cross-posted from: https://walledgarden.xyz/post/2295733
Hello again All,
I’d like to get everyone up to speed on what’s been going on with walledgarden.xyz and where it’s going in the near future. I’ll keep this as brief as I can but there’s a lot to cover. TLDR at the bottom.
First and most important- As of March 1st 2025 WG will effectively shut down. Local communities will be locked but the instance will stay open for at least all of March so that local users have time to migrate their accounts.
- Why? What does this mean? WG was initially set up as a private instance to learn about and experiment with Lemmy. With that mindset a lot of things were tested on the live instance before we started hosting communities and users. A new instance or test environment should've been put in place back then, but it wasn't. That's on me and I apologize. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to reverse while the instance is available to the public and are causing stability problems for the users and communities we host. This isn't the experience we want to offer. The difficult decision was made to shutter this instance and start fresh on a new one. We decided that it would be better to offer people a new alternative that doesn't suffer from the same problems we have on WG before the communities or user numbers grow any larger. WG will eventually become the test environment for the new instance.
- What happens to the users and communities you host? The local users are who will suffer the most from this and for that I am genuinely sorry. Local users will have until at least the end of March to migrate before any kind of reset is done. This should offer plenty of time to get your new accounts setup. If anyone is having trouble shoot me a DM and I'll do whatever I can to help out. Our current users are welcome to join us on the new instance- https://crazypeople.online/. The last few days have been spent launching and populating that instance with new versions of the communities you’re used to seeing around WG. Here’s a list of our local communities and their new homes:
- Garden Grooves is now The Eternal Playlist: https://crazypeople.online/c/eternalplaylist !eternalplaylist@crazypeople.online
- weedtime has moved here: https://crazypeople.online/c/weedtime !weedtime@crazypeople.online
- Low Effort Memes has moved here: https://crazypeople.online/c/loweffortmemes !loweffortmemes@crazypeople.online
- Pokemon TCGM has moved here: https://crazypeople.online/c/pokemonTCGM !pokemonTCGM@crazypeople.online
- Community Corkboard is now CPO Announcements: https://crazypeople.online/c/cpo_announcements !cpo_announcements@crazypeople.online
- Auto Racing has moved here: https://crazypeople.online/c/autoracing !autoracing@crazypeople.online
I encourage those of you who previously participated in our communities to join us again at our new home.
One final thing to note is that crazypeople.online will not be federated with lemmy.world until after they complete their upgrade. That could be any day now unless they push the date back. The older version of Lemmy they run can cause problems for smaller instances that I’d like to avoid on the new one. This decision isn’t meant to be political or controversial and is based strictly on performance goals.
TLDR
- WG is becoming a test instance.
- Users have until at least March 31st 2025 to migrate.
- Replacements for our communities have already been set up at https://crazypeople.online/.
- crazypeople.online will be our public facing instance going forward, open to old WG members and anyone else who needs a place to call home.
- crazypeople.online won’t be federated with lemmy.world until their planned update.
- Don’t test in production.
FWIW this approach can be helpful but is flawed in its own ways.
Firstly, since not all instances participate you still aren't getting the "complete" fediverse so to speak. This becomes less of an issue as more instances join the bot program, but it's another step that roadblocks what should be an easy and organic process.
Secondly, the bot can pose a potential security risk depending on how it's configured. If you use it to federate in both directions you're subject to malicious actors spinning up tons of new communities on instances that don't restrict user registration. This will in turn hammer the database an instance uses for EVERYTHING and eventually causes slow downs, crashes, etc. The solution to this is to only seed your communities outwardly but if everyone only does that the bot is rather useless...
I don't have a solution for any of this, I'm just pointing out some rather frustrating problems this platform has in its current state.