Hi folks!

Over the past few months, we have started seeing a significant amount of new user sign-ups. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new members, and to share some useful resources and info about lemm.ee.

First, some stats

Here is a bar chart of daily new users (this is only counting users which have been approved by our admins):

As you can see from the chart, for most of 2024, we were accepting roughly around 10-20 new users every day. Then, from the start of this year, the daily numbers have been constantly growing. Yesterday, we approved a massive 609 new users on lemm.ee.

The increase in sign-ups is significant enough that I have been taking several steps to improve our monitoring & anti-bot measures, but so far, it seems the vast majority of the new users are completely legitimate real humans! (Thank you all for not being bots 😅)

About lemm.ee

This Lemmy instance is turning 2 years old very soon. It was initially created around the time of the Reddit API changes, when existing Lemmy servers were getting overloaded with new users - lemm.ee was intended to help spread the load. We're now the second largest Lemmy server when it comes to monthly active users.

Our core philosophy for this instance has always been to treat it as a generic gateway to the Lemmy network. I want to provide our users a stable and reliable home for their Lemmy account, so that they can have easy access to all of their communities, regardless of what instance the community is actually hosted on.

We run on some decently beefy hardware, and our setup is fairly customized in several ways in order to ensure a smooth experience for our users (most of the time, this has worked out quite well!). Our servers are currently hosted in Finland.

Our infrastructure has been funded by the community almost from the start through GitHub sponsorships and Ko-Fi donations. I am sure I speak on behalf all of our users when I say that I am extremely grateful to all supporters - you are really responsible for the continued existence of this instance!

Lemmy itself is open source software, and while it has improved massively during the time I have been using it, it definitely still has some rough edges. Please be patient when using Lemmy, and remember that it is being built collaboratively by humans (not corporations), without any intent of ever turning it into a business.

Useful resources

• If you're confused about anything, feel free to check out our F.A.Q.
• We have an instance policy for administration, moderation, and federation - feel free to check it out if you want to understand how admins and mods are expected to act on lemm.ee
• For staying up to date with instance news, feel free to subscribe to [email protected]
• If you ever can't reach lemm.ee, please check our status page at https://status.lemm.ee/ - I communicate updates on that page when dealing with any unplanned problems.
• You can always find these resources (and some more useful info) in the sidebar of our front page (https://lemm.ee/)!

Don't forget to participate!

Communities on Lemmy only work if people actively use them. Even upvoting/downvoting based on quality of content is a great start, but I would really like to encourage you all to comment and even write posts, because that's really the best way to build communities.

If you have any questions or thoughts about lemm.ee or Lemmy in general, feel free to post a comment below this post, and myself or one of our veteran users will definitely respond.

I hope you enjoy your time on lemm.ee, and I wish you all a great week!

Hello everyone! Ella here,

I’d like to preface this post by thanking each and every one of our users for being here with us. Over the past year, lemm.ee has seen slow but very steady user growth. Our goal of being a general purpose, accessible instance for anyone wanting to use the fediverse the way they see fit, has largely been achieved to date.

However with that success comes an increase in administrative burden. This is reflected primarily in delays approving applications, delays in responding to requests on our support forum, and slow response to some reports.

In an effort to combat this, we are looking to bring on two new admins, whose primary duties will consist of reviewing incoming applications and reports.

Note we will be making decisions on this gradually, with input from the entire existing admin team.

Please be aware that being an admin is unfortunately quite a thankless job - if you’re doing your job well, then most people won’t even realize you’re doing anything. OTOH, if you make mistakes, there will likely be many users calling you out in public. The main motivation for joining the admin team would need to be a desire to help build and maintain this instance as a great home for yourself and others.

If there is anybody who would be interested in helping out even despite the above disclaimer, please DM me with the following info:

• On a typical day, during what hours are you active on lemm.ee (with timezone info)
• Do you have any previous experience with moderation/administration
• Are you in agreement with the current state of the lemm.ee administration policy.

Hey folks!

For anybody stumbling on this post from outside lemm.ee: I am the head admin of lemm.ee, a general purpose Lemmy instance, which recently turned 1 year old. I am writing this post to elaborate on how we approach defederation on lemm.ee.

Anybody who has been on Lemmy for a while has most likely seen several public defederation drama posts (most recently regarding lemmy.ml, but there have been many many others previously). As an admin, I have probably seen far more than what is visible publicly, as I regularly receive private messages on the topic, ranging from polite questions about federation, to outright demands that I immediately defederate, and even to threats and personal attacks over the fact that I have not defederated some particular instance. It is definitely a topic that will keep coming up for as long as Lemmy exists, which is why I feel it would be useful to condense my current thoughts about it in a single place.

Note that while I strongly believe everything this post contains, it is definitely a subjective topic, and there is no single right answer here. Other instances have completely different approaches to federation compared to lemm.ee, and that’s of course totally fine. The beauty of Lemmy is that everybody can choose their home instance, and in fact, everybody is free to spin up their own instance and run it however they feel is best. For an absurd example, if you want to create an instance which defederates any instance with an “L” in their name, then nobody can stop you!

Quick intro to the lemm.ee federation policy

Very shortly after creating lemm.ee, I wrote down a federation policy, which basically boils down to “we treat defederation as an absolute last resort, and we do not use it as a generic way to curate content for lemm.ee users”. This policy can always be found in the sidebar of the lemm.ee front page.

In practice, this has meant that we have had extremely few defederations, and that we mostly solve problems with other means. I am very happy with the results, as it means that lemm.ee has become a great entry point into the Lemmy network, with very few artifical limitations on who our users are allowed to interact with.

The benefits of federation

I hope that this part of the post is very uncontroversial, but I firmly believe that federation is the absolute strongest feature of Lemmy. While we all know that the concept of federation can cause confusion for new users, this is usually overcome extremely quickly (for example, using the common e-mail providers analogy to explain Lemmy instances). To me, it’s completely clear that the benefits of federation far outweigh the downsides.

For example, by splitting the Lemmy network between thousands of independent nodes, we ensure that:

1. Any single entity is not a single point of failure for the whole network. Even if the biggest instance goes down tomorrow, their content will still be accessible through all the other federated instances.
2. The maximum impact of admins is limited to their own instance. As a lemm.ee admin, I can ban a remote user from posting on lemm.ee, but I can’t completely ban them from the entire network.
3. Private user data (such as ip addresses, e-mails, etc) are never shared between instances. No single malicious instance can harvest user data for the entire network, and extremely privacy sensitive users can always spin up their own instance if they don’t want to put their trust in any existing admins.

One thing which is probably important to note here is that I tend to view Lemmy instances as infrastructure, rather than as communities. I know that there are alternative approaches, as quite a few large instances are in fact run as mega-communities, but that’s not the approach I take with lemm.ee, because I feel like such an approach encourages centralization and negates some of the benefits of federation (if all communities related to one topic condense on a single instance, then that instance does effectively become a single point of failure for a large number of users).

In general, I feel like it should be a goal to encourage and cultivate decentralizing the network through federation as much as is practical, in order to maximize the above benefits.

The downsides of dedeferation

Conversely, defederation has a lot of downsides.

1. It obviously negates all the benefits of federation mentioned above. Every time two instances defederate, the Lemmy network becomes less redundant, some communities become a bit more centralized, and the danger of malicious admins for those communities becomes much greater.
2. There is a lot of collateral damage. The most common reason I have personally seen for defederation demands is related to moderation of either a single user, or a handful of users. For example, a lemm.ee user gets into some heated arguments with people from an instance with hundreds of active users, and then links this heated thread to me as proof that the instance should be immediately defederated. However, in this situation, there are hundreds of other users who were not even involved (or even aware of) the thread in question. By defederating, I would be making a decision to cut off every single lemm.ee user from every single one of those hundreds of innocent remote users.
3. Ironically, defederation actually makes moderation more difficult. It was recently pointed out to me by a user on another instance that they are afraid they can’t effectively moderate communities on lemm.ee, because their instance has defederated several other instances, which means they would not be able to see posts from those instances on lemm.ee communities.
4. It is extremely easy for malicious actors to abuse. In the year I’ve been on Lemmy, I have already seen two separate cases of users creating accounts on another instance and posting garbage, and then going back to their home instance and demanding their admins defederate over the content they themselves created. Basically, if an instance is known to use defederation as a tool to punish misbehaving users on other instances, then it’s actually quite easy for users to manipulate the situation to a place where admins have no alternative except to defederate.

It seems to me that a lot of users don’t think of such downsides when demanding defederation, or they just don’t consider them as important enough. In my opinion, these are all significant issues. I do not want to end up in a fragmented Lemmy network, where users are required to have accounts on 5 different instances in order to be able to access all their communities.

What’s the alternative to defederation? Should Lemmy become some kind of unmoderated free speech abolutism platform?

I want to be very clear that I do NOT believe in unmoderated social networks. Communities should always be free to set and enforce rules which foster healthy discussions. On top of that, instances should always be free to set and enforce rules for all of their users and communities.

In the case of lemm.ee, we have some instance-wide rules, and we will enforce them on all lemm.ee users, as well as all remote users participating in communities hosted on lemm.ee. For example, we never want to offer a platform for bigotry, so we regularly issue permanent bans for users who want to abuse lemm.ee to spread such hate. In practice, site bans have been extremely effective at getting rid of awful users, whether they are remote or local.

On top of site bans, Lemmy admins also have the option of removing entire remote communities. There are certainly cases where a community might be allowed on instance A, but not instance B - rather than defederating (and potentially cutting off a lot of innocent unrelated users), instance A can just “defederate” a single community.

Finally, a lot of issues can be solved through simple communication between instance admins. Often having a discussion with another admin results in pretty clear alignment over whether some user is problematic, and the user will end up being banned on their home instance.

Being one of the most openly federated large instances with such an approach, we have discovered several things:

1. If we were to defederate over every rule breaking user or community on the Lemmy network, we would not be federated with any of the large instances at this point
2. In the vast majority of cases, remote users who have broken lemm.ee rules have ended up banned on their home instance anyway - there is very little additional moderation workload for our admins from being widely federated
3. If a user truly wants to spread some kind of hate, defederation wouldn’t stop them anyway, as they will just create accounts on any instance which they want to “attack”

The longer I run lemm.ee, the more sure I become that in the vast majority of cases of abusive users, the best approach is to simply hand out site bans.

When is defederation the only option?

Having said all of the above, I still believe that there a few cases when defederation is the best option:

1. When an instance is abusing the Lemmy network - generating spam, advertising, illegal content, etc - either deliberately, or through inactive admins (this has been the most common reason for lemm.ee to defederate any instance in the past)
2. When an instance is just causing too much moderation workload. So far, we haven’t experienced this yet on lemm.ee, but I can’t rule out that it could happen in the future.

Conclusion

I hope this post helps clarify my stance on defederation. Like I said in the beginning, I realize a lot of this is subjective, and there are no right or wrong answers - this is just the way we have been (and will be) doing things on lemm.ee. I intend to save this post and link it in the future when people bring up defederation requests. If you feel like I didn’t address something important, please feel free to raise it in the comments!