this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026

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124

What happened to lem.ee? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by early_riser@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I see lots of references to it and its demise. Just curious what the story is.

top 34 comments

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[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 167 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

lemm.ee was one man show operated by one person, who was probably industry professional (some kind of system architect/admin), because his infrastructure was designed quite well and robust.

he eventually grew tired of it, because as the instance grew, it was impossible to maintain it as one man team and expanded on his admin and mod team.

after some more time, the admin team announced that it is still too much and they aren't able to handle the amount of moderator and admin work needed, and we should go home because they are closing.

it was quite strange, because sunaurus, the founder and head admin of the instance, was quite transparent about how everything works from the beginning and communicated with the users often and clearly - up until the end, where this "we are closing, go home" announcement was not made by him, but by some anonymous admin.

so my working theory is they killed and ate him, stole the servers and went home 🤷‍♂️.

edit: the lemm.ee meta community is still archived, so everyone can see for themselves - https://lemmy.zip/c/meta@lemm.ee

edit2: this is from his github page, so maybe they did not eat him 😂

Hey folks!

Thank you for checking out my GitHub Sponsors page. I have been active in a few open source projects, most notably running a Lemmy instance.

Recently I've been burned out by open source, so I am for the most part currently taking a break. Please feel free to cancel any recurring sponsorships, unless you want to pay for my coffee.

I will probably return to open source at some point, although most likely never to any social media adjacent projects.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 60 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the site received a considerable amount of “vile” content of one type or another

ok, i can definitely see problem with that.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-moderators-kenya-ptsd-intl

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 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.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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)

[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i am personally simple person. i see @hexbear.net, i block, no exceptions.

[–] outerspace@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sometimes they say correct things, but for all the wrong reasons

[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

yeah, and sometimes they say "your parents deserved to be murdered because they owned stuff", so... 🤷‍♂️

[–] outerspace@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

True true

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

Exactly.

[–] Demigodrick@piefed.zip 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

+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.

[–] scytale@piefed.zip 11 points 1 week ago

And most of us .ee users jumped over to .zip because you run your instances as good as Sunaurus did. Thanks for your efforts!

[–] NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 9 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It was an amazing instance and I was grateful for the wonderful lemm.ee community. After seeing what happened, if dbzer0 wants a moderator, I'll try to help out instead of scrolling past thinking someone else is probably gonna take it.

[–] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hobbies come and go. Shiny exciting thing stopped being shiny and exciting and now it's just a thing you're paying the bills for until you admit you've moved on.

[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the thing is the bills were paid by users, and according to what he publicly said the money were not a problem and he had budget for months in advance, so it wasn't about money.

the fact that he didn't make the final announcement himself is something that i personally do consider quite strange, but we will never know, i guess.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Honestly I can relate.

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago

Sorry I got hungry and I ate the servers

It tasted good tho

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Moderation is the most difficult aspect of running social media platforms.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A well-constructed site also has a huge amount of work put in to its design and functionality. Its a job that requires a lot of discretion, compromise, and adapting to the best interests of the users... all things which aren't necessarily obvious. So really, there's at least three absolutely vital job areas:

Backend and maintenance
Ongoing site design
Moderation and PR

It's so, so easy to underestimate how much and varied the work is going to be when you're high on enthusiasm.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

None of that makes you look at mutilated children, though.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago

That depends on the layout of duties for any particular site / instance.

When Sunaurus spoke of "vile content," I got the sense that yes, he had to deal with too much of that horrible shit, plus much more.

[–] determinist@kbin.earth 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

lem.ee was the first server I joined. I liked it, then moved to kbin when lem.ee stopped.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Whoops?

[–] determinist@kbin.earth 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think so? maybe? kbin seems pretty decent. I just don't like change :))

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh! What I meant is, I thought Kbin went down sometime back, and got merged in to Mbin, or something like that.

My comment wasn't adding anything useful, in any case, so please do disregard. Just shows what I know. :S

[–] determinist@kbin.earth 2 points 1 week ago

It's all good. As far as I've seen kbin(.earth, the instance I use) has gone offline a few times recently due to cloudflare shitting the bed. Other than that, I am not well informed about the fediverse. Still learning. After a quick search, it looks like I created a mbin account that I use with kbin? Dunno. I may have made it unintentionally messy for myself.

Ah well. :))

[–] FarrellPerks@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week ago

Thought I'd add my bit. Was on lemm.ee from start to close, was a great instance as the admin was vocal, held public votes on large scale changes and accessible when things went wrong.

I hosted a Wales community on there until it's demise before switching over to feddit.uk as that was more adjacent to my career anyway.

RIP lemm.ee you will be missed.