This post is going to be a long one, to spare you some reading I'll do a TL;DR, but I really would appreciate you reading the whole thing.
TL;DR: Burggit (The Lemmy Instance) will be shutting down July 14th 2024. Due to lack of funding, grievances with the Lemmy software and lack of resources, energy and interest on our part. We'll be giving one month for everyone to move their local posts somewhere else and download their images. shota.nu will not be shutting down, so images/video hosted there will be fine, but they will not be viewable on the Lemmy Burggit since we'll be shutting the webpage down after July 14th 2024.
Now for the whole post.
Back when we started Burggit I was in great health, I was managing multiple sites at a time and constantly adding things to my plate, which were managable while I was in that state. Burggit was an excited project that I asked Burger to set up, because I didn't (and still don't) have the knowledge to maintain. At worst, I thought it could be a fun little place for us and a few friends to mess around and kinda use as a link archive. I even offered to pay for it, since burger is in a difficult financial situation.
Things went well shortly after it was up, we didn't have hardly any users, just a few friends like I originally intended. Then the Reddit API stuff started going in full swing and suddenly people started wanting to join. This was a very exciting time for us as the site grew. It got to the point where my wife even had to help us with managing everything, since she was usually up when Burger and I were asleep. Everything was going rather well.
Then I got sick, I got so sick that I almost died twice, I lost half of my lunge and 2 of my ribs, and I was in and out of the hospital for almost a year. During this time, I could not participate in Burggit, and honestly, I was barely able to fund it. Though I eventually did come back, but it was never like how it was before I got sick.
My financial and physical resources decreased significantly as a result of my health, I can't manage or juggle as much as I could and I will probably forever have a slower paced life because of the events that transpired.
Then there's the Lemmy software. The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there's no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can't even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.
The other thing is there's no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.
Also the software is constantly breaking.
This site has become more of a burden for us, for me financially as I have been the sole person funding it (aside from like 2 or 3 individuals who donated a bit ago, thank you to those people.) It's just not worth our time anymore and it's not something I want to fund anymore. People seem to like this instance, so much so that it feels like the second it goes down we're made aware of it. But, aside from that we're on our own.
We're only federated with a few instances due to the way the threadiverse is, we've been literally locked into our own bubble and have been funding this project and been allocating time (sometimes a lot of time) into making it operational. We just don't have the ability to do that anymore, not unless something big changes, but I don't see that coming.
Now you might be wondering, "What about the Sharkey?" The Sharkey is easy to manage, is widely federated and is easy to manage storage and much cheaper to fund. It doesn't cause even a third of the hassle Lemmy does.
I'm very sorry to make this announcement. Both Burger and I were trying as much as we could to keep this up as long as possible, but it has officially reached a point where we just can't do it anymore.
This is very sad to see happen... I was trying to support you guys so hard, and managed to bring over many Reddit users. I wanted to motivate them, but they saw this platform was not really doing well, and I hoped that with enough help and users it could become better than Reddit.
But you're not gonna see me on the Sharkey....
Not only do i not like that the creators of the platform's donation page is not "To Sharkey"
but it's "To Transfem".
Which feels wrong, and shilling something that IMO should remain unrelated to moderating/controlling/financing a platform such as Sharkey.
On top of that, I saw you guys are welcoming MAPs, and your argument for people not needing to worry is that you will not defederate certain instances. Which is great and all, but they will defederate you.
But the real reason this is a problem to your users, is that Lolicons tend to not really like being among/compared to MAPs.
In my honest opinion, the only reason someone is a MAP publicly online, is to bait people into contacting them for it, it feels like a fucking trick to find people to exchange with. It's something I will never support.
And as a proud and oldhead Lolicon, I do not identify these people as one of us. No, never. They're not the same. Not only is their want not fictional, their want IS a risk, and the only difference between a MAP and the real thing, is what moment in time they are in, give it a couple years, they might have Digivolved into the real menace.
If you had picked a provider where I can trust in unbiased freedom and not have to deal with people who like REAL children, and thus also be accused of being one because I choose to be among them(no thanks), then maybe I'd have stuck around. But this is not it Disa and Burger. This is totally not it.
You guys are sadly not the cunny Valhalla that I hoped you to be.
Sharkey is a platform, just like Lemmy. Lemmy is a project ran by several communists (The official Lemmy instance will ban you if you say negative things about the CCP). Sharkey is the most fully featured Misskey fork. We chose it entirely due to that and separate from anything else. It does not mean we agree with their politics (because we don't)
We're not “welcoming” MAPs we just aren't excluding them. Burggit has always allowed MAPs to exist on the platform, this has never changed. We take a very similar stance (if not the exact same) on the Sharkey, we even explicitly do not allow anything supporting or endorsing actual child endangerment/abuse. It's stupid to exclude someone if they are following the rules of the platform. If they are managing to behave themselves and maybe subdue their urges through non-violent/non-harmful means, I sure don't have a problem with that.
The people who would defederate are going to do that anyway. My own separate instance, Shota.house has been defederated to hell and high water, despite only having a single digit active user count. There's not realy any instance I can think of which allows loli/shota. But would ban an instance outright for simply allowing MAPs to be on the site, provided said MAPs were behaving themselves and were not encouraging/endorsing any dangerous IRL activities. Anyone else would've likely defederate us, regardless of whether we allowed/disallowed MAPs.
Our stances have never changed. I'm sorry if you don't like it, you have no obligation to use any of it. Like Burger mentioned in the post before mine, we are entirely self funded. We run platforms we want to be on, and we run them in a way we'd like to see a platform be run, while also taking into account the needs of other users.