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.
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.
If that showed up on some Lemmy instance, you’d still have people saying “Defederation is bad! Marketplace of ideas! Just block them and move on! It’s just one person!” :sigh:
That’s not bigotry. That’s flat out lunacy at this stage.
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.
I only had to read the post title before noping out. Jfc that’s bad.
Same. I don’t even understand how you can hold such comically evil fucking viewpoints… Like, Disney villains aren’t that atrocious.
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 ill-fitted to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users. 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 very 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.
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.
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.
It turns out that people stop valuing things like “free speech” and “tolerance” when people try to use those values to force them to tolerate assholes.
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 think we’re already seeing that a lot of the groups are going to be left-leaning, and since the system is decentralized by design, it’s not going to be attractive to people that are right-wing and have authoritarian views. E.g., they won’t be able to force other people to see what they say. (Remember the shitstorm of whining when TheDonald was removed from the front page so that 99% of people didn’t see it anymore?)
I’m Iranian. Lemmy isn’t even filtered in Iran, it’s readily accessible
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.
And a lot of the users Reddit decided to alienate are mods…Aka the ones who put in the effort to grow their subs in the first place…
Voat was the worst of Reddit while this exodus has the chance to be the best of Reddit.
Oh it certainly wasn’t free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.
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.
I think it’s probably doomed. It’ll never overtake reddit. But, it’ll be a nice, quiet, alternative.
Why is it doomed? I think if it becomes a small alternative to reddit, it’s a win. Killing reddit was never on the table - it’s just too big and mainstream for that to happen (see Facebook and Twitter). Will it be more successful than Voat? If we can sustain the community/activity that we have now, then yes.
Here’s a quick litmus test for all the downvoters. How many times have you gone to reddit today?
I’ll go over that. It’s probably a week since I last went to reddit (this includes teddit and those other ways to go there). I don’t even have an account or reddit app anymore. All the reddit news I get are from here and discord. Last time i went there was to delete my accounts and use Power Delete.
I haven’t logged into reddit since overwriting and deleting 12 years of content. So, I dunno man. I also haven’t logged into Twitter since Musk took over.
I think that you’re right, that reddit won’t die. But I think that things like this, if not this exact thing, are going to be reasonable alternatives for many people.
Honestly - I agreed with the first paragraph of your comment and was going to upvote, but all the edits made me reconsider; this is a place to share our thoughts, not worry about how many people up/down-ticked our comment.
Throw out a thought and forget the “karma”!
I suspect your downvotes are due to your ridiculous all or nothing speculation. No one can base the future on what’s happening right now. Yet you’re speculating it’s already failed. What a shit take.
We don’t know if the fediverse will succeed yet on a larger scale. Sometimes migration is instant, like with digg, sometimes it takes time, like with Facebook exodus which is continuing as i type this. Not to mention people weren’t prepared for this migration so none of the tools to make it a replacement have been in place. But now people are actively working on building out the community. Maybe we’ll know in a couple years if this is a successful endeavor on a Reddit type scale. But we don’t know yet.
The reasons were less tangible before. Taking away popular apps will have a much bigger impact than some subreddit drama.
Taking away popular apps to a social network that doesn’t have any yet? What?
We would have to see the user stats related to reddit app usage, to talk in an informed way about this.
edit: Here’s a quick litmus test. How many times have you gone to reddit today?
How many times have you gone to reddit today?
None.
Ok, now let’s ask the 99.9% of Redditors that aren’t here. You take the left 25,000,000, I’ll take the right, meet back in 5. Go!
edit: Oh man, I’m out of breath. We might need help. How about every single lemmy user helps us! That’s only about 1,300 people we each have to ask! Well, 1,299 for me. At 4 seconds each, that’s should only be about 1.5 hours. See you all soon!
Should we care that other people still use reddit?
Do you have to chose one or the other?
Why are people so hell bent to “take over” Reddit?
I found an alternative in Kbin and Lemmy that suits my needs and focuses on user experience and growing communities instead of growing the pockets of a handful of people.
I decide to not use Reddit anymore because the upper echelon can go fuck themselves.
Is it so weird to have a set of values and stop using a service/product, because they cross the boundaries one has set for themselves?
I have used Reddit for more than a decade and I haven’t missed it all.
I am here because I enjoy it and not because I have a deeper desire for Reddit to evaporate out of nowhere.
What are you on about? Yeah obviously people still visit Reddit, it was stupid of you to ask in the first place. I thought this kind of idiocy would’ve stayed at Reddit.
edit: I was part of this attempted migration, not the hate one. This isn’t the first blackout for reddit being shitty.
It’s the first one where average users were affected beyond the blackout, though. Other than the alt-righters nobody wanted there and weren’t going to follow when they left. Patriots.win isn’t a real community either, it’s just constant Trump, Biden, and “democrats bad” content.
It’s the first one where average users were affected beyond the blackout, though.
I think this makes the very big assumption that the average user uses third party apps. All of the polls on reddit, that I saw, suggested this is not true. For example. If that’s true, then the average Redditor is only being inconvenienced by the blackout and related shenanigans.
Was there a wider poll that showed non-negligible third party usage?
You know third party apps can’t use the polls feature, right? Right?
I do not know how to solve this but the disagree = down vote thing has gone crazy. It seems to have become next to impossible to have a civil discussion online nowadays about an alternate opinions. It feels like everyone just wants to have their beliefs confirmed and never have their opinions questioned.
I’ve had plenty of civil discussions online where I had an alternate opinion from the zeitgeist. On Reddit.
Generally speaking, if you aren’t alt right scum, people are agreeable. If you believe people should be allowed to live how they want as long as it isn’t hurting people, and nobody should be treated differently because of an inherent, born characteristic, people may not be happy with your opinion but they’ll at least listen to you.
Or maybe up and downvotes are meaningless and karma has no value. I think it’s a way of polling opinion on a topic. Lemmy is not Reddit. Users have no accumulated karma, downvotes don’t hide comments and Post’s default comment sort is by New.
People are really bent out of shape with others disagreeing with them. You aren’t being silenced, you’re being polled and that’s not a problem.
Now if you are harassed because of it, that’s a different subject than a simple downvoted. That’s why I love the transparency here
tbh the culture here is reddit in its purest form right now. once they start sanitizing everything here again I’m out. One opinion allowed ONLY and if you dont align you’re a NAZI and FAR RIGHT TROLL
I’m seeing red whistles and hearing dog flags coming from you! Am I doing it right?
Perfect. ‘Downvote’ me too so you can really show it to me how WRONG I am.
If you want to see what happens if this culture permeates here just look at Mastodon. Negative growth, barely any interaction and it’s the same few people shouting into the void. I checked some mutuals who proudly announced they’d move to Mastodon and most haven’t posted anything this year. Still posting regularly on Twitter tho :clownface:
A lot of users here are the same, ‘move’ here to show they’re protesting and then stop posting in a few weeks or months and back to reddit.
Some clown mod made over 50 magazines/subs on kbin. Hasnt posted 1 comment since a little over a week. Bio reads: ‘Proud owner of xxx communities.’ lolIf there is no unique culture/point to this platform and it’s just reddit 2.0 then people will simply go back to reddit.
Having been called fascist, troll, sealion, and all manner of insults because I dared disagree – Yeah, you’re totally right.
People gotta learn to deal with speech they dislike or disagree with. That’s the beauty of democracy.
This is the least self aware post ever. You should learn to deal with speech you dislike instead of complaining about being called a fascist
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Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn’t even there.
This 100%, and the beauty of Lemmy, is that they can have their own Lemmy server, and servers for normal people can defaderate that. Keeping the shit show contained to their own bubble.
And it’s very much noticed in the feel of communication everywhere here.
So far in my first week, discussions here are much more civil than most spaces at Reddit.
Also, yes, I have run into a couple of douche canoes (like one guy making a thread “questioning” the concept of being trans), but they were just called out for their hateful nonsense and downvoted to oblivion by the 99% of the community, and their… ahem… “contributions” quickly disappeared. So the good people of these spaces seem to quickly clean up the trash that does wash up on this beach, and it’s very refreshing!
I definitely see myself enjoying Lemmy long term from here, regardless of what happens over at Reddit.
I had already deleted my reddit account before this happened. I just kept a few links to subs i lurked.
I have now deleted those links too, and haven’t visited reddit even for curiosity for a week.
And we already have Lore! (3 day no shitting guy)
I’ve never gotten settled into an app faster, and I still have 5 days left before I wipe my reddit account
I’d say yes. Lemmy isn’t just one community, it’s many different servers talking to one another. If one instance goes down, people can just go to another one.
Voat died because the owner ran out of funds to keep the site up. Unlike Lemmy, he didn’t allow people to donate to help with the costs.
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.
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.
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 with people. It’s chill here and commenting is fun. I see myself sticking around.
Same here, and I haven’t made the slightest effort to even find communities I’m interested in so far, either. I think there’s maybe 4 places I’m actually subbed to? For now I’ve been content to just sorta browse .world all and see what interesting communities/posts come up, and that’s been more than enough to keep me occupied content-wise. Sure, I’m gonna make a more concerted effort to find subs to by and large replace my communities on reddit at some point, but I’m actually pleasantly reminded of my earlier days browsing reddit (12 years ago now, which seems unreal) and just stumbling across groups I had no idea existed - especially when they have 🔥memes.
The only subs I’ve blocked so far are the German and French language onrs, as I literally can’t understand them lol
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.
Luckily thanks to Federation it’s easy to connect with users across instances of both.
So, luckily you can still be connected to the tankies you don’t like?
Then don’t federate with that server?
Ster Trek: Tha Federation Generation
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.
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).
They’re Nazis… What other rhetoric do they have?
At least then we can just defederate with their instance, yeah?
I glanced at the mod log today and someone who has been prominently and insistently posting hateful content had just been banned 2 minutes before. So, lemmy.world isn’t tolerating insulting nonsense themselves. As far as other servers, admins can choose to federate or not.
They are all decent folks over at .world ❤️
Awwww thank you. I love you friend!
Pao’s stint as CEO (under the orders of Spez and Ohanian), Voat was inundated with a mass exodus of
There is currently a nazi instance. Lots of instances have defederated from it. The instance name involves explosions and heads. Also apparently there’s a loli instance that a lot of instances have defederated from - that one ends in
.moe
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.
TrumpTraitor supporting subs have already been called out and others urged to defederize with them (is that the right phrasing? I’m still new to this).For that reason alone, I feel like Lemmy will-at the very least–last longer than Voat as a viable reddit alternative.
*Defederate
Defecate them out
Defenestrate them!
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.
I disagree.
“Diversity” does not include–nor allow–bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc.
Sorry, but that’s not diversity; that’s ignorance and hatred.
Yes, if they’re being bigotted, feel free to shut them down.
i just hope you endorse your anti-bigotry for all :3
but if they’re just a conservative fella following the rules and is being respectful, they have a right to remain.
Yes, if they’re being bigotted, feel free to shut them down.
That’s my entire point.
if they’re just a conservative fella following the rules and is being respectful, they have a right to remain.
That’s correct. If you can find a conservative person who isn’t bigoted, racist, or misogynistic, then they’re more than welcome.
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.
It’s already gone down. Beehaw has almost most other large instances defederated because of Beehaw’s admins having beef.
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.
Wait, what does the name Lemmy mean?
guessing they’re referring to Lemmings, who were mistakenly believed to follow each other off cliffs
I thought it was named after https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ihlVbZAPxRk lemmiwinks (South Park).
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.
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.
That distinction is huge. Voat also became the haven for jailbait, fatpeoplehate, and other notorious communities.
@zeppo@lemmy.world wrote:
being composed mainly of people from communities that were kicked off Reddit for breaking rules about hate speech and violence
Few people know that Lemmy was also created by people kicked off from Reddit for breaking rules on hate speech and violence. And racism.
Yet, indeed. The ability for you to set up a website for just about anything and have all the communities you like, is super cool. And it will clearly give Lemmy an upper hand in this.
The nice thing about this system is unlike a single website, we don’t have to worry about specific individuals in the same way. I can picture Lemmy ending up with 2-3 major networks and several smaller ones that operate as independent entities.
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.
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 .
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?
Lemmy’s community is much better than Voat’s. Voat existed to give a home to users who were too toxic even for Spez. Lemmy is pretty good at stopping that.
Turns out when you start out as a place for Nazis pushed out of Reddit, you stay nazish
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.
