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
hi, I haven’t used your project, but I saw this thread linked elsewhere, read it, and I just wanted to express two things:
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said about people on Lemmy. It’s sad, it really seemed promising a few years ago. There are still some good people it seems, but I feel like there is a large (but diminishing) silent majority of people who, like me, don’t want to bother engaging because of the people who are too extreme. If you (or anyone else) is aware of some community that is a bit better in this respect, I’d be very interested in joining. (Mostly to lurk and read comments, but perhaps to participate when I have something to add).
Also I wanted to say how sad it is that you can put a ton of work into something and eventually have the community let you down. It’s hard enough to build anything, let alone something that becomes popular, and I can’t imagine how disappointing it is to still have to deal with a toxic community despite contributing like that.
If you have an RSS feed or mastodon account or something then you should let me know, I’d be interested in following it to see what you develop next, or if you have something you want to share. In addition to the technical side, it seems like you have a lot of valuable insight on what is needed to keep a community from going downhill like Lemmy has.
Aside: I started dumping some thoughts on how to make moderation more flexible, allowing more people to report obviously bad stuff, but also maybe having different “moderation lists” that people can contribute to, to reduce the visibility of (but not necessarily hide entirely) more aggressive comments. If the moderators of these lists seem to become too extreme, users can always find a different list, and instance/community admins/moderators could choose different ones to apply by default. Maybe these lists could be made up of smaller groups of people (to keep each other accountable) and peer together to form larger groups, but the others could vote for or against including other groups.
I realize this probably isn’t the right place to ask this sort of question (apologies, you probably just want a break from all of this)… so I’d be happy to be pointed towards somewhere where people discuss this sort of thing.
Long rambling brain dumb of potential ways to make moderation easier and more customizable for different kinds of people
I don’t have any experience with this stuff at all, but I’ve often wondered about different technical solutions for content moderation that could make everyone happy. Is there any way to have co-existing moderation philosophies? Some way to allow some people to filter out kinds of content that they don’t enjoy, leveraging community contributions to different “moderation lists” that people can choose to opt-in to (and possibly opt-out from). Maybe some of these lists wouldn’t hide the content completely but simply push it down into a less visible area, or hide it behind a “too aggressive” button that you can only press if you are interested and in the mood to read comments like that. Then if you feel the comment is reasonable, you can choose to apply different moderation lists that better align with your own feelings, or possibly some sort of “I think this comment was incorrectly tagged, people may be misusing this moderation list”. Maybe people who don’t administer these lists can have those sorts of reports highlighted, so they can re-consider whether or not they agree with the moderators of that list. But worst case if you disagree with their philosophy, you can just find a different list to use to filter the comments you see.
This might help take some of the moderation burden off of instance admins, and also allow for a greater spectrum of people to be able to co-exist on the same platform. The instance admin could simply choose what groups of people they trust as sort of default moderators, and users could even adjust that somewhat if they disagree. I don’t think I could handle the full burden of being a moderator, but I wouldn’t mind occasionally reporting content that I feel is overly hostile or rude, or even unreasonable (though this would be a different list). And I would be okay with my submissions to that list being reviewed by others and perhaps gradually being given more permission, but at the risk of having that permission taken away if I abuse it, perhaps with the chance of being steered in the right direction by a more senior moderator (e.g. use list “aggressive” rather than list “flag for removal”). Also perhaps my submissions to these lists don’t have any effect unless some other number of users agree or make the same submission.
Ideally people would be aware of these lists, and try to be more polite and civil if they really want to engage with many different people and try to change their minds. If they (sometimes) just want to rant and be aggressive, that’s fine, but they can be contained and limited to other people who want to engage in that sort of thing. Maybe they could even voluntarily tag their own comments if they know that it’s not for everyone.
I’ll add that on Lemmy I am sometimes afraid of even downvoting comment that I consider too hostile, at least if others seem to upvote it. This is because I vaguely recall that votes are public, at least to instance admins, and I figure some instance admins could be irrational and doxx me or something.
::: spoiler
Thanks. It makes my heart happy knowing that I’m not the only one seeing Lemmy for what it’s become.
That was the whole premise of DubVee (my instance). We’ve got a fairly strict set of policies covering extremism and toxic behavior because, from the start, we wanted to be better than where we came from (Reddit). We’re highly curated/heavily moderated, and our content policies apply to local and federated users equally (enforced with liberal use of perma bans and defederation from extreme/fringe instances).
That was going very well for quite some time, but with the recent turbulence in the Fediverse (lemm.ee shutting down and big Lemmy instances spinning up parallel Piefed instances in the same month), most of that curation came undone - probably 80-90% of the accounts that had been identified and banned over the last two years were all back with new alts.
That’s basically when I decided to throw in the towel; I’ve been doing this alone, and I just don’t have it in me to go through it again. When DubVee launched, I had a second admin who helped out, but they lost interest a little under a year in, so it’s been a solo-operation since.
While I’ve had offers from some amazing people to help lighten the admin burden, they were from admins who also had their own instances to worry about. I truly appreciated the offers, but I just didn’t feel it was going to be enough to keep this place going without being committed full time to the mission/vision here.
As far as I know, Beehaw would be the next best thing (they were basically my spirit guide when I set this place up). I’m not sure they moderate federated content like I did, but the local environment there is very welcoming - only limitation is they don’t federate with
.worldorsh.itjust.works. Similarly, if you’re a Trekkie, startrek.website is also well moderated (though, again, not sure if they moderate federated content).Votes were never fully public, just restricted to admins and eventually community mods. I never worried too much about that since if I was afraid of a psychotic admin, I’d probably defederate their instance.
What’s worse, though, is some rogue admin from the gregtech instance decided to make a web tool that lets anyone look up anyone else’s votes. I feel like that’s too much power for the wrong hands to have access to and disagree with their stance that “since anyone can spin up an instance and see votes, why not make this tool available to everyone”.
When I was modding a couple of larger communities that often attracted some pretty psychotic people (news, unpopular opinion), I did very much live in fear that some psychos were going to doxx me for shits and giggles. That’s not an irrational fear. I’ve directly seen them calling for Jordan Lund (LW mod for politics, news, and a couple other communities) to be doxxed and had to mod those comments (which I absolutely felt put a target on my back).
ah, thanks for the info! In your original post I missed that you were also the instance admin (though in hindsight that makes much more sense), the post that I saw that linked to this one talked about tesseract.
It’s encouraging to hear that the existing moderation techniques can work for a while, but to me it still feels like a lot of work and stress to expect people to put up with for fun in their spare time (in addition to paying for the hardware and maintaining it), so it would be nice if there were ways to distribute the load somewhat, perhaps giving you the option to take a break whenever you need or want it without major consequences (I assume). Part of why I wanted to respond to your post is because I relate to this feeling of “I’ve had enough”, even from my day job, which pays me and still allows me to disconnect when needed, and sometimes from hobby projects, but at least I can step away from them from weeks or months if I want to.
Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do next! (In my case, I would be happy to have a break from work for a few weeks or months, so I hope you get the chance to do the same if that’s something you want, at least as a break from side projects like this Lemmy instance). If later you decide to start another sort of community on whatever might pop up after Lemmy, I’d be interested in joining it. (I may finally give Beehaw a shot too.)