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
This really makes me wonder if we should have more admins here on Blahaj in case Ada ends up feeling burnt out. I don’t really see Kaity around at all so it’s just her doing the moderation for the whole instance.
If I could add an instance level moderator that didn’t have full admin permissions, I’d do so in a heart beat. As it is though, it’s hard to trust the keys to the castle when the only avenue for building trust is lemmy interactions.
That being said, we do have a bot admin that trusted users have access to, that Kaity developed, which helps us deal with spammers and throwaway bigot accounts.
Also, we don’t actually have that much going on in terms of moderation workload. Our sign ups are manually approved, but our bot helps with that so it’s not all on me. Our large communities have active mods. So I’m lucky if I have to look at more than 3 or 4 reports a day.
Also, if we ever reach the burnout point, we would hand the community over before taking it down.
It’s really good to hear that you would hand the community over before shutting it down. As for right now though, I think there could be a more public face to this extended moderation team? .World has their “server moderators”, who I think work via bot as well, quite publicly talked about and empowered to interact with the community. I think that might be a way to achieve a balance, and would mean that reports that require interaction can be seen to outside of your own timezone.
I don’t know, it’s not like there are moderation issues right now, but it would give you the capacity to take yours eyes off things for a day or two and unwind, and I think that’s important.
At the moment, we have the ability to take our eyes off of things for a while. Because applicants are screened, we don’t get many bigots or spammers getting through. And our mod bot allows trusted users to ban and delete all content from new accounts (whether they’re local or remote). So we have trusted users that can watch for new people joining and then act on any bigoted ones that do slip through the cracks.
So whilst I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking my eyes off of things for a week or more, I feel quite comfortable not looking at lemmy for a day or two. We’ve travelled several times since spinning the instance up, and even then, checking in once every couple of days has been enough to keep on top of things with the tools we have.
Which is not to say we don’t need to do anything else. The real vulnerability at the moment is if Kaity or I go involuntarily inactive for a longer period of time for some reason. But until we have “server moderators” as an option, I’m not sure how to develop the rapport required to bring additional admins on. It’s not not simply a matter of trusting someone, but also ensuring that they share the same vision for what this space is and what it should be, and at the moment, there are very few avenues to do that. I know from experience that bringing instance level moderators on in our other spaces that do support them, such as sharkey and matrix has been challenging to say the least, so it’s something we need to take particular care with.
It sounds like you’ve already got server moderators though, in a similar way to how lemmy.world has theirs set up? I understand it’s a bodge but they’re effectively the same thing. The only difference would be actually naming and promoting them as people that are taking care of the community. That way people can see them taking care of the community.
That’s a good idea!
Hah I’m glad that came across clearly, I’m pretty sleepy!
So, it turns out that PieFed has instance staff that exist between community mod and admin!
Yes, they probably should. Burnout is rife even with more than one admin/moderator ioo. So as long as they can all be trusted there should probably be a lot more, especially paid, admins and mods, donations willing.
I’m not sure about paid, but I mean, if there’s will for it by the userbase I’d chip in. I think there’s a decent amount of people who would be good at the role and want to volunteer.
