Sunaurus (what an awesome bloke), stated several times from early-on that the site received a considerable amount of “vile” content of one type or another, and heavily implied that it was serious drag on the admin team. Later, he said very publicly that he was quite burned out having to deal with that and other issues, and was going to try to focus on the backend, leaving the then-current admin team to deal with the daily operations stuff.
Unfortunately, it seems they essentially got burned out too, with no useful volunteers to step up. It’s a damn shame to me, since it was such an incredibly well-run and curated site otherwise, but it sounds like the amount of toxic users were too much too handle, in the end. Altho frankly, I’m not really sure why Lemm.ee (the 3rd-biggest Lemmy instance at the time) evidently received so much of that shit compared to others.
I happen to have a long history in web forums going back ~25yrs, and for sure I’ve seen site runners absolutely overwhelmed by trying to run both the backend and frontend. Beyond a certain traffic point, at minimum there needs to be two people to strike any healthy balance, with as many useful helpers as possible, as the site expands. Sadly (and typically) almost every person involved in staff is an amateur of one type or another, so sites can also kind of implode due to internal squabbles.
All this hobbyist site-running stuff involving large interactive userbases is usually a lot more challenging than it might seem on the surface.
i remember his unwillingness to defederate with basically anyone, hard to say if that played a role.
Good and interesting point. And a small anecdote: I was running my community there at the time, and once, after I posted an extract from a book which examined internal disputes between Israelis, we immediately got ‘jumped’ by a gang of toxic HexBear users, rabidly trying to twist the discussion into an overall condemnation of Israel. Now I probably would have agreed with much of what they said in other circumstances, but they were just such obnoxious assholes about the whole thing that we wound up banning most of them.
If Sunaurus had to deal with stuff like that on the regular, then I pity the fool… (famous Mr. T quote)
This is the Achilles heel of the fediverse, or indeed of any non corporate platform. It’s more often than not run by passionate volunteers, but passion will only get you so far and it doesn’t always last forever.
Lem.ee was relatively easy to join and IIRC, didn’t require approval like some others require, at least the 2 times I made accounts there. Where you sign up and wait for an acceptance if they accept you.
Because of that is why a lot of shit came through and I imagine that was something he didn’t want to change. It was probably a dealbreaker, either his instance has this or it doesn’t exist. But because of that, you’re going to get more spammers and bad actors, unfortunately.
It was also on the front page of Lemmy for a while, so that probably attracted more people for that reason alone. I know because it was the first instance I joined with because I didn’t know there were other instances to join.
+1 to everything you’ve said (as someone running lemmy + piefed instances)!
I feel really lucky in the admin team and the support from many of our users too, but I can absolutely see where sunaurus came from and why he dropped it.
Sunaurus (what an awesome bloke), stated several times from early-on that the site received a considerable amount of “vile” content of one type or another, and heavily implied that it was serious drag on the admin team. Later, he said very publicly that he was quite burned out having to deal with that and other issues, and was going to try to focus on the backend, leaving the then-current admin team to deal with the daily operations stuff.
Unfortunately, it seems they essentially got burned out too, with no useful volunteers to step up. It’s a damn shame to me, since it was such an incredibly well-run and curated site otherwise, but it sounds like the amount of toxic users were too much too handle, in the end. Altho frankly, I’m not really sure why Lemm.ee (the 3rd-biggest Lemmy instance at the time) evidently received so much of that shit compared to others.
I happen to have a long history in web forums going back ~25yrs, and for sure I’ve seen site runners absolutely overwhelmed by trying to run both the backend and frontend. Beyond a certain traffic point, at minimum there needs to be two people to strike any healthy balance, with as many useful helpers as possible, as the site expands. Sadly (and typically) almost every person involved in staff is an amateur of one type or another, so sites can also kind of implode due to internal squabbles.
All this hobbyist site-running stuff involving large interactive userbases is usually a lot more challenging than it might seem on the surface.
ok, i can definitely see problem with that.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl
i remember his unwillingness to defederate with basically anyone, hard to say if that played a role.
but i agree it was very well ran instance. it is a shame it ended and i hope he is happy with his other endeavors.
Good and interesting point. And a small anecdote: I was running my community there at the time, and once, after I posted an extract from a book which examined internal disputes between Israelis, we immediately got ‘jumped’ by a gang of toxic HexBear users, rabidly trying to twist the discussion into an overall condemnation of Israel. Now I probably would have agreed with much of what they said in other circumstances, but they were just such obnoxious assholes about the whole thing that we wound up banning most of them.
If Sunaurus had to deal with stuff like that on the regular, then I pity the fool… (famous Mr. T quote)
i am personally simple person. i see @hexbear.net, i block, no exceptions.
Sometimes they say correct things, but for all the wrong reasons
yeah, and sometimes they say “your parents deserved to be murdered because they owned stuff”, so… 🤷♂️
True true
This is the Achilles heel of the fediverse, or indeed of any non corporate platform. It’s more often than not run by passionate volunteers, but passion will only get you so far and it doesn’t always last forever.
Exactly.
Lem.ee was relatively easy to join and IIRC, didn’t require approval like some others require, at least the 2 times I made accounts there. Where you sign up and wait for an acceptance if they accept you.
Because of that is why a lot of shit came through and I imagine that was something he didn’t want to change. It was probably a dealbreaker, either his instance has this or it doesn’t exist. But because of that, you’re going to get more spammers and bad actors, unfortunately.
It was also on the front page of Lemmy for a while, so that probably attracted more people for that reason alone. I know because it was the first instance I joined with because I didn’t know there were other instances to join.
+1 to everything you’ve said (as someone running lemmy + piefed instances)!
I feel really lucky in the admin team and the support from many of our users too, but I can absolutely see where sunaurus came from and why he dropped it.
And most of us .ee users jumped over to .zip because you run your instances as good as Sunaurus did. Thanks for your efforts!