Update: Instead of shutting down I am stepping down and defederating instances. We're moving to whitelisting.
Lemmy is bullshit and the people awful. At least Reddit is free, I was donating to the Lemmy developers and paying to host my own social media. I have cancelled both.
A little bit about myself: I am a real person with issues. I was lucky to be able to figure out enough masking skills to hold down a job and have a family but yeah, I'm not normal.
I'm not interested in paying to be harassed by people like "ptz" who are pretending to take a high ground or instances that host communities designed to torment people like lemmy.ca, I'm not interested in random people downvoting my posts on my server for my friends. I'm not interested in people constantly repeating US politics and propaganda. Lemmy fucking sucks, I tried my best to make it better but to be honest, I don't think it is me, it is you.
I appointed a friend as admin for the time being. If she likes it I will consider paying for the hosting.
Hey, I haven't been a user here for long, but I lurked the veganhomecooks subreddit and then this community for a couple of years. I'm sorry you've been getting harassed by the losers on here. For what it's worth I agree with your anti-US sentiment and think the drive-by downvotes are fucking annoying. I find a lot of Lemmitors are simply morons who treat Lemmy as another Reddit and as such it has a lot of similar problems to Reddit.
Either way, thank you for setting this place up. I have enjoyed my time here even if it might not be for long.
Thank you. I think I have a plan. Arcane Potato is going to become the admin and I'm going to defederate lemmy.ca and possibly other generalist instances. I will also purge all liberal communities from being federated including any communities repeating any state propaganda.
As someone from the outside VTC is one of my favorite places on the fediverse. I've only talked to a couple people from your instance but they are amazing and wonderful to chat with! I think the atmosphere here is awesome even though I don't interact much. The meals and gardens and articles from here are great to see!
It sucks that people have to interfere with others. I'm sorry having your space open to everyone isn't going how you wanted. Maybe it will be more enjoyable for you as a user within a walled community instead of dealing with other stuff and the community will continue to grow.
Sincerely I hope you feel better about things and find your own peace and happiness, whatever form that takes. Good luck friends!
I see. I respectfully disagree with OPs take on this for the following reasons:
Don't donate to the idiot devs of lemmy. They are transphobic idiots who don't actually understand socialism.
This is a function of the software that is lemmy. There are options for this issue (disable downvotes, block instances that don't mesh with you, better moderation and pr)
This is very reactionary and just stirs the pot.
Drama communities exist on most major instances, fedilore is a popular one. You should work with instance admins when you have problems with other communities.
Anyways, that's just my take/opinion. To each their own.
OP: reconsider shutting down the instance and consider making changes. There are loads if like minded people on lemmy (even lemmy.ca) who enjoy this instance and would volunteer to assist with moderation.