Lemm.ee was already a decentralization factor from LW, but it was still tiny in terms of communities compared to LW. Moving all of the Lemm.ee communities to Piefed.social (not that it's the case anyway, I've seen communities moving elsewhere) would keep the status quo that we were all living with.
Of course ideally over time more Piefed instances emerge, and we can spread a bit more. Also, thanks to the Piefed migration feature, we'll be able to move communities much smoother (even including subscribers).
Yes. We were still waiting for the API (allowing app support) to come out of beta, and coincidentally it happened the same night Lemm.ee announced their shutdown.
So now quite a few Lemm.ee communities are considering moving to Piefed.
history is (repeatedly) showing it to you that these bets are not good.
History shows you every day that people prefer to post on other instances than yours.
https://lemm.ee/c/football@lemm.ee has 4 regular posters (Rose, Sabrewake, Ulrik and I). I'm not forcing them to post there, they decide it by themselves.
Niche topics were always going to be dependent on numbers.
I'm the single contributor to !lego@lemm.ee , one of the most popular toys on the planet. And I didn't expect another regular poster to appear before we reached 60k monthly active users.
"Build it, and they will come" isn't really true nowadays. We're competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.
Less communities on their instances means less traffic, less activities, less moderation reports (they would have to deal only with users on their own instances)
Those users are the same as in our universe for lemm.ee as a user instance. They stir the same dramas, create the same number of alts, violate rules in a similar way.
if even then they are overloaded with work, they could decide to scale down the operation before reaching burning-out point: close the instance for new registrations, make user registration conditional on payment/donation, etc.
That was available to the lemm.ee admins in our scenario as well. They preferred to shut the instance down rather than reduce.
A shame the communities will be lost in the transition, the movies/television communities are genuinely cursed. This is the 4th or 5th time people moved that community.
Posted a meta poll on !movies@lemm.ee, same for !television@lemm.ee