My Lemmy experiment is over

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:38:06 +0000

After over a year I’m going to take down my personal Lemmy server. Running it on Hetzner has been relatively easy and with only a few hiccups along the way, for a single user instance it uses about 20-30gb of storage for it’s db and image cache.

Why did you selfhost?
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Like most people after the Reddit enshitification I was looking for a new home, Lemmy seemed like the right place. Rather than jump on the bigger servers I decided I’d selfhost it and have a another little part of the internet for myself, similar to how I have my own Mastodon instance.

Selfhosting Lemmy was actually a lot easier than Mastodon so I was quite surprised to be up and running as quickly as I was, posts started federating very quickly and I was seeing content from around 40-50 different communities I subscribed to across some of the bigger servers.

Why take it down?
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Content - the communities I follow have been slowly dying, the mass exodus from reddit fueled a gold rush to Lemmy which was great but over time content quality and quantity has declined.
Moderation - every so often I find that communities I follow have been abandoned and waves of spam hit them, it’s not fun knowing that you have no power other than to block a million accounts. Reporting posts only affects my instance which isn’t very useful.
Racism/Homophobia/Extremism, I see more racist, homophobic and extremist language than I thought I would, again blocking users is the only solution. I don’t go out of my way to find this content I find it just filters into communities I’m already part of.
I’m happy with Mastodon, this is a fairly simple one to explain, Mastodon is everything I want from a social media platform. There are still issues with it but at least with Lemmy gone it’s one less thing to worry about.
It’s tied to my identity, it wouldn’t take someone very long to do a bit of exploring to find out who I am on Lemmy and that really restricted my usage of it, it’s no different to being on my own Mastodon instance but Lemmy just feels worse. I’ve only ever posted a handful of comments because of this.

Will I come back?
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Nah, the web has fundamentally changed and my usage of it has to as well. Reddit was great, a fountain of useful knowledge until it wasn’t. What I wanted out of Lemmy was the same thing but you can’t beat Reddit and Google, you can only try and avoid them and build your own piece of the internet.

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My Lemmy experiment is over

Why did you selfhost? #

Why take it down? #

Will I come back? #

Why did you selfhost?
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Why take it down?
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Will I come back?
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