What Lemm.ee’s shutdown means (and doesn’t) for the Fediverse
A Lemmy instance closed on 30 June 2025. Some people are panicked. Is it really a big deal? On 3rd June 2025, the Lemm.ee team announced they were shutting down the instance, and yesterday, the website went dark. Some people seem to be a bit alarmist about this shutdown. I think it’s a completely normal part of the Fediverse. Let’s dive in. tl;dr: It’s not that big of a deal that an instance went offline. It’s a natural part of the ecosystem. Fediverse. It’s the name given to a collection of platforms that are able to interoperate between one another without actually being affiliated. What does that mean in English? Imagine if you could “follow” a subreddit from Twitter. Imagine if you could follow your favourite quotes publisher on Tumblr from Instagram. Or maybe you’d rather follow a high-school friend on Flickr from your MySpace? Okay, that last one is a bit far-fetched, but the principle remains. Or almost. There’s a few platforms in the Fediverse that use ActivityPub, a protocol that allows different platforms to communicate between each other. There’s for example Lemmy, Mastodon, Vernissage, and many, many others. Lemmy is closest to Reddit, whereas Mastodon is closer to Twitter. Vernissage is a cross between Flickr and Instagram. I’ve never tried either Friendica or Diaspora, but I hear they’re closer to Facebook (which I’ve also never used). The concept of federation might sound bizarre to most people, until they realise it is exactly like email. For example, you can create an email account with Hotmail or Gmail or Fastmail, and you can then send and receive email from every corner of the internet (for better or for worse). You don’t need to have an account with Hotmail to exchange emails with other Hotmailers. The same concept applies for Fediverse platforms. Say you want to join Mastodon, and toot at the world. Which instance do you choose? Well, there’s a bunch to pick from. You can pick an instance that has a focus on security, or maybe you just want one that is more focused on writing and poetry. You can explore all the Masto servers here. But maybe you want to pick an instance that has specific rules. Maybe you want a moderation that actively removes Nazi bullshit, or maybe you want an instance that doesn’t moderate anything (don’t—you’re going to have a really bad time). The main point is that choosing an instance isn’t that big of a deal for most people. Just like when you created your first email inbox, you probably created that now-cringeworthy address with the same provider as the person who was helping you setting up said email address. But here’s a bonus feature: many platforms allow you to easily migrate your account to a new instance. For example, I was able to migrate my account from Pixelfed to Vernissage, and my followers (all 6 of them or something) came with me, and didn’t lose me as the amazing content producer I am. And that’s not even the same platform! Well, some people seem to think so. Lemm.ee was the second largest Lemmy instance, by user count. Sadly FediDB doesn’t show any data about it anymore, probably because it can’t be scraped anymore, but that appears to put it in the 5-10k monthly active users scale. But, I disagree with people who seem to think this is a doomsday moment for Lemmy or the Fediverse. Instances going up and down is exactly the point of the Fediverse. That’s why they are federated in the first place! While I won’t go as far as to cheer for lemm.ee’s disappearance, this underlines the importance of federation. For example, you can still browse a Lemmy Community (think subreddit) about sous-vide cooking, and read posts from over two years ago. While the source server is gone, the content isn’t. I’m not going to pretend the data is safe—it will disappear eventually. But, it’s not like we lost everything that was produced in that community overnight, even with the server going offline. I’m not very active on Lemmy; I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Mastodon instead. And the shut down came in quite an unexpected and sudden way (at least for bystanders). Reading their post, I fully understand why they decided to shutter the service. The amount of abuse and spam that the admins have to wade through so that the rest of us can enjoy things in peace must be stupendous. I couldn’t be more grateful to the admins of lemm.ee, and those of every other fedi server. Thank you.Fedi-what?
What’s an instance?
Is it bad that lemm.ee shut down?
Parting words