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

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      If the ability to make your own feed without much defederation behind the scenes so to say I’d recommend lemmy.zip as an alterative. When I made my account I specifically looked for an instance that would defederate only illegal and mega fucked up shit like cp and gore. This instance offers that, and is federated with almost everyone.

    • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Lemmy.today offers smooth Lemmy experience without defederations. Loving it, using for well over a year.

      • net00@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        I ended up choosing this one, since it’s small and it helps spread the user load around.

        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.

        I also decided to nuke my account, unfortunately when lemm.ee shuts down this implies users will lose control over the content saved on other instances without ability to remove it.

        If you nuke it now the deletion will still sync through fediverse.

  • WatDabney@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    This is sort of unfortunate, but as long as the fediverse remains genuinely decentralized, I expect it’s just going to be a fact of life. Instances are going to come and go, alternately riding in on waves of determination and enthusiasm and out in sluggish streams of burnout and ennui.

    And in a way, I think it’s arguably even a good thing, or at least not a bad one. The basic structure of the fediverse prevents centralization through ownership, but there’s still a risk of individual instances gaining enough clout to effectively act as a centralizing force. Not that Lemm.ee was in that position or even headed that way, but still, broadly I think that the understanding that instances are likely ephemeral — that they come and they go, and much more to the point that that’s as it should be — is an important one.

    And it neatly illustrates a large part of the reason that I have at least a dozen or so accounts scattered around the fediverse, including, for a little while longer, this one.

    • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.

  • thefartographer@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    Dear lemm.ee and the wonderful admin,

    I’m sad to see you go, but thank you, sincerely, for being the springboard that allowed me to dive into the refreshing waters of Lemmy.

    Stay golden, pony boy

  • lasers4eyes@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    Very unfortunate, lemm.ee had a real promise of being a flagship lemmy instance.

    But I’m generally curious, as someone who really has no knowledge on software development, what are the chances lemmy could fork? Could we see any progress on this foss project?

    • MemmingenFan923@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      There are already lemmy compatible solutions.

      Don’t need another fork / competitor unless it has killer features that other don’t have.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      What does forking have to do with this instance shutdown? They were lacking admins for running the instance, not developers.

      • lasers4eyes@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        24 days ago

        Because a couple weeks ago, the lemm.ee crew made a post asking for donations and their comment section immediately went dumpster fire mode. Not saying they can’t ask for donations, but I can imagine its very problematic considering that the lead developers themselves are very hateful, transphobic and have questionable political opinions.

        You cannot possibly convice me that didn’t somehow influence this decision to shutdown the instance. And if lemmy doesn’t find a way to keep that stuff down we’re def gonna see more instances shutting down.

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
          0·
          24 days ago

          Because a couple weeks ago, the lemm.ee crew made a post asking for donations

          They didn’t, that was a post asking to donate to lemmy, the software.

          You cannot possibly convice me that didn’t somehow influence this decision to shutdown the instance.

          I can because it’s completely irrelevant, and what stopped this instance seems to have nothing to do with the development, but rather to do with the amount of volunteers and their work load.

        • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          24 days ago

          Iirc the request for donations was a repost from .ml the instance run by the devs of lemmy software, not a request by the admins of lemm.ee for support.

              • lasers4eyes@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                24 days ago

                Yea I never said specifically to donate to .ee, dingus. I said “asking for donations”. It’s a very ambiguous. My point was the backlash from that comment section definitely took a toll on the admins.

                • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
                  0·
                  24 days ago

                  I think you’re retroactively reinterpreting your vague phrasing, but whatever dude. I don’t think that particular post has anything to do with it.

            • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              0·
              24 days ago

              Same post. There is a link from that post to the ml post. In your link the admin says money is good for lemm.ee donate to ml.

  • moseschrute@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    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.

  • Drunk & Root@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    all good things gotta come to a end sadly this good thing came to a end because bots an rusdian trolls with to much time on there hands

  • blackn1ght@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    What will happen to the remaining donated funds once everything has been settled (assuming there’s funds left over)?

  • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.comEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    That is unfortunate :( they were one of the instances I could easily recommend to new users. Sad to see them go, but I get it. Moderation is hard job

  • ivanovsky@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    Soon to be homeless noob here, shopping for a new home. Is there an easy way to see what instance X has defederated from? I’m looking for an instance that doesn’t defederate much (as I just aggressively block the specific communities inside of questionable instances). Looking for an instance with few technical issues/downtime that doesn’t defederate from NSFW/piracy, etc

  • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    I was not expecting to wake up to this :(

    On one hand, it makes me want to recommend Lemmy.World even more. On the other hand, if Lemmy.World ends up like this too…

    It’s a really tricky situation.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Lemmy.world is already the largest instance, recommending it to more people seems like it’d just speedrun burnout like what happened to lemm.ee, not to mention centralization around .world goes against the philosophy of the fediverse.

    • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      I don’t see us going down anytime soon, and at current user numbers I don’t think there’s going to be a major difference in moderation workload with the influx of users compared to what we already have, but it really is not great for decentralization. We already try delegating the majority of moderation to community moderators where applicable, where on a lot of other instances the admin teams seem to be more involved in addressing community reports on admin level as well. For the most part we’re dealing only with instance level topics in the admin team and provide some additional tooling to improve report notifications to community mods. There are even various benefits from a moderation perspective when users are all local and not remote, as with federation a lot of signals that would allow various types of abuse are unfortunately lost. That said, I would still prefer if there were more stable and larger instances overall, while not having a single instance stand out as massively larger than any other one. Friendly “competition” is almost always beneficial for everyone involved.

      lemm.ee being the second largest instance and the shutdown only being announced less than a month before is unfortunately also not something that gives people looking for a stable instance much confidence. I hope this won’t scare too many users away from Lemmy and that most will just find a new instance in the Fediverse.

      Instance moderation and moderation in general are unfortunately tasks that can be very challenging at scale, even with just a few thousand users, especially when dealing with drama. It’s not really a surprise that there are somewhat frequently posts from larger instances looking for new admins, while older admins on the same instance are becoming less active. Even if people aren’t exhausted from their involvement, their circumstances in life may change, or they may no longer be interested in Lemmy as a platform in general, leading to a number of reasons why admins may not be as active as it seems when looking at the list of admins in an instance sidebar. It’s often a thankless job with a lot of things happening in the background to deal with spam, trolls and other issues, which most users won’t even see when done right.