Fediverse

That's just life on the Internet/fediverse in general, there's a constant churn of the small websites/instances as people inevitably burn out. You gotta be mentally prepared for it. I'm really sad since .ee was one of the few good instances that federated with the unpopular ones too

The only solution is improvements to the protocol so migrating instances is less painful. A different form of identity (key-based rather than domain based) would be cool to let us keep handles across instances

Oh so it's your fault then. Please stop ruining instances

I also had just joined Lemm.ee, barely over a month ago. I was really starting to enjoy it when they posted the news. Am disheartened, for sure.

As someone new to Lemmy, thanks for asking this. I just joined lemm.ee from a Reddit link, and I don't know all the different flavors of the different domains.

I just moved to lemmy.zip.

I'd recommend going to lemmy.zip or lemmy.ca. They work almost exactly the same as lemm.ee, and you can interact with the same content.

How do we prevent this from happening to other instances?

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.

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

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. :/