This post is going to be a long one, to spare you some reading I'll do a TL;DR, but I really would appreciate you reading the whole thing.
TL;DR: Burggit (The Lemmy Instance) will be shutting down July 14th 2024. Due to lack of funding, grievances with the Lemmy software and lack of resources, energy and interest on our part. We'll be giving one month for everyone to move their local posts somewhere else and download their images. shota.nu will not be shutting down, so images/video hosted there will be fine, but they will not be viewable on the Lemmy Burggit since we'll be shutting the webpage down after July 14th 2024.
Now for the whole post.
Back when we started Burggit I was in great health, I was managing multiple sites at a time and constantly adding things to my plate, which were managable while I was in that state. Burggit was an excited project that I asked Burger to set up, because I didn't (and still don't) have the knowledge to maintain. At worst, I thought it could be a fun little place for us and a few friends to mess around and kinda use as a link archive. I even offered to pay for it, since burger is in a difficult financial situation.
Things went well shortly after it was up, we didn't have hardly any users, just a few friends like I originally intended. Then the Reddit API stuff started going in full swing and suddenly people started wanting to join. This was a very exciting time for us as the site grew. It got to the point where my wife even had to help us with managing everything, since she was usually up when Burger and I were asleep. Everything was going rather well.
Then I got sick, I got so sick that I almost died twice, I lost half of my lunge and 2 of my ribs, and I was in and out of the hospital for almost a year. During this time, I could not participate in Burggit, and honestly, I was barely able to fund it. Though I eventually did come back, but it was never like how it was before I got sick.
My financial and physical resources decreased significantly as a result of my health, I can't manage or juggle as much as I could and I will probably forever have a slower paced life because of the events that transpired.
Then there's the Lemmy software. The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there's no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can't even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.
The other thing is there's no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.
Also the software is constantly breaking.
This site has become more of a burden for us, for me financially as I have been the sole person funding it (aside from like 2 or 3 individuals who donated a bit ago, thank you to those people.) It's just not worth our time anymore and it's not something I want to fund anymore. People seem to like this instance, so much so that it feels like the second it goes down we're made aware of it. But, aside from that we're on our own. We're only federated with a few instances due to the way the threadiverse is, we've been literally locked into our own bubble and have been funding this project and been allocating time (sometimes a lot of time) into making it operational. We just don't have the ability to do that anymore, not unless something big changes, but I don't see that coming.
Now you might be wondering, "What about the Sharkey?" The Sharkey is easy to manage, is widely federated and is easy to manage storage and much cheaper to fund. It doesn't cause even a third of the hassle Lemmy does.
I'm very sorry to make this announcement. Both Burger and I were trying as much as we could to keep this up as long as possible, but it has officially reached a point where we just can't do it anymore.