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
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. :/
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.
@https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto
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.film content is still there, and lemmy.film went down more than a year ago
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 guess it's not really surprising, though. The Lemmy userbase is much smaller and very skewed towards certain types of people with extremely strong opinions and low levels of tolerance for anything that goes against their worldview. I don't think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard, it just benefits from having such a massive userbase filled with all kinds of people. The toxicity and off-topic intrusions of political/culture war stuff get drowned out over there, whereas here you'll frequently see threads where 90% of the comments are arguing about things that are completely irrelevant to the actual topic because so much of userbase has an activist mindset that is always itching for a fight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Link? Just out of curiosity.
https://lemmy.ca/post/37365128
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
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.