It reads like an instance by the name of MedMastodon went down with little to no notice.

Although this announcement seems to have been made on a Friendica instance that also isn’t cooperating - certainly not to anyone without a login on that specific instance, which I imagine will affect roughly 100.00000% of all people reading this (and high ironically - in the Alanis Morissette sense - roughly also 100.00000% of the people that do not read this:-).

To anyone on Lemmy and wondering, there are additional hashtags that render on PieFed but not Lemmy, though it doesn’t help here since this is the only place that hashtag has ever been used (that PieFed here shows).

Oh, and the instance actually does return an error page saying “This instance is under maintenance.”, so it’s remotely possible that this Friendica message is based on misinformation, and that the instance being “down” may be only temporary? (I have no idea)

Some additional info I could scrounge:

Article about Med-Mastodon, basically saying to use both the X and then treat that Mastodon as a way to hedge your bets against Twitter enshittifying.

Hrm, it looks like their GoFundMe may have just run out, having started on Nov. 15, 2022 and lasting for 3 years? (I have no idea if there were any follow-up ones)

And at this point I’ve already put far more work into this than OP, it would seem, trying to guess what they meant, so I’ll stop here.🙄

Things that used to be free: Google searches, YouTube, Android, Reddit - all have enshittified in different ways (e.g. Reddit is still free of direct monetary charge, but now restrictive rather than “free”).

AI is simply following this well-trodden path, or rather people are claiming that is what is happening.

Could there be a translation issue - like “mayhem” rather?

90% of the web is porn tho…

I mean, technically we are all traveling in time right now… forward, at a constant velocity (or at least it appears that way to us, locally in this part of our spacetime continuum).

These shoes just seemed to have a bit of a detour, before they finally arrived at this, their new destination:-).

Time travel 🧳 - it’s the only logical explanation!!

Just a quick note that PieFed allows you to easily block all users from a given instance, like a personal defederation with no need for admin powers. Your way also works, but you’d have to block thousands of users individually, plus new ones that sign up later.

While in contrast the option that looks like it would work easily, the “instance block”, in fact is strongly misleading - still allowing those users to vote on your content, reply to you, submit posts in other communities, DM you, triggering notifications, etc. Essentially it does not “block” the “instance” at all, only muting communities hosted on them.

Only if Lemmy was the only Reddit alternative. As so many people are saying though, it’s not.

e.g. PieFed not only exists but it has surpassed Lemmy in most ways in terms of feature development. And it continues to add new features at an astonishing pace.

There is no hope for “Lemmy” reaching the mainstream in my mind, but with PieFed leading the way, and Mbin also exists (that sounds mean so I’ll clarify: it has <1k users worldwide iirc), and yes a fork of Lemmy could be created if necessary, there is hope for the Threadiverse (federated threaded-based conversational platforms) overall.

Try out PieFed, even just the sign up wizard will leave you amazed. Donate to both its development and the operation costs of the instance that you choose (PieFed.social, PieFed.zip, several others to choose from).

There is a simple solution: Musk will simply purchase the USA and use that military arsenal as a deterrent.

(/s… maybe)

Oooh, this surely must be a sign of good things to come.

Supporting Lemmy won’t do much to help the Threadiverse thrive imho. Instead I suggest supporting PieFed, for many uh… reasons. One being that it is written in Python (which many developers are already familiar with, rather than the extremely niche Rust that even experienced C++ coders are loathe to have to learn) and thus has a ton of features already that Lemmy lacks (see https://join.piefed.social/features/), plus it’s only continuing to add still yet more, on a monthly basis even.

By comparison, Lemmy requests sit for literally years and years, while a lot of the donations, rather than going to support further code development, instead goes to support the, let’s just say “highly controversial” instance lemmy.ml.

Lemmy won’t “die”, but it’s never going to hit mainstream. Visit r/RedditAlternatives in any given post to find out why (hint: tankies, which Westerners do not like, probably bc tankie instances are full of content calling for the literal murder of Westerners as well as the actual fall of those civilizations - for some reason though these anti-Western sentiments seems to drive people who live there away? Go figure!🤪🙃).

PieFed on the other hand might just have a chance, and the dev team is super friendly and highly responsive. At least check it out.

Also, post content! More than most other things you could do, that would help a lot.

This ignores how money donated supposedly to support development of the Lemmy codebase goes instead towards moderation of their personal instance. Unless you want to donate to Nutomic specifically (which has other issues), there is no way to donate specifically to develop Lemmy code.

So ironically the answer to your question lies in the lines that are lacking, but that would have been there otherwise.

Bottom line is that it’s their code and they can do as they please. Meanwhile, I switched to PieFed. I wish you good luck with that extremely slow-paced development of Lemmy, but I am not putting any hope into it myself anymore.

Keeps billionaires wealthy (+ promises that some will trickle downwards)

Dang it, now that you gave them the idea, they seem to have already done it, retroactively. I hope you are happy /s (😭).

Well, there’s nothing we can do.

How about paying a living wage for human writers who actually give a damn about the integrity of the end product?

Like I said, there is nothing whatsoever that we could possibly do about this…

Might be a Rihanna fan.

Wcgw?

I think there’s a way to make that happen. Sorry I don’t use apps, I just played around with it in the past, but I recall not liking it until someone told me how to make the images larger - buried VERY deep in the customizations somewhere - and then afterwards it became my favorite app (except I don’t actually use apps, but IF I did, it would be Voyager. Or Thunder. And with full sized images that don’t cut parts out.)

Ah yes. Lemmy really was not designed to appeal to end-users so much as self-hosters who want to spin up their own instances.

Then the Rexodus came, and of course people want what they want, but the entire design philosophy only makes sense when you see it in that light. Westerners primarily still only want a “Reddit replacement”, except somehow without spez at the helm, whereas Lemmy is actually pushing for something entirely different: decentralization.

At which point instances going poof is a feature not a flaw in that model. Though images disappearing could be worked on to better serve a variety of needs - e.g. posters could set a flag that their image is higher priority - and perhaps mods and definitely admins could then modify that - which could affect the automated longer term storage handling.

But Lemmy still isn’t finished yet, despite how many years have gone by, and due to how slow it is to change (driven in large part by it being written in the highly complex and niche Rust language, but several other factors exist as well including funding, which interrelates with the whole tankie issue, etc.) now many people are giving up on it and pinning hopes instead on PieFed to drive changes to the Threadiverse (it being written in Python and with a highly productive and passionate team of volunteer developers who aren’t asking for money before making such things happen).

So I expect things to change in this regard, but in all likelihood in PieFed but whether Lemmy itself ever decides (or is able) to catch up with it I cannot guess. Maybe eventually, one day, in another few years.

And entire instances can vanish

But when they do, their entire repository of posts has already been copied to every other instance across the entire Threadiverse.

e.g. here is DMV.social’s goodbye message, hosted on beehaw.