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.
Was anticipating the New Years Eve thread, but as I don’t see it I’ll leave a little message here. Farewell Yiffit, it’s been a pleasure. While it sucks to lose a furry instance, I thank you for the time you gave for the cause of both community and software freedom. Self hosting something like this is often a demanding and thankless task, and because of your efforts, many critters had a home here. When dealing with many small, independent nodes, things don’t usually last forever. The great thing about those many nodes though is we’re still here, and I know I’ve seen some residents already make their next stop to our little node at pawb.social! Pawb isn’t my first instance, and I’m sure it won’t be my last if I use Lemmy for long enough, but I can’t thank all of you enough for what you selflessly bring to the table every day that you keep doing it.
Every server host, every comment, every piece of artwork, we’re all in this together to make our communities a little better. To make things feel a little more like home. Sometimes we run out of steam—and that’s okay—we still made memories along the way.