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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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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 with people. It's chill here and commenting is fun. I see myself sticking around.
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.
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?
At least then we can just defederate with their instance, yeah?
I glanced at the mod log today and someone who has been prominently and insistently posting hateful content had just been banned 2 minutes before. So, lemmy.world isn’t tolerating insulting nonsense themselves. As far as other servers, admins can choose to federate or not.
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
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'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 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'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
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.
Reddit was still functional when Voat gained popularity. Now, Reddit is self-destructing, so many people have no choice but to leave.
A lot of folks already pointed out Voat's main issues, but the biggest thing here is that any sort of open source thing like this can't really totally fail if anyone is still using it. Voat was still centralized if I'm not mistaken.
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.
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.
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.
~~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.
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.
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.
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.