I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
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.
I think the other Motorheads did a fair job of explaining.
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.
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.
Oh it certainly wasn’t free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.
Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn’t even there.
I quess it’ll be Lemmy/Kbin, or at least for me. What is voat? ;) (never heard of it until this post)
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.
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 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
The Lemmy devs and admins of lemmy.ml are pro-China tankies, aren’t they?
Lemmy is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).
If you ignore all the tankies, it’s great!
The leftists are why there are so few nazis.
People seem super jazzed about the decentralized nature of Lemmy and other stuff in the “fediverse”. I don’t really understand how it works but it seems cool that Lemmy isn’t a single company/website. Can’t have a power tripping CEO or a board that panders to shareholders that way.
People over complicate federation. I write federated software so lemme break it down. Federation just means data sharing. When you post something on a federation enabled website it sends a copy of your post to everyone who follows you and tells their service to store your data in their database in addition to their own data. What this means is that you can’t just blow up a server to shut it down because everyone in the game has a copy.
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.
The one problem with this is that most of the content does seem to be pretty centered on only a couple instances (lemmy.world mostly, with some also scattered in beehaw.org, Lemmy.ml, and sh.itjust.works). If one of those goes down, especially lemmy.world, it will cripple this place pretty bad. Maybe if we one day get a way to backup or export user profiles and communities to other instances, but until then, I think this place has a centralization problem brewing as well.
