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.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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.
I quess it'll be Lemmy/Kbin, or at least for me. What is voat? ;) (never heard of it until this post)
It was the new Reddit but free speech so full of racists fascists etc
Voat was an unconditional "free speech" platform that wanted to be an alternative to reddit a few years ago. I think it took about a week until they had to ban the first communities on their site. The_Donald, QAnon and Gamergate was pretty big over there at first and it gradually turned into a neo Nazi platform. It was easily one of the worst sites around when it died.
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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.
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Lemmy is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).
If you ignore all the tankies, it's great!
At least from the threads I've read, there's been a harsh pushback against marxist-leninists and the likes. Even more so as their home instance is defederated from all "major players".
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Well for one Lemmy is open source and federated. It's not one site, so even if the developers get tired of fooling with it, the servers don't depend on them and other people could take over development without express permission from the original developers.
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.
Oh my god I forgot voat existed. Isn't that a far right hell hole now?
It's gone now, thankfully but yes it turned into an alt right paradise before it went kaputt.