Hey, admin of lemm.ee here. I have no behind the scenes knowledge of what happened to vlemmy, but I have heard (in this thread and elsewhere) that some communities have been suddenly left without a home. I hope it’s OK for me to direct a message to such people here.

If you’re looking for a new home for your community, and don’t want to do it on lemmy.world for any reason, I would be happy to welcome you at lemm.ee! If you’re interested and want to know more about how lemm.ee is run, you can check out our administration and federation policy.

We recently upgraded our servers, so should be no problems in accepting some new users. In general, lemm.ee is not going anywhere - we have even already paid for some of our infrastructure up front for a year.

Let me know if you have any questions!

little bit tricky, was only on there for a few weeks but in that time i managed to subscribe to 50 communties and host one, now i gotta redo all of that again which is a minor pain in the ass

I am not sure how to proceed, to be honest.

I had a small community, [email protected] (see lemmy.world cache). It had its issues, like low # of posts and comments made by anyone but me, but I could see people starting engaging bit by bit and if I was to write more, the community would be able to compete with its kbin counterpart. Aaaand bam.

Now I’m thinking of where I could move to. [email protected] is semi-dead and is run by a person who I believe to be a squatter who had occupied a lot of communities and called them “placeholders until the reddit mods evacuate”. If I am correct, then I’m not sure if I really like the idea of participating in a community run by a squatter.

Probably I should settle somewhere else.

Uuuuuuuugh. Rough.

I was just in the middle of trying out 3rd party clients, so I initially thought it was the clients. That being said, it only took a half-hour to rebuild my profile (mostly re-subscribing to stuff). I feel like lemmy.sdf.org is noticeably slower, although I’m still grateful for their work.

Personally it was quite annoying. It was made more annoying due to the fact that I literally wrote a long comment about this exact scenario where I advised the reader to get multiple accounts but that I basically couldn’t be arsed to do it myself.

However, at the very least, the communities I followed are all fine, and obviously the Fediverse itself won’t be impacted by vlemmy’s disappearance. (It so happened that none of the communities I followed were on Vlemmy, other than its support community.) I got wrecked for a few hours, but there’s an easy path for me to recover (make a new account on a different instance).

In my view, this event justifies why the Fediverse is more robust than a centralized system, even a hypothetical one without corporate control. It is no longer (for me) a hypothetical situation: my instance shit the bed, and I got through it. We thought Vlemmy was rock solid. It had some of the best uptime in the game. While I was briefly inconvenienced, the system went on and I was able to quickly rejoin the conversation.

Honestly, I hope Vlemmy comes back. I’m not going to bet on it (and this time I’m actually going to follow my own advice), but I miss the experience. If not, it will bring me great closure to find out why the site died.

Lastly, I think we need to be able to download our user data to a JSON like in Invidious. At a bare minimum, we need profile data and the list of subscriptions so that the new instance can regenerate the desired feed from the old instance. Furthermore, Vlemmy was one of the few instances who had no defederations or blocked instances [1]. To get a full picture of the Fediverse, it will probably be necessary to have two or more accounts under the assumption that the union of the instances’ federations will be enough to cover the desired subset of the Fediverse. It’s certainly possible, it just needs to be implemented. I guess I have an actual reason to learn Rust now!

[1] Vlemmy had just recently defederated from burggit for legal reasons. Otherwise, they were federated with everyone. I really value the existence of a small number of instances not defederating from anyone because I want to be aware of idiots and assholes on the platform that normal instances (rightly) filter out. The Meta situation has really challenged that perspective, and I reserve the right to change my mind about this. All I know is that it is really convenient to go on Vlemmy or sdf and be pretty certain that I’m seeing all the discussion. That, and that I love a good shitshow every once in a while.

@linuxFan Had a lemmy.world account from before. Found [this] (https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim) to be safe in future.

Hello everyone, To the Vlemmy refugees, sorry for your loss.

@linuxFan Had a lemmy.world account from before. Tried this to be safe from any such future events.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

Meh, I had just got asylum coming from reddit, had barely unpacked.

Having learned the volatility of instances, I’ve signed up to a couple of other instances and subscribed to the same communities.

I don’t care for hoarding internet points - if I did, I’d have stayed in reddit as a karma hostage - so I don’t mind switching instances.

Maybe that’s a healthy aspect of lemmy; accumulated points matter less when they are more ephemeral.

you should not try to login to vlemmy directly, you can access and subscribe to communities hosted there from your instance like open cheeseburger.social/c/<community>@vlemmy.com (or whatever domain it has)

I have account on feddit.de, this community for me is: https://feddit.de/c/[email protected]

Was pretty painful to recreate my account on Lemm.ee, but I think that I have it mostly recreated. I am wondering if there is some way to automatically download a full list of subscriptions so that I can either sync up a backup account or at least have a file that I can import with a new account in case Lemm.ee blows up.

Fortunately, I had manually exported the list to sync it up with my Kbin accounts about a week and half ago, so I did have some of them tracked. Exporting into Excel was not easy!