No Stupid Questions

Reddit was still functional when Voat gained popularity. Now, Reddit is self-destructing, so many people have no choice but to leave.

~~Trump~~ Traitor supporting subs have already been called out and others urged to defederize with them (is that the right phrasing? I'm still new to this).

For that reason alone, I feel like Lemmy will-at the very least--last longer than Voat as a viable reddit alternative.

I don't want "feasible alternative to reddit" tbh. Fediverse is its own thing and it's whatever we make it. We have tools to decide what content we see on our end. We have instances that all have slightly different vibes. Lemmy is just a multiverse, populated by people. So far most people here are cool.

If there becomes an instance that is breeding hatred, they get defederated. The end user can then decide to make an acct there if they wanna see that stuff.

That may not resonate with some people I guess. I really like it's simple organic nature and it allows for flexibility.

After trying Voat and Rukkus a while back, Lemmy seems very different in a good way. Those other efforts felt like libertarian tech bro attempts that imploded under the weight of their own dumbness.

I think that they are, or at least, they're more open to the idea of it.

One of the problems that Voat had was that it launched as a "free speech" service, and was popularised at the time when people were leaving Reddit because they were banned, or had problems with the moderation. For the most part, this didn't really affect users as much as it did troublemakers, and as such, they all ended up flocking to voat, causing it to become rather a cesspool.

That compounded in on itself, and now it's also not the kind of place that you want to launch a new community on, just because of both the reputation of the site, and the audience involved.

By comparison, Lemmy isn't as limited to one site, but was also popularised at a time when the problem was less moderation and free speech focused, and people leaving because they no longer wanted to support the site, owing to what the administration was doing with it. The people leaving tend to be a bit more diverse.

It also helps that Lemmy technically isn't a single site, but more of an interconnected set of sites, that you can join by running a piece of software. Anyone can spin one up, and disconnect from ones that they do not wish to see. If one instance is particularly nasty, it can just be left to its own devices.

I quess it'll be Lemmy/Kbin, or at least for me. What is voat? ;) (never heard of it until this post)

Voat was a racist, fascist hell-hole where the most terminally-online and unlikeable people on the internet were corralled together. It was the social equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

Lemmy seems to be insulated from Voat's fate because it was a hard left-turn in the face of a platform implosion.

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.

The people who left reddit for voat where those whose subreddits were banned, such as farpeoplehate and shit. Niche communities.

With lemmy the migration is from a much wider number of communities.

In the past, Reddit alternatives pretty much existed only for the least savory people (i.e. nazis)

Now Reddit has caused an exodus of good users, a bit different.

There was one Voat. When the one Voat goes bust, Voat goes bust. Like any enterprise, it's failure can be attributed, at least in part, to poor management.

There are many Lemmy's. If one Lemmy collapses, another Lemmy can take its place. The individual instances might be less stable than a centralized social media site, like Voat was, but when federated the whole unit is more resilient than centralized social media.

No, because Lemmy is not a platform, its a software that can be run on a server, and that server running the code is called an instance. The instance is where the platform is. An instance can communicate with other instances, which is called federation. Instances that are deemed problematic by another instance owner can become "defederated" meaning communication is cut off. One well known instance being defederated is lemmygrad.ml, which is an instance that promotes authoritarian-left political views. Another instance is exploding-heads.com (don't know if I spelt it correctly, I don't care), which has far-right content.

TLDR: Lemmy is not a singular platform, but an interconnected network of servers (instances). Lemmy will not "die" anytime soon, but certain instances can die.

I think due to the decentralised and open source nature, it‘s much better and even if some instances die the project persists. I‘m in IT and it looks like a solid project which has me excited and thinking about how I could contribute. My feelings coming here were also hope for better and a freedom from corporations.

Voat was just another corporation out to make money off hate I guess.