It really wasn’t, sadly.
The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that’s typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.
From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.
A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.
Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I’m very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.
So, yeah. :/
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I can help with that, if needed. I’m going to have to migrate my own communities in the coming weeks, so I can help with yours too.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 days ago
@https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto
Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.
Yes, I understand it’s already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.
As part of that, backing up the community’s many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.
Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.
Anyway, that’s for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I’m going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that’s good for starters!
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Also, have a look at this post: piefed.social/post/667044
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Hm, if you need to migrate all of the content to a new community, that might require quite some work indeed.
What about gradually moving content over? lemmy.world/c/moviesandtv@lemmy.film content is still there, and lemmy.film went down more than a year ago
thickertoofan@lemm.ee 2 days ago
how’d the migration work?
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Have a look at this post: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876780
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
Hmm. Yeah, if anyone’s posted images there to the pict-rs instance on lemm.ee, those will presumably be going down too.
checks
Yeah, like, you just posted this image yesterday. Like, post text federates, but other instances won’t have copies of the images.