Retiring BlendIT: the BSD Cafe's Lemmy instance

After careful consideration, I've decided to retire BlendIT, our Lemmy instance, effective 1st May 2026.

This is not a decision I take lightly. Every service at the BSD Cafe is something I care about, and shutting one down always feels like closing a table in the bar. But part of being a responsible barista is knowing when something isn't working - for us.

Lemmy is a valid and interesting piece of software, and I have respect for the project and the people behind it. However, managing it in a context like the BSD Cafe has proven to be more difficult than I can sustain. The resource demands, particularly around media storage and retention, grow in ways that are hard to control, and the maintenance overhead has become significant for what is, ultimately, a community-run infrastructure with limited resources. There are also concerns around GDPR compliance, as the software's approach to media retention makes it difficult to ensure that data is handled and removed in accordance with European regulations.

On top of that, we now have Billboard, a federated forum that fits naturally into the BSD Cafe's ecosystem. With Billboard available, maintaining two overlapping solutions for the same purpose no longer makes sense. Rather than spreading our energy thin, I'd rather focus on what works best for us.

None of this is a judgment on Lemmy as a project - it simply isn't the right fit for us, here, now.

If you have content on BlendIT that you'd like to save, please do so before 1st May. After that date, the instance will be permanently shut down and its data removed.

Thank you to everyone who used and contributed to BlendIT.

The table is closing, but the bar is very much open - and there's always room at the counter.

Stefano, your Barista

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements #BlendiT

Today, we're introducing three things.

The first one is a forum. A real forum - with categories, threads, and actual conversations that don't disappear in a timeline after six minutes.

The second is a Fediverse platform. Fully federated, ActivityPub-native. Your posts go out, the world's posts come in. No walled gardens, no algorithms, no tricks.

The third is a Bar. A place to sit down, talk to strangers who happen to care about the same weird things you do, and stay as long as you want.

A forum. A Fediverse platform. A bar.

Are you getting it?
These are not three separate things. This is one thing.

And we're calling it Billboard.

https://billboard.bsd.cafe

And no, we checked the calendar. We know. This is not an April Fools' joke.

We're just really bad at timing.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements

The #BSDCafe #Mastodon instances have been updated to v4.5.8

#BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements

The #BSDCafe #snac instance has been updated to 2.91

#BSDCafeInstance #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements

The #BSDCafe endpoint VM has been upgraded to #FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE

#BSDCafeAnnouncements #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeServices

The #BSDCafe #Mastodon instances have been upgraded to v4.5.7

#BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements

The #BSDCafe #snac instance has been upgraded to 2.90

#BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements #BSDCafeServices #snac2

I’ve previously mentioned having trouble managing BlendIT, but I’m going to give it another try.

Tomorrow, 5th February, I’ll be running an experimental update.

I managed to compile everything in my test jail, but we’ll have to see if the actual upgrade succeeds.

I will be taking the service down for a few hours - exact timing depends on my schedule - but since usage is low, it shouldn't be an issue.

I will post updates here and on https://status.bsd.cafe.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements #BlendIT

The #BSDCafe #Mastodon instance has been upgraded to v.4.5.6

#BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements #BSDCafeInstance

Important announcement, especially for BSD Cafe friends who don’t have a local account.

Over the past few days I noticed that, when browsing some public pages on our Mastodon server (especially the federated timeline, meaning posts coming from other instances as well), certain content could appear without a CW and in some cases it was pornographic, illegal, or generally not suitable for a general audience.
The problem is that this was visible even to users who were not logged in, which effectively made BSD Cafe a gateway to that content. Also, some media files are cached on our server, so it could look like BSD Cafe is the source of it.

For this reason I had to make a decision: I have disabled the ability for non-logged-in visitors to view posts coming from other instances.
This way, anyone visiting BSD Cafe without an account will only see BSD Cafe local content, helping us avoid potential issues, including legal ones.
Some of you (from other instances) thought you had been blocked because you could no longer see your posts here, but that is not the case: your posts are still fully visible to local users, as usual.

I have also re-enabled (at least for now) hashtag browsing, since BSD Cafe is one of the most well federated instances for BSD-related content and it would be a shame to lose that. However, I may reconsider this decision if it leads to problems.

Let me know if you notice anything unusual.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafeAnnouncements #BSDCafeServices #Mastodon #Fediverse