I wouldn’t be too surprised if reddit was doing some action to keep Lemmy down (like down ranking posts that mention or link to Lemmy in their algorithm), but I don’t think lemm.ee shut down from any outside force attacking them, I think it was far more mundane.

A few things probably contributed:

1. Lemm.ee was the second biggest instance, that’s going to attract a fair amount of drama and trolls no matter how you slice it. If you don’t have enough mods or admins to deal with that load, it can be overwhelming.

MrKaplan of Lemmy.world mentioned that .world is able to handle their size effectively due to ensuring they have enough active mods to handle their communities so there’s less load for the admins, perhaps lemm.ee did not.

2. Their policy of non-defederation likely increased their drama and report burden, as some instances are known to have more toxic users than others, making defederation a powerful tool to make things manageable and quiet that report notification.

Combined with a lack of fresh admins to rotate out the ones getting burned out, and you’ve got a potent recipe to make the whole thing super un-fun and feel like an unappreciated slog of a job.