’t suggest that. While yes some instances have failed, lemmy.studio lives, db0 lives, rblind lives, lemdro.id lives.
Mastodon doesn’t migrate content.
Db0 has 1500 monthly active users, 3 times more than piefed.social. Not sure why you consider it a smaller instance when it’s that much bigger and is the 9th most active instance? https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_month
Wait, what. I’m just pointing to niche instances. Nothing to do with size.
Ah, then I guess we weren’t talking about the same thing.
I thought you favored smaller instances to avoid centralization of users and communities. By that metric, dbzer0 is a large instance, due to the amount of MAU, and 10 communities with more than 1k monthly active users: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/communities
If you distinguish about “generic” / “topic-focused”, then yeah, dbzer0 is kind of topic focused, but it still hosts !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com, which is a generic news community.
Dbzer0 is kind of an interesting case itself, as I personally have !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com and contribute to !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com over there.
If we were to add 4 of the communities I listed above, could we consider that it’s becoming a generalist instance?
Anyway, not sure where I’m going with this, just thinking out loud at this point.
I genuinely always enjoy your thoughts