End of the road. Wish I could say it's been a fun trip, but that would be a lie. Running this instance started out as a fun project, but it has been nothing but a nightmare for a long, long time. I'm looking forward to the freedom I will have after being shackled to this mess for the last two years.

This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.

If you want exports of anything, let me know. After that, I'm pulling the SSDs and going full Office Space on them.

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Edit 07/12/25: Thank you all for the kind words, understanding, and appreciation. While I have been consumed by the negativity here, I never forgot about the positives. Unfortunately, the negatives can and do become overwhelming.

If you appreciate what I've been trying to do, then please do not let the efforts die with my departure. The toxicity I've described cannot be solved by any individual alone and requires a group effort.

• Don't engage with those acting in bad faith or just trying to get a rise out of people. This is basically "don't feed the trolls" but sometimes the trolls are subtle.
• Don't let emotion cloud your logic and try to remain rational. Always try to see the bigger picture and keep that in focus. Context matters. Ramifications of actions matter.
• When you see people calling for violence, ask yourself "And then what happens?" Because it's most definitely not going to be "we all join hands in a circle, a rainbow appears overhead, and the world is saved".
• On the same note, a large percentage of those calling for violence don't even live here. They're just trying to rile people up or spread chaos by feeding on our pent-up anger.
• There are very few absolutes in this world, but people around here love to speak in them. If someone only speaks in absolutes, then they're missing most of the picture which is in the middle. Beware of those people.
• If you see someone twisting what other people are saying just so they can attack them, please report them. This is a common form of trolling/harassment which is often difficult for mods to detect without personally investing themselves in every conversation thread. This often manifests as "Oh, so you think X, so you must think Y" where Y = an absolutely insane jump in logic. Then they attack the person as if they had said Y with other people dog-piling on afterward.
• Admins: Please, please start clamping down on extremism and general toxicity. No psychopath, racist, etc has ever come back from a temp ban a better person. Force these unhinged people back to the fringe instances and defederate from those.
• Most importantly: be good to one another. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we differ.

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Original plea below, though it's superseded by the above.

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I'm gonna get right to the point: I'm burnt out, I kind of hate this place, and I really don't want to be here anymore.

I started it not because I kept getting banned from elsewhere but because I wanted to do and be part of something better. Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it's not "corpo social media" that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.

The average Lemming has the nuance of a wrecking ball and the maturity of a junior high edge lord, and trying to keep the peace here has become more than what I want to deal with. The worst part is that they're so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can't see they're just as bad or worse than what they're spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with "bootlicker", wild accusations, and/or worse.

I need help. Well, really, Lemmy needs help, professional help, but barring that, then I need some more referees to keep this place under control.

This instance has a mission, and I am no longer able to deal with the volume of toxic shitheads who do nothing but call for violence, take people out of context and jump to insane conclusions, and just act like petulant fucking children. Seriously, the demographic here is disgusting and needs to grow the hell up.

So this is it: Either some people step up and help to keep this place sane, or I'm shutting it down. Clock is ticking