MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: WG is shutting down as a public instance March 1st 2025.
from FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz to newcommunities@lemmy.world on 21 Feb 14:14
https://walledgarden.xyz/post/2295743

cross-posted from: 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- 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:

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 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.

#newcommunities

threaded - newest

PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat on 21 Feb 14:44 next collapse

What were the problem-causing changes that were made to the test instance before it starting hosting users? Code changes / DB migrations that were then hard to undo?

It might serve as a useful cautionary tale for other admins, to know the specifics so people know how to avoid painting themselves into the same corner.

FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz on 21 Feb 15:24 collapse

Early on we were experimenting with trying to offer everything on the fediverse from a Lemmy instance. A lot of changes and tweaks were made to try to make that work before it was abandoned. There’s a lot of leftover bloat from that project that we’ve been trying to deal with without too much impact to the Lemmy instance but for the size of the instance it makes more sense to start over than to spend even more time trying to undo the wrongs of the past. There isn’t a specific cautionary tale here besides “don’t go public with things that you hope to fix later.”

More recently we’ve had issues with our registrar or DNS pop up that no one seems to have answers for yet, so sometimes the domain itself isn’t reachable. One problem or the other might not be a huge deal in the short term but together they make for a miserable time trying to sort things out. Moving the traffic to a known good config will help me maintain sanity while dealing with the issues at WG.

PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat on 21 Feb 15:28 collapse

Makes sense. Meaning code changes to the Lemmy server? Additional scripting added in that would take work to remove if you want things to keep working? Federations out in ways that weren’t compatible with Lemmy and are now written into someone else’s DB and unchangeable?

I’m just curious about the details, I like to hack on my little toybox Lemmy server as well is why I am asking these things. You’re welcome to go into as much detail as you have time for, if you feel like.

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al on 21 Feb 17:07 collapse

Was about to cry about my weed memes but they’re moving to the new instance.