Is Lemmy more likely to succeed than Voat? Why or why not?
Is Lemmy more likely to succeed than Voat? Why or why not?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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 .
Reddit was still functional when Voat gained popularity. Now, Reddit is self-destructing, so many people have no choice but to leave.
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.
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.
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.
This is just the start of Reddit's board going for the big money. It's at odds with a volunteer modded site and volunteer created content. Mods aren't going to be happy to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just the first exposure of this conflict. As more mods wonder why they are doing this for free just so what's his name gets rich, more will abandon Reddit and come to Lemmy.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moves towards Voat were primarily sparked by the banning of various conspiracy and negatively oriented subreddits (e.g. fatpeoplehate). This association meant people assumed the Voat community was all made up of people from such communities, which in turn meant the site only really appealed to a small subset of the Reddit userbase.
This time around Reddit has annoyed a broader section of the userbase and the move is not associated strongly with any particular group or ideology so I think alternative sites now have a better chance of building a community that will attract others in the long term.
The main difference is that there was basically no reason to leave Reddit for an alternative. Yes, there was speculation that something bad might happen, but everyone stayed on Reddit.
This time there are major reasons to leave, and there are plenty of content creators who are willing to use Lemmy (and have already jumped ship).
Time will tell, and if Lemmy is still this active in 3 months we'll know it has staying power, even if it's for a more niche audience. But I know I've been having more fun on Lemmy over the past week or two than I did on Reddit for the past year or so.
holy shit i remember voat.
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.
I think the federated nature of Lemmy/kbin will be what keeps it going. It’s not an all or nothing approach but rather many pieces coming together to make something truly interesting. I’m sure there will be plenty of growing pains and drama, but the Lemmy-verse is a community built by the community.