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
Thank you and the admin team, past and present, for their time and care.
What’s really disappointing is that I just made my Lemm.ee account because Lemmy.One had announced they were closing down. Kinda disheartening to make a new account only for the new instance to also shutdown.
It was the first foray into the fediverse and helped wean me off reddit. Sad to see it go.
“It was the first foray”.
It’s a great concept. This should inspire others. Things can change and get better and grow.
My first foray. Typo. But the sentiment still stands.
Damn, even if it was to be excepted with how the admin issue was evolving, it’s still sad.
But i guess the strengh of the fediverse come from the fact that such an issue can happen without impacting the entire lemmy community as a whole.
I’m just worried that the lack of moderation becomes a recurrent issue in the future of lemmy with the userbase growth and the lack of revenue.
I wish best luck for communities moderators and EE users!
The settings import / export feature is extremely cool.
Reminds me of the many times I was banned from reddit for no good reason and then had to reset every one of my subs. So much easier, and just goes to back up the decentralized philosophy of lemmy.
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.
so where do i go now?
thank you
you can try lemmy.today. probably best to make different accts.
i might make one for those. i already made a new lemmy.today, and world just in case.
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.
And how? I came here due to full reddit ban not cause I knew anything about the platform and wanted in, it I do like the platform and I’m glad I was “forced” to try it. Except I didn’t, and don’t, know what instances are, why they matter beyond “decentralization” and I just picked one at random because I didn’t realize your “instance” could just be removed… if an instance can be removed/shut down it doesn’t seem like any instance is actually a safe place to go since it’s not depended on me but whoever is running it? You can lose your account no matter what. Idk if this means I should try to figure this out, which is just make a new account I think? Or if this is a sign for me to give up my last social media outlet and just be done with reddit/reddit clones in general
I mean, yeah, any instance could be gone at any time. Anything can disappear at any time. Don’t overthink it. Just pick a new instance at random like you did before. Export and import settings. Leave a note on your profile where your new account is. Once lemm.ee is gone, your account’s info page will forever say where your new account is. This instance shutting down doesn’t mean your old comments and posts disappear. Sure, you won’t be able to directly respond to them, but they aren’t vanishing.
It sucks, and it’s an annoyance, but it’s hardly the end of the world.
Think about if this were a non-federated platform. You’d be shit out of luck. All your posts and comments would be gone forever. All of everyone’s content from your instance would just be lost to time when the server shits down. But with federation it gets copied to other instances. It will live on there. The only time it won’t be is if someone makes a new instance after lemm.ee is gone, they won’t be able to pull in old lemm.ee stuff.
The best analogy is still E-mail. Me@Gmail.com can talk to you@outlook.com, which can talk to employee@random-company.com. Sometimes an email service shuts down - has anyone checked if yahoo still exists?
So in that case, you have to get a new mail and probably move your important stuff over. It sure sucks, but there is no good way around it, if you want to be able to choose between different services.
Imagine everyone using only gmail: what if Google decided you smell and they don’t want your business any more? What if Google decided to make every login cost $5? Or that you need to say “I love Coca Cola” to read your mail?
Unlike reddit, you can bring most of your account with you to a new instance (a different server. basically imagine each instance is its own mini-reddit, and all the mini-reddits can talk to each other).
If you go to your Account Settings page, you can export your account JSON file, which you can then import into a new instance so you can bring your subscriptions, blocks, and favorited comments/posts.
To help choose a new instance, check out this comment.
An “instance” is a server that talks to all the other Lemmy servers, where your account info and login are stored. There’s a lot of benefits to decentralization - even if one instance goes down, like lemm.ee, it doesn’t really impact the whole of Lemmy too severely. The cost of running an instance isn’t super high, which means that if an instance is being annoying about advertising or something, you can ditch it with little cost to yourself and even run your own instance if you want. A single cabal of admins can’t ruin it like Reddit (cough cough Spez) and it can be easier to curate your own experience by choosing what instances you want to ignore completely.
Any given instance is not necessarily a safe harbor, but as long as Lemmy is around, there will probably be multiple instances to choose from. The only thing you really lose is your post history - and you can link to your old account info in your new account for continuity’s sake.
Nothing is perfect and nothing is permanent.
If you are extremely motivated to have an account that can never be pulled out from under you, you must run your own instance.
In the fediverse, its plausible to do this and still be connected to others. There are.lots of single user instances. There were some small businesses opening where you could pay someone else to do the admin work for you if you are disinclined to that kind of geekery yourself.
reddit was doing multi-account bans retroactively which was pretty much very rare unheard of. basically any old accounts that participated in the sub years ago were instantly ban if any of your other accounts were subreddit banned.
See the other comment
think of instances, like thier own reddit clones. one clone can die and you have to make a new acc with another, apparently this cas was lack of administration/modding, or money.
but instances seems to die very quickly soon after created, thats the only thing. the instances to avoid is the extremely political ones: ml, hexbear, conservative.
Here are some servers.
Shouldn’t you be fine using lemmy.world?
I literally just woke up and opened Lemmy to see this. As a lemm.ee user this is sad news but I respect the decision of all those involved as they navigate this
same
I’ve only been on Lemmy for a year, but this feels pretty significant. How do we prevent this from happening to other instances? Or do we not see it as a huge problem if we assume most active users will migrate to other Lemmy instances?
Also side note, I think Voyager defaults to lemm.ee.
I suppose we should normalize lemmy instances closing new registrations, to keep the user count at a manageable level for the admins.
I’m not sure that would work. Admins need to manage their instance users, yes, but they also need to look out for the posts and comments in the communities hosted on their instance, and be one level of appeal above the mods of those communities. Including the ability to actually delete content hosted in those communities, or cached media on their own servers, in response to legal obligations.
True, it’s not a perfect measure. But surely an instance with fewer users also tends to have fewer active communities, no?
It might be better than nothing at least.
or have a more restrictive sign up process to limit spamming.
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
With all the communists you think it wouldn’t be an issue if all you have to do is put in more work at your own expense
well they are all in thier own instances that nobody here wants to deal with.
Communists are just as selfish as anyone else. Their point is that if we want a better life we need to move beyond capitalism, communism is an appeal to our selfish nature as much as it is a call for cooperation.
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.
Please be aware that being an admin is unfortunately quite a thankless job - if you’re doing your job well, then most people won’t even realize you’re doing anything. OTOH, if you make mistakes, there will likely be many users calling you out in public. The main motivation for joining the admin team would need to be a desire to help build and maintain this instance as a great home for yourself and others.
Being an admin is a job and deserves pay. We don’t have an infinite supply of good people to deal with an infinite supply of AI-generated trolling. That means we need donations in the short term, and to consider paid memberships in the long term.
Ads won’t work at all because we’re all using open source clients and browsers with Ublock. And even if they did, we know where that leads.
Evil suggestion: lock minor features behind pay walls, like profile pictures or bolding their name in comments. There are more people who will pay to look cool than there are people who will inconspicuously donate.
I think Voyager defaults to lemm.ee.
They moved to lemmy.zip: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45890744
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.
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.
Decentralization is a double edged sword, you just have to accept you give up some things to get other things.
aww man, this is actually depressing. Hope Lemmy as a whole grows back better after this blows over. o7
it’s just one instance? i think Lemmy as a whole is fine
True it is however one of the larger ones, I read in some other comment the third largest. If those users all do not go somewhere else it would be a big cut into the userbase.
alot of them were reddit refugees, due to massive purges reddit has been doing since the beginning of the year, especially i noticed thier shadowbanning is pretty high but in the background.
ah i see. thanks for the context!
no joke, i got banned from lemmy.cafe for saying pineapple pizza bad, definitely avoid it
Fair and based /s
maniacs! will avoid those loons
I’m trying to figure out to move to another instance, and found my mod logs. Turns out a lot of my best posts have been deleted, often for stupid reasons. Apparently Lemmy isn’t much better than Reddit as far as tolerating free speech.
I managed to find a new instance, but my posts haven’t ported over. Looks like I’m starting over.
depends on which instance it was deleted on, when i posted on the political community/post some of my comments were deleted because i was criticising against israel by saying the “j word” in the states and people are funding the censorships. the problematic ones are usually the political ones.
Holy shit, that was unexpected.
So long, and thanks for all the fish! o7
Ahh, this is really sad. Lemm.ee was always an instance that shined brightly, and @sunaurus@lemm.ee has helped me out a couple of times.
Sad day indeed.
What a loss. =(
It’s a strange quirk of lemmy that we will continue to be able to see content from lemm.ee even after they’ve shut down. It’ll feel like seeing ghosts.
