The End of NormalCity.life

Hello,

In my previous post, I outlined a detailed plan for the likely shutdown of NCL (NormalCity.life). The hope was that the post might encourage donations, alleviating the ever-growing financial burden of running NCL. The hope was that this and a few other issues would've sorted themselves out by December. Unfortunately, we are not in a better position today than when I wrote that first post. It's not an announcement I take lightly, but NCL is shutting down for good in January.

You can look back on that post for the specific plan we have in place for the shutdown, but I wanted to spend a little more time going into some of the reasons why NCL is ceasing operations. I suppose the best place to start is why NCL exists at all. In June of this year, Reddit had a significant upheaval concerning API pricing. If you recall, a sitewide protest resulted in much of the site being inaccessible for a significant period. People were upset with how the website was being run, and people were searching for alternatives to Reddit that still filled a similar hole in their social media diet. Lemmy was perhaps the best-equipped alternative, although many of the instances that I came across before NCL were home to vile and divisive content, often moderated on extremist political lines, and generally were one-trick ponies in terms of what local communities were allowed under the rules. It was clear to me that I was in a position to create an instance focused on tackling these problem areas, and so NCL was born. NCL became a home for federated alternatives to the subreddits I moderated at the time, as well as several other communities I created based on my own interests. NCL was founded on the idea that the divisive political content typical of other instances should be minimized without resorting to outright censorship. It's a tricky thing to get right, so we ended up essentially banning communities that were created with explicit political intent but left well-meaning users with as much freedom to speak their minds as possible. If you're interested, there are some older posts I made on this topic that clarify our stance on moderation. We also were interested in gaining a general user base and wanted to avoid locking users into too much of a box if they wanted to create their own communities here. In fact, NCL originally intended to be purely general-purpose in this regard but more recently switched its focus to STEM-related topics. In general, we wanted to be a place that offered more freedom, less drama, and something more dependable.

So, did we achieve what we set out to do? In some regards, I think we did. NCL gained a respectable, albeit small, base of local users. We never reached the level of growth needed to become fully supported by donations, but we did receive a modest amount of user donations early on. Aside from the communities that I've created here, we haven't had much activity in terms of community creation. Still, our [email protected] community is probably our biggest success story regarding activity and participation. We offered someplace with lenient moderation; we tried to stay as federated and functional as possible, and I believe we managed to set something of an example in terms of what a Lemmy instance could be. We didn't reach our glorious aspirations to be self-funded, but we ticked the main boxes we wanted to for the short time we've been online.

I encourage you to read the last post on our shutdown, which will be the playbook for the coming weeks. The short version is that we're shutting down on January 15th, 2024. This provides a two-week grace period after the end of 2023, outlined in that initial post. Everything here will be deleted along with the VPS where NCL is hosted, although a few key posts that I value were/will be archived before that time. I can attempt to recover data if you request it at [email protected], but I'm really not making promises regarding what I'll be able to gather before the shutdown. Chances are, you're in a better position than I am to recover your own data, and some tools are available to make moving key bits of information to a new account on another instance easy. I'll try to address that gamut of concerns on January 1st with another post, so look out for that.

Aside from financial concerns, which were the main reason for the shutdown (it's now $32 a month to run this site), legal and technical concerns were also part of the decision. Ensuring continual compliance with the multitude of global and state-level privacy laws is nigh impossible, and more recent issues with our automated update system Ansible meant that hours would need to be spent fiddling with configs to get that working. Combine that with an already busy schedule, waning interest in the concept of Lemmy as a whole (on the part of me and others), and other considerations; it's simply the right time to say goodbye. So, once again, NCL will definitely be shutting down on January 15th, which provides a two-week period after New Year's Eve for people to get their things in order and figure out their next steps. I'll make a post before that period with more information.

I hope everyone has a great December, and I will see you at the start of our grace period to help you all out as much as I can.

Sincerely,

EuphoricPenguin22