This lemmy site will be shutting down end of November
Unfortunately this lemmy site will be closing at the end of November.
The reason for this is I no longer believe several design choices have actually come to fruition with regards to how lemmy and the fediverse works. While other fediverse projects may work, I personally dont really see Lemmy as a frontrunner to bring a successful alternative to other similar projects such as reddit.
The main issues revolve around human behaviour - the top 20 lemmy sites account for most of the traffic. Users simply do not want to join smaller lemmy servers to spread the load in any meaningful way. So smaller lemmy sites such as my own have just a handful of daily users that could just move to one of the top 20 sites with no real issues effectively. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
There seems to be no downside to this as the last 3 years have proven that being on a bigger or smaller lemmy site is basically irrelevant.
The other issue is lemmys population is waning. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48 The number of monthly users is dwindling- now under a 750k a month and still falling - so the project itself is not even popular among users. Compare this to Mastadon which is growing - not shrinking. If people do not like the project then I do not feel invested in continuing to run it. I would rather spend the money in a different more popular and useful open source project.
For these basic reasons the decision is made and users are asked to migrate away by December to another project. There will be no further updates or maintenance to this server as a result.
Kind regards -P
Registration to this server had been changed to closed.
5 replies
Thank you so much for creating this sweet lil' lemmy site, I really liked the idea behind it 🫂
Thank you, Thief, for your time, effort and money to run this server.
It was a nice being a part of this community, but I completely understand and respect your decision.
I'll be over at @[email protected] going forward.
Hey boss, I am sorry to hear this. Would you be open to transferring the administration of the server to someone else, such as myself? I'm not currently equipped to handle it but I could probably figure it out by November. I am part of the admin team at sh.itjust.works and I believe we could fold it into our operation fairly easily.
I think you make good and valid points, but I personally value the smaller Lemmy servers quite highly, and this one is obviously particularly close to my heart. As things currently stand, this server doesn't have very many active users, but I would still feel pretty bad about losing those or forcing them to start new accounts. And to be fair, this is actually the 54th largest Lemmy server by active users and has over 600 total accounts, although most are currently inactive. That's a pretty significant number of people, although it might not seem like a lot compared to millions.
::: spoiler wall of text Aside from that, you never know what the future may bring. Whether it might be another wave of growth for the platform as a whole, or a change in the behavior of the users that causes them to migrate to smaller servers, anything is possible. We have seen major servers like lemm.ee shut down, and such changes could definitely cause a ripple effect where this server could become more heavily utilized. Future software updates could create real benefits to using smaller servers for any number of reasons.
One critical thing to consider is that if someone wanted to start up a new Lemmy server today, it would take at least several months to build up close to the user experience that we have here, because users would need to find and subscribe to all of the different communities that we already have. And ultimately, it would never be the same, because they would never have access to any of the threads that have unfolded over the past 3 years. Their version of Lemmy would start in 2026, and I feel that would be a significant loss in terms of understanding what this platform is and how it developed.
Lastly, I feel that the taglines are really funny and add a unique flavor whenever I use this server. That was a major reason why I chose to make an account here, instead of the hundreds of other minor servers that were vying for attention in 2023. There's just something very nostalgic, old-internet, and personal about them. I think it would be a great idea to give users a chance to add more taglines via some kind of submitting/voting process. :::
Basically, my overall point is that I think this server still has a lot of value as a part of the overall threadiverse ecosystem, and I would hate to see that disappear for something as easy to fix as lack of funds or time. I totally get if you want to move on, but please consider letting the server live on under new management. Or alternatively, continue to be involved but accept some assistance in the financial or technical aspects of running this place. It's ultimately your decision, but I wanted to throw in my perspective because I have already seen too many Lemmy servers shut down and it pains me each time. And this time I figured I might be able to make a difference.
Hi,
Of course you or anyone else can take over the various services. It costs the following:
Contabo hosting (single vps) : USD 30 per month iDrive object storage : USD 60 per year
Domain I own and use so will continue to pay. Email is done via a freemium service (mailjet) - 200 emails per day.
Maintenance requires docker updates, snapshotting server prior to work, checking backup scripts run (also go to idrive with a retention bucket) and managing cloudflare account to prevent excessive bots and so on.
You would basically be on the hook to budget around $50 a month to ensure nothing ever happens and your time. It basically runs itself except for upgrades and requires no maintenance or intervention between versions as everything is tweaked to be within set limits (cpu, memory and so on), and configured to work without ever logging on. For example I only ever log on to update the server and then reboot it and occasionally do apt-get upgrades when I feel like it. Cloudflare does all the protection automatically and you cant directly access the lemmy web interface via ip - the firewall rules are locked to cloudflares IP range only and proxied by them.
That all said, Im not actually going anywhere, I just dont see any value in ~$50 going towards this project vs some other open source project as its never performed as developers of Lemmy projected or promised. I have given them three years to sort themselves out. I feel that was enough and now someone more worthy can take on the expectations I have for projects such as these.
Let me know if this interests you or not, but someone has to be prepared to foot a bill for a server end of the day if they believe in it and want it.
P