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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

I tried voat, it was a hell site. Then I went to empeopled who had crypto rewards for posting (never actually paid out) and it stayed very small and was eventually closed down indefinitely.

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).

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. It’s chill by comparison and commenting is fun. I see myself sticking around.

This. The community I’ve seen on Lemmy has been way better than the cesspool voat became

Turns out when you start out as a place for Nazis pushed out of Reddit, you stay nazish

The decentralization is what makes it hard to go down entirely, but a key difference between federation and full decentralization is that while lemmy allows the servers to share content they (crucially) don’t share users, and sharing can be controlled by each instance. So if there is a group of people who frankly aren’t nice to be around they can simply be cut off from the rest.

I’m not quite sure if lemmy allows communities to migrate instances at this point, but even if that is not possible federation is still a way to allow some parts to die while others survive.

Pretty sure Voat was based off the opensource version of Reddit. Which is basically old reddit with non of the Spam protection built into it.

For more explanation regarding the problem with free speech platforms, I’ll point to Mike Masnick’s Twitter speedrun he offered to Elon Musk ( on Techdirt ) which is a funny and useful explantion of why free speech quickly breaks down.

When the US federal government was talking about free speech platforms (largely because hate speech some officials agreed with was getting censored on Twitter), I had proposed that the US government could sponsor a free-speech platform just to remind us what happens when a platform goes unmoderated, and any time they want to take chunks out of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we could look at that and decide yes, indeed, let’s not force everything else to turn into that nightmare.

Edit: Fixed Markup. I hope

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.

Hence the name Lemmy.

Even if a bunch of instances follow each other off a cliff, there’s still going to be plenty who didn’t join that group that will survive.