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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don’t know, I was there in the beginning. I think it died because it had no real content, compared to reddit. And, all anyone talked about was reddit, or reposted stuff from reddit, just like we’re seeing here. I think this might stick a bit better because reddit is way bigger than it was back then, so even if the same super small % of users came over, it would still be quite a bit more content.

For comparison of how negligible all the Lemmy fediverse is, there are ~40k active users this month. Reddit has over 50 million active users. So, that’s around 0.1% of reddit users. Literally 99.9% of reddit are not here.

I think it’s probably doomed. It’ll never overtake reddit. But, it’ll be a nice, quiet, alternative.

edit: Here’s a quick litmus test for all the downvoters (I guess “correct” answers only here!). How many times have you gone to reddit today?

edit: I was part of this attempted migration, not the hate one. This isn’t the first blackout for reddit being shitty.

edit: I humbly apologize for my personal, speculative, opinion about the unknowable future. The downvotes have made me realize my math was wrong, my opinion is wrong, and I am wrong. My corrected opinion is that Lemmy will overtake Meta, Mastadon, Twitter, and Google (wtf is reddit!?), and every upvote will be worth $1000, making everyone rich! Or, we can have fun guessing, and wait and see how things go. I hope they go well!

Oh it certainly wasn’t free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.

I think the other Motorheads did a fair job of explaining.

The Lemmy devs and admins of lemmy.ml are pro-China tankies, aren’t they?

Relevant Dead Kennedys

If you ignore all the tankies, it’s great!

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:

1. 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.
2. Server instability. Crashes were frequent and the site went through significant downtime because it had received the Reddit hug of death.
3. 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.

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.

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.

You can find constant activity by searching New>All>Comments.

Nonstop stream of stuff.

I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s ultimately up to the admins of instances to keep an eye on those tiny communities.

Diversity is important, even for speech you don’t agree with – That is the beauty of democracy.

Good point. I know SEO isn’t the be all and end all in a federated world, but if we do want this place to grow we do have to make it easy to find.

Both ‘Lemmy’ and ‘kbin’ aren’t the most memorable names

Who’s Lemmy?