End of the road. Wish I could say it’s been a fun trip, but that would be a lie. Running this instance started out as a fun project, but it has been nothing but a nightmare for a long, long time. I’m looking forward to the freedom I will have after being shackled to this mess for the last two years.
This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.
If you want exports of anything, let me know. After that, I’m pulling the SSDs and going full Office Space on them.
Edit 07/12/25: Thank you all for the kind words, understanding, and appreciation. While I have been consumed by the negativity here, I never forgot about the positives. Unfortunately, the negatives can and do become overwhelming.
If you appreciate what I’ve been trying to do, then please do not let the efforts die with my departure. The toxicity I’ve described cannot be solved by any individual alone and requires a group effort.
- Don’t engage with those acting in bad faith or just trying to get a rise out of people. This is basically “don’t feed the trolls” but sometimes the trolls are subtle.
- Don’t let emotion cloud your logic and try to remain rational. Always try to see the bigger picture and keep that in focus. Context matters. Ramifications of actions matter.
- When you see people calling for violence, ask yourself “And then what happens?” Because it’s most definitely not going to be “we all join hands in a circle, a rainbow appears overhead, and the world is saved”.
- On the same note, a large percentage of those calling for violence don’t even live here. They’re just trying to rile people up or spread chaos by feeding on our pent-up anger.
- There are very few absolutes in this world, but people around here love to speak in them. If someone only speaks in absolutes, then they’re missing most of the picture which is in the middle. Beware of those people.
- If you see someone twisting what other people are saying just so they can attack them, please report them. This is a common form of trolling/harassment which is often difficult for mods to detect without personally investing themselves in every conversation thread. This often manifests as “Oh, so you think X, so you must think Y” where Y = an absolutely insane jump in logic. Then they attack the person as if they had said Y with other people dog-piling on afterward.
- Admins: Please, please start clamping down on extremism and general toxicity. No psychopath, racist, etc has ever come back from a temp ban a better person. Force these unhinged people back to the fringe instances and defederate from those.
- Most importantly: be good to one another. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we differ.
Original plea below, though it’s superseded by the above.
I’m gonna get right to the point: I’m burnt out, I kind of hate this place, and I really don’t want to be here anymore.
I started it not because I kept getting banned from elsewhere but because I wanted to do and be part of something better. Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it’s not “corpo social media” that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.
The average Lemming has the nuance of a wrecking ball and the maturity of a junior high edge lord, and trying to keep the peace here has become more than what I want to deal with. The worst part is that they’re so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can’t see they’re just as bad or worse than what they’re spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with “bootlicker”, wild accusations, and/or worse.
I need help. Well, really, Lemmy needs help, professional help, but barring that, then I need some more referees to keep this place under control.
This instance has a mission, and I am no longer able to deal with the volume of toxic shitheads who do nothing but call for violence, take people out of context and jump to insane conclusions, and just act like petulant fucking children. Seriously, the demographic here is disgusting and needs to grow the hell up.
So this is it: Either some people step up and help to keep this place sane, or I’m shutting it down. Clock is ticking
I have enjoyed interacting with you, and I’m tempted to say that I will help out, but I know that I won’t be able to keep up the effort long term due to health issues. I don’t want to see you close up shop, but I thoroughly understand why you would want to.
I’m commenting because I just want to express solidarity with you. I have started to not like Lemmy all that much over the last several months. The average temperature of the comment sections on most of the communities has reached a boiling point. Even when I’m having benign conversations with people, someone else comes and shows their ass. Everyone has their own purity tests, which nobody can seem to pass. There is FAR too much USA politics on Lemmy (and I’m speaking as an American citizen).
A couple of years ago when Reddit shut down their free API, I really enjoyed interacting with folks here because most of the people who were here first were pretty cool, and then those who migrated because they objected to Reddit changing their API policy were also pretty cool. In more recent months though, it seems like we’re getting a much higher percentage of people who can’t stay unbanned from Reddit and continue their bad behavior on Lemmy. It’s exhausting.
I hang out on other forums too, and it seems like the same basic issues are happening there as well. Mods are starting to complain that they’re losing patience with people and threatening that they’re just going to start banning instead of issuing multiple warnings.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even want to interact with people online.
So anyway, you do whatever you need to do in order to maintain your sanity. You owe us nothing. I hope you get some assistance - seems like you have gotten a bit just since this post - but I will get it if you still decide you’ve hit your limit in the future.
You’ve described my experience here exactly. The fist 6-12 months here, during the API exodus, were amazing. The people who were here were here because they wanted to be here.
After that, it’s like it just filled up with all of the people too toxic to be platformed everywhere else, and the good/nice people got chased off or completely drowned out. I was determined not to let them win, but I feel like I’m swimming in what used to be a clean lake but is now a toxic cesspool. I’m all for fighting the good fight, but I also know when a retreat is warranted.
Thank you for being one of the dwindling voices of sanity around here.
I’ve got one person added to the team now, and I’ll see how that goes, but I am not optimistic that is going to be enough.
It’s good to hear others express this perspective; I wasn’t sure if it was just my faulty memory. I was also initially impressed with Lemmy’s community around the time of the API exodus. I took a long break around some instance drama noise, just joined back up a month ago, and I’m already considering bailing again. Maybe social media is doomed by its nature, I dunno. I wish you all the best.
Thanks. I just wish some more instance admins would express this perspective and maybe we could address the problem. Sadly, I think it’s been allowed to metastasize to the point of no return. I could be wrong - I hope I"m wrong. I still want this concept to succeed, but I just cannot see that happening in its current state.
Until then, I’ve done all I can do on my own.
It was a strangely unique time where people were collectively building something instead of identifying parts to tear down.
So true. Love that analogy.
I’m not going to claim that I haven’t had my own bad moments, but those didn’t really start until the toxicity crept in. I normally feel bad about it when my composure slips, and I wind up beating myself up over it. I have tried to step back and reassess what I want out of Lemmy, and frankly I’ve settled on mostly lurking. I hate that, and I’d hate it even more to see this instance close up (again though, totally get it).
I really enjoyed what beehaw was doing, but since I’m pretty much an app-only user, it got to be impossible to keep participating there when they weren’t keeping up with upgrades which broke compatibility with Voyager. I appreciate your aim with this instance given the beehaw influence.
I’ve actually been contemplating moving my account, and if you get the help you need, I’ll probably move here because of your goals with the instance.
Same.
Thanks. Yeah, we’ve been “Beehaw-lite” since inception. I wanted to be general purpose with a good mix of content but also have a mission and guiding principles, so I looked at what BH was doing and modeled off of that.
FWIW, Beehaw recently updated to 0.19.11 or 12, so all the apps should work now. For a long time, they were stuck on 0.18.4 because they were planning to move to a different platform, but I guess that’s a ways off (or plans changed) so they updated to the latest Lemmy.
If we’re still here in a month, you’re totally welcome to! lol