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
For lemm.ee users who will be migrating to new instances: You can export your subscriptions and blocks to import them to your new instance! You can export that info in your profile settings panel, and import it from the same page on your new instance.
yep, if you’re a lemm.ee user then your Export button will be here: https://lemm.ee/settings
the bottom of the right column
Holy shit, that was unexpected.
Lemm.ee is recruiting new admins!, from four months ago.
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. :/
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.
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.
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!
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/[email protected] content is still there, and lemmy.film went down more than a year ago
The OP has comments disabled and it didn’t seem right to not say thank you and goodbye.
To the entire team past and present at lemm.ee- Thank you for the time and resources you poured into this platform. You will undoubtedly be missed.
why are comments even disabled in the first place?
Really nice that they’re doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy’s first major “shutdown” we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I’d hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.
Cool, now we’ll get an influx into lemmy.world and I’ll finally have a reason to abandon this account lol
.world was already the closest thing to reddit on the fediverse.
lol yeah even has the shitty sociopath admins.
My 2nd cake day was going to be a few days after shutdown :(
Lemm.ee was a fantastic instance, it will be greatly missed. Huge thanks to the admins and owner that made it happen for so long.
A shame the communities will be lost in the transition, the movies/television communities are genuinely cursed. This is the 4th or 5th time people moved that community.
I guess now would be a good time to give Piefed another shot. I love Lemmy and all, but new features have stalled for too long and I’m ready for some change.
So long, lemm.ee
We are currently preparing the 1.0 release which will have lots of major new features, such as private communities, multi-communities and much more. Although 0.19 is also getting constant updates with smaller improvements, for example 0.19.11.
I know that instance had a policy of trying not to defederate from anything (unless very necessary). Is there another instance like this that will not be shutting down?
I think sh.itjust.works has a similar policy IIRC reading the various instance policies across Lemmy. I suppose Hexbear may also be in that category, but I don’t want to be subjected to constant pics of pigs shitting on their own balls.
Yeah tbh I feel like Hexbear/ML/Lemmygrad are all instances that will ruin/poison any other instances touched by them much. As well as any communities modded by the .World admin team.
Reddit refugee here, can someone recommend to me a place that is not heavily censored but also not filled with racists and white supremacists?
I love it on infosec.pub, doesn’t defederate from most instances unless they are particularly hostile, doesn’t censor in itself, and hosts mostly tech/nerd communities.
I think I’ve heard of it before
Sad to hear, had a very inspired name and the admin was very strong with hosting tech. Unfortunately however a generic instance with lax federation rules and no solid ideology, is a recipe for burning out your admins. The owner seemingly losing interest in lemmy also didn’t help.
shouldve kept the nsfw, ml and hexbear instance seperate when they had the chance.
Ironically, that lemm.ee still federated with .ml, hexbear, and lemmygrad was one of the primary factors for me deciding to move my account there from lemmy.world. I want to be a part of an instance that federates with those communities and then I can just block individual communities and accounts on a case-by-case basis from my account.
Yeah I agree, that model just isn’t sustainable. Moderation is one of the most challenging aspects of running a Lemmy instance, and deciding to never defederate because of “free speech” and “user choice” just makes the job that much worse. It feels almost inevitable that instances like this will ultimately succumb to this type of burnout.
Really I feel like we should stop talking about “defederation” as an abstract concept without context or reason since it makes it seem like defederation happens for no reason. Which is almost never the case. We don’t talk about other forms of moderation that way, and if someone did it would be clear they’re one of those free speech trolls, so why do we so casually talk about defederation this way? Seriously, defederation, like any other moderation is 100% necessary, because humans are evil pieces of shit. Not all of them, but many are. That’s why we ban people, that’s why we defederate the most rotten places in the fediverse. Saying “just block users” is counterproductive. You know what Lemmy would look like if that’s all we offered here? Probably a more extreme version of 4chan, since those are the people that dominate when moderation isn’t enforced.
