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[Important Post] Here's the situation. - Burggit
burggit.moeThis post is going to be a long one, to spare you some reading I’ll do a TL;DR,
but I really would appreciate you reading the whole thing. TL;DR: Burggit (The
Lemmy Instance) will be shutting down July 14th 2024. Due to lack of funding,
grievances with the Lemmy software and lack of resources, energy and interest on
our part. We’ll be giving one month for everyone to move their local posts
somewhere else and download their images. shota.nu [http://shota.nu] will not be
shutting down, so images/video hosted there will be fine, but they will not be
viewable on the Lemmy Burggit since we’ll be shutting the webpage down after
July 14th 2024. ------------------------------ Now for the whole post. Back when
we started Burggit I was in great health, I was managing multiple sites at a
time and constantly adding things to my plate, which were managable while I was
in that state. Burggit was an excited project that I asked Burger to set up,
because I didn’t (and still don’t) have the knowledge to maintain. At worst, I
thought it could be a fun little place for us and a few friends to mess around
and kinda use as a link archive. I even offered to pay for it, since burger is
in a difficult financial situation. Things went well shortly after it was up, we
didn’t have hardly any users, just a few friends like I originally intended.
Then the Reddit API stuff started going in full swing and suddenly people
started wanting to join. This was a very exciting time for us as the site grew.
It got to the point where my wife even had to help us with managing everything,
since she was usually up when Burger and I were asleep. Everything was going
rather well. Then I got sick, I got so sick that I almost died twice, I lost
half of my lunge and 2 of my ribs, and I was in and out of the hospital for
almost a year. During this time, I could not participate in Burggit, and
honestly, I was barely able to fund it. Though I eventually did come back, but
it was never like how it was before I got sick. My financial and physical
resources decreased significantly as a result of my health, I can’t manage or
juggle as much as I could and I will probably forever have a slower paced life
because of the events that transpired. Then there’s the Lemmy software. The
amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is
ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there’s no easy way
to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages).
When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy
devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for
illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design,
and they want it to be like this. We can’t even easily look at the list of
registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity. The other
thing is there’s no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage
caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever. Also the software is
constantly breaking. This site has become more of a burden for us, for me
financially as I have been the sole person funding it (aside from like 2 or 3
individuals who donated a bit ago, thank you to those people.) It’s just not
worth our time anymore and it’s not something I want to fund anymore. People
seem to like this instance, so much so that it feels like the second it goes
down we’re made aware of it. But, aside from that we’re on our own. We’re only
federated with a few instances due to the way the threadiverse is, we’ve been
literally locked into our own bubble and have been funding this project and been
allocating time (sometimes a lot of time) into making it operational. We just
don’t have the ability to do that anymore, not unless something big changes, but
I don’t see that coming. Now you might be wondering, “What about the Sharkey?”
The Sharkey is easy to manage, is widely federated and is easy to manage storage
and much cheaper to fund. It doesn’t cause even a third of the hassle Lemmy
does. I’m very sorry to make this announcement. Both Burger and I were trying as
much as we could to keep this up as long as possible, but it has officially
reached a point where we just can’t do it anymore.
I still don’t think the best solution to an under-staffed team is to try to make a competing under-staffed team. I think just contributing would be more helpful for all, especially with the plugin support coming soon to Lemmy
how long until Sublinks catches up to Lemmy?
Let’s not start again this whole debate ha ha
Also, piefed.social is a small team, but is almost feature parity with Lemmy