Farewell... for now? - dmv.social is closing on April 14th.
tldr: dmv.social is closing on April 14th. Going forward, the instance will be read-only until the termination date. I apologize for the short notice, but I am setting this read-only to prevent abuse.
If you go to your Profile on the website, there should be a link to export your subscription list. You may import this list to other instances. Do note that some instances aren't federated with everyone, and instances have varying SFW/NSFW policies.
If you wish to start a community for anywhere in the DMV area: I will create a post on the big communities here to help spread the word. Send a private message to @dmvsocial@dmv.social by March 23. I will compile a big post on all of the major communities here after March 23 linking to alternative communities.
If you are a server host where dmv.social communities have federated to: I have locked all posts and communities. You should not have to worry about spam. Feel free to delete the communities after April 14th.
Thank You.
I've received about a half dozen unsolicited "thank you" DMs over the last few months. Genuinely, the unsolicited "thank you"s have been uplifting.
To the few users on this instance: thank you for making this instance your home on the Threadiverse the past several months. I've received a few private messages thanking me for running this and providing a SFW-gateway to the Threadiverse, so I hope I reasonably delivered up until this point.
To everyone else: Thanks for the upvotes, the downvotes, the subscribes, occasional comments, and lurking :)
Will you be back?
Maybe. If this does return, I want to give it 6-12 months. If you're interested about this returning, bookmark https://dmv.social and check back in 6 months. In the mean time, I'll post an update to the Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#dmvsocial:matrix.org
I still want to provide a federated social network for this area, I'm just not really confident now is the right time.
OK, cut the b-s: Why?
I want to make a few things abundantly clear so there's no unnecessary speculation:
This was not a financial decision. The server hosting costs were $55/mo, which were extremely easy to manage.
This was not done because dmv.social is still on the smaller/still-growing side. I've spent years building communities elsewhere, anyone would be unreasonable to expect something to take off in less than a year.
I'm not playing the blame-game and putting this on the Lemmy devs. They seem like busy folks adding stuff in and I appreciate that releases have been pretty damn seamless from a server-administration side.
This was done entirely because of my concerns about being a server host on the Fediverse. 99.9999% of Fediverse folks are wonderful people. The remaining 0.0001% are urinating in the pool, so to speak.
I've been weighing this decision for the last 2-3 weeks. I wanted to build a mod bot to get ahead of the malicious images problem other hosts had since I didn't want that crap coming here. Common sense eventually kicked in, and I realized that the risk of liability just isn't something I want to deal with.
Last year, a few other instances had malicious images posted. The admins and mods of the communities were quick to remove it and explain what was going on, but that was a huge wake-up call that "wow... this is... dangerous."