There was a previous post on that community about Burggit shutting down, but because it just linked to the announcement without explaining any of the details it didn’t get a lot of attention or generate much discussion, with most of the comments simply consisting of “loli bad”.
So I made a post yesterday specifically focusing on the grievances with the Lemmy software that the Burggit admins brought up, and there were some interesting comments, with one of the Lemmy devs responding as well.
To summarize: Most of the instance admins who commented seem to agree that the Lemmy software is lacking and devs are rather slow with updates, others contend that coding moderation tools is difficult and boring, some recommend addons/tools that have been created by other devs to help with Lemmy, and some people say they’ve had few problems with their instances, or found easy workarounds to the known problems. Nutomic, one of the Lemmy devs, also says that many of the issues that have been brought up have either been solved or improved in more recent versions of Lemmy. Some users also discuss what’s reasonable to expect from the small dev team considering the current funding that they receive, and there’s a bit of bickering in there too.
People are still commenting on the post so I definitely recommend checking out the full thread to see how the discussion evolves.
A lot of our issues were due to the growing pains of our host who, don’t get me wrong, promptly responded and fixed issues as they popped up. The big reason we stuck with him is because he went to bat for us when someone did their typical crybully shit and tried to go above us and get us censored by our ISP despite the infringing content being completely legal in the country that the host is in.
I highly recommend kyun.host for this very reason because they will promptly tell any complainer to fuck off so long as the host they’re complaining about isn’t doing anything illegal. It really is censorship resistant.
I’d get pinged all the time on our Matrix that the server is down or is slow and other stuff which caused the components of the server, namely pictrs to crash and exhibit undefined behavior, since our image storage host was accessed via an NFS share to a spinning rust server with more ample storage mounted through a Wireguard tunnel. With each server going down all the time, it’d cause Lemmy to seriously break and require a manual fix to get it going again. Over time, I’ve gotten kinda burnt out from maintaining the site and slowly just mostly stopped using it altogether aside from a cursory glance every now and again to make sure it was still working, due to my increasingly waning lack of interest in perusing the site.
If it wasn’t for the funding issues, this instance probably would’ve remained on the same path to being shutdown just at a later date, most likely. Just because it’s too much for one person to maintain given all these situations along with the software still being of a beta quality piling onto our already existing issues. And frankly, I don’t have fun using it anymore and honestly completely dread working on it.
I absolutely refuse to create an account on any of the popular instances, which would probably end up in a repeat of the Lemmy Admin Matrix room situation where I laughably got permanently banned on sight for “CSAM” even though I never posted any such thing, rofl. So I’ll leave this here, the hyperlink in that post references their Fediseer tool:
This is precisely another reason why I’m glad we’re shutting down, the threadiverse is so stifling that we have to be on our best behavior or else we get labeled through your dumb Fediseer tool. Sometimes wrongly, (IE: calling us bigots when we fully support the trans movement, as well as the overall LGBTQ movement as a whole, and any movement that’s focused on minorities.) labeling us as a bad instance. The fact that your tool doesn’t allow instances to opt out can create a completely slanderous situation if a clique of high profile instances decide that they don’t like you.
Burggit will live on in a frankly more fun microblogging fork of Misskey, called Sharkey in the wider fediverse. A big chunk of which, will not give two shits about the reputations passed down to instances by this tool wielded by a clique of popular Lemmy instances whose behavior would make a typical Reddit powermod blush, since it takes itself way less seriously: dill.burggit.moe
the strong-arm bullying by popular instances was easily the most annoying thing about the “Lemmy-verse”. The auto-defederate list that those instances controlled was an obvious example of power-mad witch-hunting people being in charge. I’ve even heard once or twice of smaller instances being forced by the popular instances to follow their rules and subscribe to the list if they don’t want to be added to the list themselves.
I share your sentiment that Sharkey has been much more relaxed and fun! Only a week after I started using it, I stopped caring if Lemmy Burggit would even come back online. The users are more playful and friendly, and there’s none of that circlejerk/hivemind moderation cult over there. it helps a lot that sharkey itself feels much better put together than lemmy does. so with that, I too say goodbye to Lemmy, and hello to Sharkey.
https://lemmy.comfysnug.space/post/305019 saw itself being forced to change its rules despite content falling within their scope not having been posted at all.
wow! that’s a concrete example of exactly what I mean. despicable behavior.
Going back on my, “This is the last post I’m making on Burggit.” Already apparently, lol. This was something that I thought of covering, but ultimately decided not to, since I thought the post was long enough as it is. Thank you very much for bringing this up.
@diff@burggit.moe Fuck redditors. Lemmy can jump off in a brushfire. Misskey FOREVER!
Never heard of fediseer before, but their censured list is a great place to find new instances!
First of all, thanks a lot for maintaining this community.
Secondly, could you share anything about kyun’s pricing?
sorry for the late reply, everything you’d need to know is on https://kyun.host/
Its surprising to see Lemmy hate loli so much since much of the Mastodon fediverse is full of it. Just look at Pawoo, Baraag, Misskey, and a ton of other small instances. I was hoping to see a lot of old style redditors who liked free speech show up when Lemmy got popular but that didn’t happen. I guess they’ve all dispersed and gone elsewhere or off the internet entirely.
