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 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.
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.
I need to take warnings a lot more seriously on this site. That’s the second time I disregarded a warning and hate myself for it.
I remember when voat happened, I only wish it took more of Reddit (and maybe a ceo) with it.
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.
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.
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.
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’m Iranian. Lemmy isn’t even filtered in Iran, it’s readily accessible
Oh it certainly wasn’t free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.
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.
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.
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.
Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn’t even there.
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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.
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.
This is news to me.
I thought all the Voat refugees flocked to Ruqqus and then to Poal when Ruqqus decided to tighten up enforcement of threats of violence based on the Brandenburg Test and lost all of their users. Because apparently stopping people from openly inciting violence against ethnic and religious minorities is the definition of being infiltrated by the government according to these crackpots…
Poal from what I’ve heard is an absolute shitshow run by a staunch power-tripping antisemite that has been known to remove/edit comments, shadowban people, silently lock users out of their accounts by changing passwords/email addresses, etc.
Voat did a couple of things wrong, first they Atko attempted to attract people to his site during the Pao thing, people were looking for an alternative and Atko presented his site as faster as it’s written in C#, and has things to prevent powermods by having mod limits and brigading by having minimum points to comment.
What that means is that the normal people who went there to like things are turned off by the lack of content and went back to reddit, so the only one who stayed are the ones who are there to not like things(to put it lightly), and they get louder because they posted more about the things they not like, and since there is a barrier to entry, they just got more and more people who were there to not like things and pushed out all the original nice communities that were on voat, which turned the site into only a place for people to not like things.
So as long as we have people who like things and tell the people who are here to solely not like things to leave, it should be fine.
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?
the great thing is that it has absolutely no bearing outside of that one instance. they have no control over anything that happens in lemmy.world or any other instance, if they are even exerting it over their own
you wouldn’t be saying that if tankies were replaced with nazis or something else, just sayin’
Tankies suck, but they’re so far from nazis morally it’s not even really fair to tankies to compare them.
At least tankies generally speaking aren’t okay with genocide of innocents.
If they praise Stalin, Mao or the CCP, then they’re on the same level. Genociders all.
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.
Thankies are a very special kind of “leftist”.
The last century of History has shown that the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” isn’t really compatible with the autocracy that tankies love some much and many are so painfully close to fascists (with but a different set of slogans) that they end up loving the likes of Putin.
That said, they seem to have their own instance, whose admins seem very very keen on the whole Centralized Control aspect of things (a very tankie approach to managing speech) so they’re cutting themselves off from the rest of the Fediverse which does sound absolutelly fine (I for one am happy with people having their own circle-jerk safe-space separate from the rest - if it makes them happy whilst not causing problems for the rest then it furthers the whole “the greatest good for the greatest number” thing, IMHO).
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.
It doesn’t seem that conservative ideology is particularly popular among whatever demographic reddit serves, based on the distribution of subs and comments.
At one point reddit was a very diverse community.
After one of the migrations to the site, some of the new users couldn’t tolerate the idea that there were extremists hiding in certain dark corners of reddit. Those users started finding those subs and doing things like taking a screenshot of an ad next to a post that company would never support and spreading it around the internet. It didn’t take long after that until reddit started cleaning out those dark corners.
I’ve been on reddit since about 2008. My experience was that it’s was very left/liberal, drawing users mainly from university students. There have always been people posting content that made it like 4chan lite, but not political talk. As best I recall I first saw anyone there identify politically conservative around 2014 and it seemed surprising.
I remember it mostly the way you do. It certainly wasn’t conservative in any sense of the word. Socially,
/r/atheismwas a default sub, most of the user base was LGBT friendly, and pornography was allowed. Economically, universal healthcare and the OWS protests were supported.There was a libertarian-minded free-speech-absolutist streak, which is why things like
/r/jailbaitand/r/watchpeoplediewere allowed. Some people like to blame the elimination of that type of stuff on “intolerant leftists” but in my estimation the real culprit there was the media catching wind and advertisers not wanting to advertise on sites with that sort of content.In my opinion, Reddit became far more hostile to conservatives when
/r/the_donaldtook off. That may be more a sign of the times than anything particular about Reddit; political engagement in general was rising during that time. But also most users didn’t really appreciate the way that sub manipulated Reddit’s algorithms, or being called “cuck” in their hobby subs.Yeah, the questionable porn and gore are what resembled 4chan Lite. There wasn’t much hate speech, racism or non-liberal political talk though back then. I think reddit realized that having prominent subs posting photos of 14 year old girls wasn’t something they wanted to be in their public image at all, which was probably a good move.
I don’t feel like reddit became hostile to conservatives as much as conservatives who were hostile showed up, which of course made people not like them. It was also a time when political attitudes and discourse in general in the US was growing more contentious and less civil. The ‘cuck’ crap, the “liberal tears!!” type attitudes, death threats, arrogance and harassing people showed up when ‘the donald’ went big around 2016-17. Not really different than Facebook or IG in that respect - I finally quit Facebook entirely around 2017 because i was sick of having contentious politics in my face non-stop. I’m not sure if /r/conservative even existed before ~2015. Also strangely /r/conspiracy turned from a place to discuss MK-ULTRA and UFOs to a place where people talked anti-Democratic Party politics non-stop. Personally I feel like a lot of it was organized astroturf, not even necessarily from inside the US.
I think reddit realized that having prominent subs posting photos of 14 year old girls wasn’t something they wanted to be in their public image at all
It’s basically a non-starter; all “free speech absolutist” websites are. I think Moot said that 4chan didn’t make any money because they were radioactive to advertisers. Voat died because they couldn’t attract advertisers. The remaining right-wing social media sites are all running at a loss as far as anyone can determine.
I don’t feel like reddit became hostile to conservatives as much as conservatives who were hostile showed up
Maybe a bad choice of words on my part. I 100% agree that conservatives basically invaded the site during the leadup to the 2016 election and proceeded to harass the existing user base until the admins were forced to step in. Even then the admins did the minimum they possibly could and slow-walked everything. Conservatives got every opportunity to course-correct and basically refused.
A lot of Reddit is hostile to conservatives now and they definitely earned that ire.
I’m not sure if /r/conservative even existed before ~2015.
That sub was created Jan 25, 2008. Interestingly enough, it seems
/r/christianitywas created at the same time. I don’t remember anyone being aware of either sub - much less caring about them - prior to/r/the_donald. Reddit was pretty fine with conservative subs before they started showing up in everybody’s gaming and knitting subs calling everybody cucks and baby murderers.Personally I feel like a lot of it was organized astroturf, not even necessarily from inside the US.
Everything about the genesis of
/r/the_donaldfeels like organized to me. That shit came out of nowhere. If I had to guess, it’s something similar to Steve Bannon’s strategy to target gamers and the gamergate fiasco.
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.
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.The tankies that made Lemmy are bad too, it’s why I went with a Kbin instance after looking into options. Luckily thanks to Federation it’s easy to connect with users across instances of both.
