Voat was a replica of Reddit in design. One centralized server. We would have ended up in the same crappy place even if that were a success because at some point they would have wanted to monetize it also.
You have to do some reading and learn about the technology behind Lemmy and federation to understand.
Lemmy is not a "free speech" platform, unlike Voat. It can be moderated. Offending instances in the Fediverse can be blocked and all that stuff. As long as the moderators do their job, they can filter everything they want to filter, just like Reddit.
The more interesting question with Lemmy is if the federation will actual have any advantage in the long run, as cutting other instances off is the easiest way to moderate them. Which than in turn means the users have to hop between server, which is annoying and will in turn will lead to more centralization again.
For the time being I see Lemmy not as "The Solution™", but more as a "not-Reddit". It can and will run into all the problems as ever other Web forum will.
Unlike that exodus, the Lemmigration isn’t for censorship and freedom of speech issues (inevitably drawing in the most toxic, bigoted and hateful section of Reddit to voat); it’s because of reduced accessibility and usability, alongside the visible contempt that Reddit’s administration has for their users (free content providers) and moderators (free content curators).
This means the people fleeing Reddit’s shores aren’t doing so because they want to recreate fatpeoplehate elsewhere; it’s because Reddit won’t let blind people moderate their own communities.
Voat originally emerged in 2015 during the height of the Ellen Pao scandal that swept Reddit, and quickly garnered some Reddit refugees, particularly those from /r/fatpeoplehate, a subreddit dedicated to hating on the obese.
It almost died that year for three key reasons:
Hosting morally repugnant legal grey-area content which was previously purged from Reddit, such as creepshots and jailbait. This not only drove users away but also made advertisers, payment processors and other stakeholders drop the site very quickly. /r/shitredditsays were a key player in getting companies like PayPal and Stripe to blacklist them.
Server instability. Crashes were frequent and the site went through significant downtime because it had received the Reddit hug of death.
The moment Ellen Pao was forced to resign and Steve Huffman was sworn in as CEO, everybody flocked back to Reddit thinking the day had been saved.
Voat soon became a vessel for Reddit’s undesirable communities that Spez had purged. The moment he banned subreddits like /r/n*****, /r/c***town and other subreddits dedicated to glorifying racial hatred, they flocked to Voat and turned it into a white supremacist hellhole. Another thing that spurred the change was Stormfront (a white supremacist/neo-nazi forum) being cut off by their hosting provider.
What ultimately killed the site was COVID-19. A major investor in the site pulled out during the pandemic and after months of failing to secure funding, the owner just gave up and closed the site down on Christmas Day, 2020.
I think a lot of folks are missing the critical flaw with Voat, you had to be voated up to be able to participate or create communities.
Thus, as right wing nuttos joined the platform as first they decided who could make a lot of comments, communities and posts.
So you as Reddit user, tired of Reddit moderation or TOS decide to open a community on Voat but you cant.
To open your community you would have to participate and dance with the nutties that couldnt stop dropping hard n words left and right.
Im all for free speech but I dont want to have to actively participe in their crapshow to be able to get rights to be able to do basic user actions. Worst of all is that you had to pander as downvoats would ruin your chance at opening your own place that wasnt just a nazi summercamp for regards.
Also with nazi speech being the main attraction every normal person would nope the fuck out of there. I did as well, no need to fill my mind with toxicity.
Lemmy is a very different conceptually than Voat. A major difference is it's not just a single website, of course, it's open source software that anyone can download and install, which makes it very resilient. The federation aspect is clever too, making it much more than if it was just a bunch of different, disconnected websites running a version of Lemmy.
Voat's goal of being specific to a certain political ideology naturally limited it, too. It doesn't seem that conservative ideology is particularly popular among whatever demographic reddit serves, based on the distribution of subs and comments. Maybe I'm wrong and conservatives just avoid reddit because they view it as a liberal/left site, idk.
Plus, as others have noted Voat was toxic from the start, being composed mainly of people from communities that were kicked off Reddit for breaking rules about hate speech and violence. That's a very shaky foundation, obviously. Lemmy has recently gained tons of users of course, primarily people who ditched reddit because it sucks, not were ditched by reddit for sucking. Huge difference there too.
Lemmy has recently gained tons of users of course, primarily people who ditched reddit because it sucks, not were ditched by reddit for sucking. Huge difference there too.
That distinction is huge. Voat also became the haven for jailbait, fatpeoplehate, and other notorious communities.
As I remember it, the Rexit that caused Voat to become so large was primarily composed disenfranchised conservatives, trolls, and those with extreme views. Even moderately conservative users were likely to feel out of place on Voat.
This Rexit seems primarily composed of disenfranchised mods, app users, and content producers. In my opinion, the much larger variety of people swapping to the Fediverse give it a much more stable base.
The last century of History has shown that the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” isn’t really compatible with the autocracy that tankies love some much and many are so painfully close to fascists (with but a different set of slogans) that they end up loving the likes of Putin.
That said, they seem to have their own instance, whose admins seem very very keen on the whole Centralized Control aspect of things (a very tankie approach to managing speech) so they’re cutting themselves off from the rest of the Fediverse which does sound absolutelly fine (I for one am happy with people having their own circle-jerk safe-space separate from the rest - if it makes them happy whilst not causing problems for the rest then it furthers the whole “the greatest good for the greatest number” thing, IMHO).
Before it was called VOAT, it was WhoaVerse, and back then it had possibilities. It then became a liferaft for people with racist opinions. There were a few who were OK, but most were very extremist. I abandoned that ship.
While I see conservatives here, I also see moderates and liberals. And 99% of the posts aren't about politics. Of course the 400-lb gorilla news stories, such as the Reddit issue is front row and center and that's understandable. But I also see people discussing other things, such as the situation in Russia with the Wagner group, but there are also people discussing science is /c/Science.
Will I agree with everyone here? Will everyone here agree with me? No to both of those. But as long as there is a chance for good discussion, and an exchange of ideas, this place has a real chance of being lively. Reddit won't go down in a day.
In 199-something, I was watching (I think the Screensavers with Leo Laporte) talking about how this new search engine called Google was very optimized. My browser opened up to Yahoo! and it took forever... and I switched back then to the new speed demon. When I connected to the Internet, it was like magic; a page sitting there waiting for me to type in a search query. Today Google is the top dog (and I use duckduckgo now, but that's another story). But Yahoo didn't fade away. Yahoo still gets visitors (about 5 billion per day, but that's small change compared to Google's 68 billion).
What's Google and Yahoo got to do with Lemmy? Once upon a time, Digg was the top dog, and Reddit was the upstart. Now Reddit's the big dog, and Lemmy's an upstart. I believe Lemmy can make history repeat itself.
Free speech absolutism is what ruined all the failed Reddit alternatives, including Voat. For the sake of growth or simple naive idealism, extreme voices inundated the moderate and saner opinions. Who wants to settle down on such places?
I remember visiting them back whenever the FatPeopleHate debacle was happening and there was already a stupid amount of racism and misogyny on the site. I remember some weird masculinity sub posting stupid images with text inundated with Photoshop effects and whatnot, formatted such that it read like "GIVE YOUR A CHANCE BALLS!" next to a smiling Bill Cosby punching a tiger's dick off or some shit.
Lemmy's community is much better than Voat's. Voat existed to give a home to users who were too toxic even for Spez. Lemmy is pretty good at stopping that.
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