Hello everyone,

I’m sad to announce that I’ve come to the decision that it would be best to archive this instance given the overhead in administration and moderation that would be required to run it correctly.

Please note that this announcement ONLY impacts yiffit.net and that I have no intention of terminating packmates.org at all.

There is several reasons for this decision but most of them are based on my inability to run the instance with the quality and care that I envisioned. Due to the nature of Lemmy, the necessary moderation effort, media storage costs and admin effort are considerably higher than for a Mastodon instance, for example. It’s not a matter of donations, which many of you have generously offered over the lifespan of the instance.

What is meant by termination and archival?

Some time after January 3rd 2025, fulfilling my promise of giving at least 3 months notice, the following will happen:

  • Yiffit will stop federating, all user sessions will be revoked and logins will be disabled.
  • The site will effectively become a read-only version, giving access only to local communities. NSFW communities will be accessible publicly without need for an account although equipped with an age disclaimer and anything else necessary to display adult content.
  • Remote communities and posts will no longer be accessible, thus remote instances need not worry that we would somehow cache any content which they would have wanted deleted if federation had been enabled.
  • Local comments and posts from remote users will be preserved.
  • There will be a way to receive and process personal account / data deletion requests for yiffit.net users or remote users who have submitted a comment or post.
  • I will attempt to find a way to have the site officially archived in the Internet Archive or in any similar way.
  • I will continue paying for the domain and hosting for an indeterminate period of time, especially since the storage costs of local content as opposed to remote content are negligible.

Technically there is a chance that we could come back at some point since I’ll make sure to save the server’s federation authentication keys as well as all local content, but I don’t want users to count on it.

If we were to come back it would probably be in a form other than a Lemmy instance or anything else that I currently am aware exists out there.

If you want to post a farewell message, please feel free to send a comment below since everything will be archived and visible. Before archiving the instance, around New Year’s Eve I’ll create the final farewell message thread. Both this thread and the final farewell message thread will be pinned in the home page when the site is archived.

Thank you everyone for everything. I’m incredibly humbled by all the interest and users we’ve received over time and especially all the regular users who’ve kept posting constantly despite the downturn in activity.

  • Eccitaze@yiffit.netEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    y’know what, I was gonna do this quietly, but I’m drunk, and so this feels like a time to make bad decisions:

    When Yiffit closes at the end of this year, it’s probably going to be the end of my time on Lemmy. The reasons are varied (it’s mostly the tankies) but fundamentally, it boils down to the simple fact that I’ve realized that I come here not to enjoy myself or relax, but because I want to be angry at something. And boy howdy, does Lemmy give me something to be angry about (the tankies).

    I’m gonna level with the rest of this platform. As it stands right now, this platform consists of the following:

    • ~60-70%: Reposts of whatever meme is in the vicinity of the front page of /r/all on Reddit

    • 15-20%: Politics (including some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen on the Internet) and memes about the awful takes

    • 9-14%: Memes about Linux

    • ~1%: Actual original content that interests me

    So with all that, why would I stick around here? If the shit I see here is mostly crap reposts from Reddit and shit that I either don’t care about or actively dislike, why don’t I just… go to Reddit and browse read-only without an account, like I’ve found myself increasingly doing over the past 6 months or so?

    And as for actually interacting with this place, fundamentally, most of my engagement with a platform comes from the comments. And holy fuck are the comments here absolutely fucking awful. It puts me in a mindset where when I go to this website, I’m mentally preparing myself for a session of “upvote the sane takes, downvote the unhinged bullshit, and debate whether it’s worth replying to the particularly unhinged takes and getting into an internet slapfight (hint: the answer is usually no).” And that’s fine to do for a while, but…

    I’m tired, boss.

    I’m tired of being angry and scared all the fucking time. I’m tired of arguing and exposing myself to the kind of toxic shit that you would normally hear from the angry drunk on the corner who hasn’t showered off the vomit from his last hangover, and you could safely ignore. And for a place that is supposedly mostly populated by leftists (y’know, the groups you would expect to be relatively accepting of minorities and adopt a “live and let live” mindset), holy FUCK I have seen more hate for furries in the ~16 months of using Lemmy than I did in a decade of using Reddit.

    And that’s the other problem with this place–the moderation absolutely fucking sucks. On the one hand, you’ve got literal stalinist admins running Those Instances (.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear, etc.) issuing instance-wide bans for the mildest of lukewarm “maybe harm reduction is good actually” takes, and on the other hand you have mods and admins on the not-fucking-nutso instances so traumatized by Reddit moderation that they’re wringing their hands over “well we don’t want to have the appearance of impropriety and power abuse” while literal, 90s-style BBS trolls run rampant, flooding the platform with shit and making the comments even more toxic than they already are.

    Coming from someone who is has a few years of moderation experience, here’s a dirty little secret of moderation: You cannot have an absolute, 100% objective standard. The instant you shackle yourself to the standard of objectivity, you open the door for trolls and bad-faith actors to push their discourse up to the very edge of the rules, testing the boundaries, reveling in the game of “how much can I shit all over your community while staying within the rules?” You HAVE to leave yourself at least some wriggle room to ban someone because they’re a shithead without a 5-page essay justifying why, or you’ll find yourself powerless against the inevitable onslaught of galactic martial artists. You should absolutely have methods to appeal and review moderator actions, and I do support transparency whenever possible, but moderation is fundamentally walking a tightrope of very unpleasant judgment calls that will inevitably piss off someone (if nobody else, the person who you banned and the people who want to see your community burn for their amusement).

    Similarly, I think I’m going to wind down my presence on Mastodon for similar reasons. In my time there, I’ve been exposed to some of the pettiest, Mean Girls-esque, high school bullshit drama I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve seen friends scramble to find new instances because some rando neither of us heard of mouthed off to the wrong asshole and got their instance put on a blocklist, I’ve seen groups of people that normally I would love to chill with, swap stories over beers, and generally get to know accuse one another of being racist and/or transphobic, with an astounding lack of grace, forgiveness, and willingness to understand one another’s perspective and actually fucking listen to people. Similarly to my experience with Lemmy, it’s mildly amusing to read up on the latest drama, but one can only spill the tea for so long before they get tired of cleaning up the mess and actually want to drink the goddamn tea.

    I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I think I’m generally done with the Fediverse. Say what you will about corporate, centralized social media–and holy FUCK is there a LOT to complain about–but at least their moderation is less susceptible to the kind of bullshit I’ve talked about here, so maybe I’ll make an account on Bluesky–it seems to have reached a critical mass of furries so maybe I’ll be able to find a home there, at least for a good few years.

    So yeah. I might get downvoted to hell for this, but I don’t really fucking care at this point. It’s all gonna be gone in a few months, and so will I.