niu.moe's death notice

TLDR; niu.moe will close at the end of March 2020.

It's not on a sudden impulse, it's been maturing for quite some time, and for obvious reasons I wasn't going to talk about it publicly, but niu.moe has become too hard for me to handle.

“niu” was born from a not very prepared will to make a small “weeb” enclave within the Fediverse, which was experiencing an explosion of popularity in April 2017 thanks to the release of the 1.0 of Mastodon, and to have been one of the only Mastodon servers specialized in this genre gave a great popularity (relatively speaking) to niu quite quickly, and many incredible people we reach and are still there today, surrounded by other people just as cool.

(The word “weeb” was not particularly misunderstood in my imagination, or at least was as pejorative as “geek”, i. e. something used to belittle a community based solely on its taste, so it was rather funny when you know that today being “geek” is in fashion... anyway I'm getting lost.)

The community growing, a moderation more thorough than “don't be a dick” became essential, followed by many experiments in order to keep an active and healthy community, giving a lot of work to many people (thanks a lot to them besides), and giving more or less good effects...

But unfortunately, it was not enough, and due to poor management on my part it has also become a platform for people who know how to take advantage of the efforts of others to spread their nauseating ideas in a hidden way, tainting the images of legitimately brilliant people.

For many people today niu.moe is no longer really known, or else leaves only a bitter aftertaste of people “not frequented”, even dangerous edgelords, and people on niu are not even aware of this shitty reputation, and that depresses me quite a bit.

More personally, add to this what everyone says, what I should have done long before, what I should have done now, the image that many people carry of me without even knowing me a little bit (and often have never manifested themselves to me).

The immense support of the people of niu.moe and my relatives on the Fediverse, which in spite of them leads to even greater pressure to maintain this service... and other personal concerns, it is a pressure far too great to continue niu.moe.

You can well understand how much this server is personally linked to me, and that giving it to someone you trust would only make things worse on my side, that's why I made the decision to close and archive niu.moe on its 3rd birthday, end of March 2020, sorry....

This should give people time to migrate to other servers, I can help them if they want to find a server that meets their needs, the new feature of Mastodon to migrate its account should be useful...

As for me, I'm not leaving from the Fediverse, I'll probably find another instance or create another one, you can always follow me for more information or questions.

Thank you for these (soon) 3 great years.

EDIT 12/11/2019 : I'm not gonna hide peer pressure had a part in this, but if this was only this niu wouldn't even had its 2nd birthday.

It's mostly self pressure, In the 3 last years I personally evolved a lot, and the world I want to see and build changed a lot too. Sadly, niu doesn't reflect that aymore, and changing it would change it too much for everyone, and trying to find a solution as been eating my mood and time quite too much.

So no, it's not because a group / someone pressured me, it's only because I was pressuring myself too much in this cognitive dissonance I had.