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
Really nice that they’re doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy’s first major “shutdown” we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I’d hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.
Piefed currently allows community transfers!
and they don’t support voyager
Voyager doesn’t support them
Mastodon handles it pretty decently where it automatically gets your followers to follow your new account, there’s no reason why communities/groups couldn’t do the same thing
Individual users’ follows are not very useful in the threadiverse compared to backlog of content.
The historical backlog isn’t going anywhere. It will still be viewable on other instances.
For example here’s an old thread from a community on vlemmy.net, an instance that disappeared more than a year ago.
https://thelemmy.club/post/147822?scrollToComments=true
Yes, but people can no longer engage with that content. It creates the appearance of relatively dead communities.
Yeah and that kinda looks bad at first glance. Just clicking on what seems like the biggest community (most subscribers) and seeing that it’s actually dead (instance went down or the community was migrated elsewhere).
feddit.de disappeared a while back. As did the original UK one. (Both have been replaced)
Was there an original uk one? This one is the only one I’m aware of, it had a moment of doubt a year back but we got new admins before we needed to move.
It reminds me of DMV.social’s shutdown, and for similar reasons (admin feeling overwhelmed). I don’t recall how big that one was though.