Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff. Lemmy does not have a central administration that can make decisions like that, as each instance gets to decide if they federate with another instance or not.
There's no doubt going to be a banlist that gets shared amongst the biggest, most popular instances to get rid of the trolls.
I don't know, I was there in the beginning. I think it died because it had no real content, compared to reddit. And, all anyone talked about was reddit, or reposted stuff from reddit, just like we're seeing here. I think this might stick a bit better because reddit is way bigger than it was back then, so even if the same super small % of users came over, it would still be quite a bit more content.
For comparison of how negligible all the Lemmy fediverse is, there are ~40k active users this month. Reddit has over 50 millionactive users. So, that's around 0.1% of reddit users. Literally 99.9% of reddit are not here.
I think it's probably doomed. It'll never overtake reddit. But, it'll be a nice, quiet, alternative.
edit: Here's a quick litmus test for all the downvoters (I guess "correct" answers only here!). How many times have you gone to reddit today?
edit: I was part of this attempted migration, not the hate one. This isn't the first blackout for reddit being shitty.
edit: I humbly apologize for my personal, speculative, opinion about the unknowable future. The downvotes have made me realize my math was wrong, my opinion is wrong, and I am wrong. My corrected opinion is that Lemmy will overtake Meta, Mastadon, Twitter, and Google (wtf is reddit!?), and every upvote will be worth $1000, making everyone rich! Or, we can have fun guessing, and wait and see how things go. I hope they go well!
tbh the culture here is reddit in its purest form right now. once they start sanitizing everything here again I'm out. One opinion allowed ONLY and if you dont align you're a NAZI and FAR RIGHT TROLL
Honestly - I agreed with the first paragraph of your comment and was going to upvote, but all the edits made me reconsider; this is a place to share our thoughts, not worry about how many people up/down-ticked our comment.
Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were... Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who'd quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we're migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.
On top of that, Voat got their main population-spike around the time reddit was cracking down on racist and extremist subreddits, so those are the type of users who shaped the culture of Voat. Lemmy, on the other hand, is getting their population spike from enthusiast users, I.E. the 10% of people most responsible for voting, commenting, posting, and just in general contributing to the site. Therefore, those are the people shaping the growing culture of Lemmy, doing so in a mostly positive way.
There is a phenomenon known as the "Eternal September". In the earliest internet, the vast majority of internet users were college student. Therefore, every September when freshmen started school, the online communities would get a massive influx of new users; These new users were often poorly behaved or disruptive to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users, and things would settle back to normal. This was known as the "September Effect".
And then one year the internet started gaining small mainstream attention, and suddenly these chatrooms were being constantly flooded with new, ill-behaved users all the time; And because this "September" never ended, the culture of these communities ended up being washed away by the new people, and irreversibly changed forever; hence the "Eternal September".
The moral of the story, too many new people to a community too fast can overrun the existing cultural dynamic, and so either you need to be restrained in how quickly you let new people join so they can gradually assimilate, or you need the people joining to already share the same culture you desire.
Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff.
It cannot be stressed enough how core this was to Voat's identity, and also how much it poisoned the entire platform. When even objecting to bigotry is against the ethos of the site then there's no way to build a healthy community, much less an inclusive one.
If that showed up on some Lemmy instance, you'd still have people saying "Defederation is bad! Marketplace of ideas! Just block them and move on! It's just one person!" :sigh:
The strength of the fediverse is that there can be a right wing fediverse, a left wing fediverse, a centralist fediverse, yada yada yada. Entire networks of different, unconnected instances can exist. There will probably be instances in between that act as bridges or for gathering stats.
It will be interesting to watch, but at least people will be able to join the instances with communities they like. The problem of course is that echo chambers are more likely to evolve, but it's not like that isn't the case right now.
And once we get instance bridged with the dark web, it could allow content from countries like China, North Korea, Iran, and other places that don't want information getting out.
I think we're already seeing that a lot of the groups are going to be left-leaning, and since the system is decentralized by design, it's not going to be attractive to people that are right-wing and have authoritarian views. E.g., they won't be able to force other people to see what they say. (Remember the shitstorm of whining when TheDonald was removed from the front page so that 99% of people didn't see it anymore?)
It also helps that this wave of Lemmy’s new users are unified around some common centrist causes. Like not fucking up the user experience and not lying to its end users.
Votes big influx of users happened when far right wing subreddits got shut down. That created a pretty toxic place.
The tankies that made Lemmy are bad too, it's why I went with a Kbin instance after looking into options. Luckily thanks to Federation it's easy to connect with users across instances of both.
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?
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.
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.
Voat allowed anything. So it was quickly overran by reddit worst subs that got banned. All vile hate and racism. And mods also banned people they don't like. Quickly other users left. I don't know about you but I don't want to see hate and less interested in political fights. No one would want to advertise there or donate to such website.
Lemmy is made of federated instances not controlled by one .
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.
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.
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.
Voat started out well enough, but after lots of hate communities on Reddit were purged under Ellen Pao's stint as CEO (under the orders of Spez and Ohanian), Voat was inundated with a mass exodus of angry redditors. Because of this, Voat ended up becoming a right wing echo chamber. Like I said, it was actually a nice alternative when it started out, but rapidly went downhill once the great purge of Reddit took place. Voat ended up closing its doors a few years back due to lack of funds.
I sincerely hope Lemmy is more successful than Voat, but without the Nazi's and Trump nuts that festered on Voat.
I would think so. The people who were attracted to Voat could always migrate to Lemmy and host on their own instance (I’d be in favor of blocking them if their rhetoric becomes hateful, however).
Pao’s stint as CEO (under the orders of Spez and Ohanian), Voat was inundated with a mass exodus of
There is currently a nazi instance. Lots of instances have defederated from it. The instance name involves explosions and heads. Also apparently there's a loli instance that a lot of instances have defederated from - that one ends in .moe
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