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Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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. :/

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Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

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.

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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!
  
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  - Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Also, have a look at this post: piefed.social/post/667044
    
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  - Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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
    
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  - tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.
    
    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.
    
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  - thickertoofan@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    how’d the migration work?
    
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    Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Have a look at this post: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876780
    
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rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

Blaming the community for that is not fair. It takes only a few rotten fruit to spoil the whole basket. Even if 99% of your userbase are model netizens who are supportive and only make positive contributions, the whole system can be brought down by a few dedicate trolls/losers.

We need to build effective filtering mechanisms to get rid of abuse/spam and we need to maybe bring back the idea of Web of Trust. It’s too easy to create an account and start polluting the fediverse.

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Blaming the community for that is not fair.
  
  I’m not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.
  
  What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn’t happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it’s a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You’d have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess…
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    We can not change “human behavior”, so I don’t see how/why we should expect things to “be different at .ee” compared to anywhere else.
    
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    JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about, either.
    
    What I’m talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing… how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn’t going to last indefinitely.
    
    As a personal example of a ‘motivated user,’ I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I’ve populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.
    
    For the most part it’s been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it’s still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it’s been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn’t necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.
    
    At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I’m not pointing fingers; I’m observing.
    
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- CMahaff@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah, every time there is a post on the topic, moderators say that the tools they have are insufficient.
  
  It’d be great to have some community focus on that going forward, whether through direct Lemmy changes or creating better bot mod tools. I’m not in a position to contribute right now but maybe in a few months.
  
  There is a subset of Lemmy that absolutely hates any idea of automod tools because it reminds them too much of issues they had with Reddit. But as Lemmy grows (and given it’s volunteer nature) it feels inescapable at some point.
  
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- Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  they mostly fester in any community that has political discussion in it.
  
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SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Sad to hear of your problems, but thank you for the time you did put into it! Nothing lasts forever but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile.

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Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think people really underestimate how much work it is to maintain a community online. It’s something that is so outside of my skillset and capabilities that I feel awe when I see it done successfully.

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mjhelto@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m sorry to hear about your health issues. I don’t know shit about dick, but if there’s some way a 10 yr sysadmin could do to help out, please let me help! I’m a big hoarder of data and don’t believe information should be gatekept or lost if it can be saved.

For posterity’s sake, please don’t abandon hope in keeping your labor of love alive!

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Thanks for the offer and kind words! I’ve tagged you in the comment above…
  
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Ilandar@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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.

I guess it’s not really surprising, though. The Lemmy userbase is much smaller and very skewed towards certain types of people with extremely strong opinions and low levels of tolerance for anything that goes against their worldview. I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard, it just benefits from having such a massive userbase filled with all kinds of people. The toxicity and off-topic intrusions of political/culture war stuff get drowned out over there, whereas here you’ll frequently see threads where 90% of the comments are arguing about things that are completely irrelevant to the actual topic because so much of userbase has an activist mindset that is always itching for a fight.

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard,
  
  I’d say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there’s a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It’s certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.
  
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  - Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own.
    
    Reddit was known for years to leave the moderation tasks to the volunteers admins. I’m still a mod in a quite active sub, the mod queue is around 2600 items now.
    
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    morrowind@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    We hav sub mods here too. The difference is the admins
    
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  - Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    reddit has admins, AI moderations, aggressive filters, and COMPLIcit mods in many subs to do the policing.
    
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    JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yup, good point.
    
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  - Ilandar@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s true, I guess I was commenting more on the differences between the userbases. I’m not sure much can really be done about that in the short term. Lemmy is this way because it is small and is a sort of counterculture protest against mainstream social media. Until it grows and evolves out of that framing, its userbase will continue to look very different to reddit’s.
    
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- Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  i think lemmy is skewed, because the people that got banned from reddit for expressing such trollish/spammy , or propaganda(like conservatives and ml and hexbeared) come here thats why there are such strong opinion.
  
  and theres the recent arrivals: from reddits indiscriminate bannings.
  
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SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think somebody shoukd do an academic study on Lemmy, how it differs from Reddit, its weaknesses, and why it might be failing. So that there is a definitive cause to its weakness that can be pointed to for anyone willing to give it another shot.

Secondly, I think it might be a good idea for the admins of the servers to have a video call. This will make the (at least admin) community feel much more personal in a way that comment threads cannot and will lead to a stronger sense of community.

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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  How is this failing? If lemm.ee was a traditional forum it’d be over, but because of federation everything lives on.
  
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Sergio@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
When I looked through the list of lemm.ee communities I was subbed to, my first thought was: omg I hope JohnnyEnzyme takes this ok…

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  ¡Hola, compa!
  Yes I’m bummed, but we’ll see what happens. Blaze has offered some help, and linked some kind of ‘PieFed migration project,’ above.
  
  At this moment I’d say that even if a migration *is* possible, there’s a very strong chance that EGN+ will need a new mod(s) to run the place. Aside from that, and if my health picks up, I’d be happy to keep contributing content, and maybe help out here and there.
  
  I’ll probably be posting that message to the community soon, but am mentioning it to you first, and for anyone else reading. =)
  
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letsgo@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Perhaps I wasn’t paying appropriate attention but it also seemed unexpected to me. Everywhere has a background level of “we want more mods and admins” so it gets easy to ignore, and it feels like we’ve gone straight from there to “right we’re shutting down now” without an intermediate “we’re really struggling here folk and may have to consider shutting down if it doesn’t improve”.

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- JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah, fair point!
  
  Still, as has been commented in this thread, Lemm.ee indeed called for admins at some point in order to help out, but evidently got an underwhelming response. Perhaps part of that due to the fact that Sunaurus & Ella stating right up front that it was a thankless type of job.
  
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Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
the problem is the people who have trolled, spammed on reddit with right wing propaganda/ or pro-israeli also fled to lemmy causing problems here too. reddit now is just overmoderating to the point its not usable for most people now.

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