Shutting Down on July 31. This fediverse experiment was a failure.

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~~

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49 comments

Well this sucks, but I understand and share your frustrations. You're one of the names I'm always happy to run into around lemmy (and of course in TenForward). I hope stepping away takes a source of stress out of your life.
I've never tried to run an instance, but I've been fielding reports as a mod in a few communities and have seen a lot of the behavior that you're talking about - that awful combination of viciousness and righteousness. I've had to remove hit-lists, calls for somebody to murder politicians, cops, or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone's "purity test", and much more. And I only help mod in a handful of meme communities, not anything serious. I can't imagine how much work must go into managing anything remotely political.
My worry is that this is happening everywhere on social media, and that we're just on one of many platforms grappling with it. If you want my theory, stuff like this is downstream of social media being personalized and curated by opinion, either by algorithms (like TikTok, Twitter/X, etc.) or manually by moderators (like here or reddit). When you get too many people agreeing with each other, it creates an echo-chamber that amplifies the most extreme takes about everything and views differing opinions - or even tempering voices - as "trolls", "bootlickers" (as you mentioned), or worse. The news has been full of people radicalized from various bubbles on the internet until they act in ways they might not have if exposed to more diversity of thought. It begins with people hyping each other up with extreme language that lacks nuance, maturity, or reason, and then ends with a small % of impressionable people storming the capitol, firebombing Teslas, or maybe becoming that one anti-natalist murderer that got Lemmy a mention in the news recently. It's absolutely unhinged behavior, and I think these are all symptoms of the same thing.
In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.
- In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.
  I said this before, but in a way, it's ironic that there's "diverse" in the word "fediverse", the whole fediverse doesn't feel diverse.
- I've had to remove [list of awful stuff] or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone's "purity test", and much more
  Yep, to all of that. In spades. From one to another, I do appreciate the work you do both modding and contributing to communities.
  It's easy to become not quite numb but...acclimated(?) to that as just "words on a page" and swipe it away with the mod button, but when you step back, two things stand out to me:
  A person said those things. A person typed those out and thought to themselves "This is a perfectly acceptable thing to say." That's scary.
  The massive number of upvotes those attract and the score representing the number of people who saw that violent rhetoric and thought "yes, I like this. I agree with this". That's downiright terrifying.
  If you want my theory, stuff like this...the fediverse needs normies ... or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity
  (Not cherry picking those points specifically, just shortening for brevity.)
  Couldn't agree more. I've tried to provide a "normie-friendly" space with my instance (based on my own experience here as well as feedback from some former Reddit colleages who briefly tried Lemmy and nope'd right out). But things have become so extreme here that I honesty don't think any normie in their right mind would want to stick around and dilute the unhinged behavior. i.e. The toxicity has metastasized, and I don't think there's any going back.
  I hope I'm wrong. I really do. Despite the animosity I have toward what this place has become, I still want the idea/concept of the Fediverse to succeed. But until admins, far and wide, start taking this extremism and toxicity seriously, start de-escalating this stuff from the top down, and forcing these unhinged people back to the fringe instances (which can be de-federated from), I just don't see how this place is going to become anything but the next 4chan. Again, I genuinely hope I'm wrong.
- In short, the fediverse needs normies
  I am sorry but this will never happen. Normies use Windows, are Christian, from the USA, and mostly centrist. Or perhaps use Mac, are Muslim, from the UK, and were formerly right-leaning. Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were, as in finally being exposed to how deep that rabbit hole goes. The wider Threadiverse can be quite punishing to anyone who does not share hard enough the groupthink mindset. Especially if they accidentally respond to a post, shared in All, from Chapotraphouse (which Lemm.ee famously did not defederate from, nor does dbzero, nor lemmy.zip, etc.). Or make an offhand comment in most lemmy.ml communities?
  r/Redditalternatives is full of people who were looking to leave Reddit, actually decided to take people's advice to come here, but could not stand us (we are a Nazi bar, showcasing tankie philosophy and various other purity tests as you noted) and so gave up and returned to Reddit. They felt the opposite of being welcomed here.
  And people seem to actively like it this way? We have echo chambers for a reason... and it is far easier to simply continue them than to put in the enormous and continual efforts required to do otherwise.
  Btw, brace yourself: people are talking there that there will very likely be another Rexodus in the next few weeks as Reddit is about to once again screw the pooch and break everything by doing away with modmail and replacing it with... get this... their chat bots. Oh boy, I do not envy mods of most communities on Lemmy right now...
  If we wanted normies to feel welcomed here, it would need to start with us actually wanting them to feel welcomed here, collectively rather than individually, imho.
  Edit: I find the upvote/downvote ratio on this comment hilarious 😂. When I say that people do not feel welcomed here, somehow the response by some people is to specifically NOT leave a comment either welcoming me or at bare minimum politely expressing disagreement and perhaps even make an attempt to edumacashiate me in the intrinsic errors of my philosophy, but instead to smash the drive-by downvote button and move on. I can only imagine the thinking process behind that: "THAT'LL show them!"... and obviously I am j/k there, as there is no thinking process behind that, I would strongly wager, which has been my own point this whole time. 🤔😂 By all means, rather than attempt to be different, let's instead aim to be exactly like Reddit, just shifted further left.
  
  Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were
  I remember being so confused when I first joined, because I saw the hexbear communities constantly posting insane stuff like hoping Biden would die, or using "lib" as an insult, and I assumed they were a conservative instance.
  I worry that you're right about it being too big of an ask to hope everyone becomes more welcoming and open-minded, but I'm still personally going to try to be a tempering voice on here. Part of the reason I post memes and stay out of political stuff 99% of the time is because I want there to be more content that's just here for people wanting to have fun.
  
  Hexbear - and lemmygrad.ml, and some users on Lemmy.ml - use the identical tactics of the Alt-Right, even while claiming to be leftists, so I have started calling them the Alt-Left. As in there are true leftist ideals (dbzero, slrpnk, etc.), and then there are those "alternative" leftist spaces that use alternative facts and forms of argumentation.
  Your attitude is very much appreciated! Sadly, people's ideas as to what constitutes "fun" are always going to differ - lefties making fun of righties, and vice versa, or centrists making fun of extremists, or vice versa, straight people making fun of LGBTQIA+, and again vice versa, religious people making fun of atheists and still yet again vice versa - it takes an enormous amount of effort and care and consideration to limit ourselves to only common ground and be decent to everyone, and as normal human beings we sometimes miss the mark. Especially when going through a hard time irl so perhaps on our best days but what about on our worst, or average, or below average ones?
  Perhaps it is even impossible for people with different viewpoints of the world to coexist - not people with differing ideas I mean but differing perspectives on how okay it is specifically to make fun of others. The 4chan approach will only ever devolve as time passes until it finally breaks apart - e.g. lemm.ee - and perhaps there is little hope for the Beehaw-like approach as well as it seems to take too hard a toll on the humans having to put in the effort to implement it, I guess we'll find out. Man I wish there was some kind of middle ground there! Maybe we'll find that instead? 😼

49 comments