It's a pity. They consulted with me a bit when they were considering opening their instance and they seemed very excited about it. But sadly one can't keep up a lemmy instance on enthusiasm alone. It's a lot of sysadmin work, and it's quite hard if you're not already proficient with this stuff.

For smaller instances like this, when they shut down, is it worth trying to see if someone else wants to take it over? You'd have to worry about handing it off to an internet stranger that might do bad things with it, but the risk seems pretty low.

It would also be nice if Lemmy had a migration feature based on public/private keys that let you automatically move accounts/communities to new instances

Damn that's really depressing to hear I really enjoyed ausomememes after I recently discovered it. It helped me feel relatable and understand. Something I have never felt most of my life :'(

The linked thread's comments aren't federating to my instance so I'm commenting here. If someone recreates !sillydrawingrequests@lemmy.autism.place please let me know. I couldn't contribute much to it, but I would absolutely love to hang out and lurk, because that sounds like an adorable idea and I wish I had come across it before.

Some really cute communities were hosted there. Thanks for coming, and for all the laughs!

I hope users of lemmy.autism.place found another safe space for them.

Dang I'm tempted to ask for details but don't wanna poke the scars. Hope the best for the users involved.