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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.
It wasn’t “even allowing racism and stuff”. It was created pretty much solely to be a safe space for assholes.
Turns out that doesn’t keep the lights running.
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 ill-fitted to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users. 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 very 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.
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.
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.
Also if anyone is curious how much of a cesspool Voat became, here's the most "upvoated" for the month just six months before the site shut down. Warning: lots of bigotry.
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?)
Yeah, I see people advocating for that here, but the truth is that most people don’t want to deal with constant hate and trolls. People want to feel welcome in a community.
Voat was also competing with reddit during a period of growth by appealing to the more toxic elements of the communities. There wasn't enough of them to sustain an entire service and remain solvent, and they didn't bring anything new to the experience. It was just a reddit clone.
The big difference now is that reddit corp has decided to alienate a severe chunk of their userbase.
I also suspect there were a lot of people who wanted to be part of certain communities, but weren't thrilled with the reddit format. There just wasn't anything else.
Those users are now open to alternatives like Lemmy, or Discord or another federated service. Reminds me of IRC in the 90s. If you got bored of efnet, connect to another network.
And a lot of the users Reddit decided to alienate are mods...Aka the ones who put in the effort to grow their subs in the first place...
Voat was the worst of Reddit while this exodus has the chance to be the best of Reddit.
Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn't even there.
This 100%, and the beauty of Lemmy, is that bigots and racists can have their own Lemmy server, and servers for normal people can defaderate that. Keeping the shit show contained to their own bubble.
And it's very much noticed in the feel of communication everywhere here.
So far in my first week, discussions here are much more civil than most spaces at Reddit.
Also, yes, I have run into a couple of douche canoes (like one guy making a thread "questioning" the concept of being trans), but they were just called out for their hateful nonsense and downvoted to oblivion by the 99% of the community, and their.. ahem... "contributions" quickly disappeared. So the good people of these spaces seem to quickly clean up the trash that does wash up on this beach, and it's very refreshing!
I definitely see myself enjoying Lemmy long term from here, regardless of what happens over at Reddit.
This is just my two cents from last time with no real facts to back it.
Voat died because it was mostly a place to hate on Reddit. And while there is a lot of Reddit hating still going on here, its died down a lot.
I feel the survival of any platform is for it to not be a one trick pony. And I feel this is starting to go in that direction. But only time can tell if it keeps going.
Yeah I've already moved on to just enjoying the content and interacting with people. I enjoy the people here and the overall more humble discourse. It's chill by comparison and commenting is fun. I see myself sticking around.
Voat was super duper super racist.
There's not nearly enough supers and dupers in your comment.
IIRC the_donald users tried to go there and quickly had to run away crying, they've got bullied hard.
Voat was born out of several questionable subs being banned from reddit so naturally the userbase was into very questionable things. That's why they failed so hard
I'd say yes. Lemmy isn't just one community, it's many different servers talking to one another. If one instance goes down, people can just go to another one.
Voat died because the owner ran out of funds to keep the site up. Unlike Lemmy, he didn't allow people to donate to help with the costs.
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).
They're Nazis... What other rhetoric do they have?
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?
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 .
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'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.
Turns out when you start out as a place for Nazis pushed out of Reddit, you stay nazish
Lemmy is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).
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.
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.
Voat started getting “popular” the last time Reddit fucked up, but back then it was just a bunch of T_D folks trying to cope.
This is the first time a new place doesn’t seem overwhelmed by racists.
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.
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.
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.