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 like Lemmy, but it’s not decentralised enough to avoid things like this.
I think it’s inevitable right now, even if it’s a lot rarer than it was during the great exodus from reddit. You’re reliant entirely on the goodwill of volunteers.
User accounts are unique only to an instance, and there’s no way to move them. If we want to avoid this, having multiple homes on an account would be a good first step. You probably don’t want them going everywhere (as that would need login details, which while hashed wouldn’t be immune to bad actors getting them). But making a new account elsewhere isn’t hard, it’s just annoying to lose your history.
Any lost communities are much harder to replace. Links get broken, etc. You can’t move those either, so have to make them anew and convince people to update any links before they vanish.
Honestly not sure if Lemmy’s approach is a good one or not. Recently we’ve had transphobic users from one instance harassing people on another, and without things like IP addresses, it’s hard to stop that. Your own instance also has to host a bunch of stuff from other places, and you can end up with illegal content being copied to your own hardware if hosting an instance. Maybe it should be on the instances to host communities, and on the clients to gather things from multiple servers.
Decentralization is a double edged sword, you just have to accept you give up some things to get other things.
Sorry this might be obvious, but even if an instance disappeared with all its communities, wouldn’t those communities and their content still exist as copies to other federated instances? My understanding is federation means I’m going to copy all of your content to my instance. So I’m assuming that means even if your instance stops existing, all those copies on my instance still exist. Or am I missing something?
Not 100% sure. As a guess based on how I think the Fediverse works, I think they’d exist, but new comments and posts would cease to sync around, so they’d effectively be only on your instance.
I guess my point is that historic data won’t cease to exist unless all the federated instances deleted the data or also shut down. And links would only be broken if you are access the data via lemm.ee. But if you’re accessing data via one of the federated instance’s APIs, I think you should be good? But I’m still relatively new to all this federation so I would appreciate if someone smarter than me chimed in.