Title. I'm honestly hoping that I can eventually sunset this instance if everyone enjoys it more. I genuinely enjoy using it.
There's more variety of content there from a vast sea of instances versus here where it's only a few cliquey instances controlling who gets to have a voice on the Lemmyverse. This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can't tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there's no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with. The software is downright frustrating to work with, and It feels less rewarding overall putting effort into this instance because it feels like we're so isolated. I'm going to be honest, when I put this instance back up, I felt a sense of dread when doing so.
Federation is pretty much broken from Lemmy to Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma and their respective forks. So all we can get is this watered down content from the Lemmyverse from the few instances that still haven't figured out our existence, as well as the ensuing defederation that will surely follow once they've found out about us.
So I'd like to get your guys' opinion on this. Which software do you prefer? Sharkey or Lemmy?
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