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.
The first big migration happened to Voat when fatpeoplehate was banned.
Yeah, assholes.
Anyone that left Reddit just because they couldn’t belittle and demean people online is an asshole.
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 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.
That sounds like an argument against immigration too
Just replace culture with labor market.
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.
I migrated to Voat over the AMA stuff, and noped the fuck out about 4 days later.
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:
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.
Holy shit, that’s bad. Who would want to be liable for hosting deplorable stuff like that?
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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, along with the assumption that reddit doesn’t improve their app, which will probably be forced onto spez.
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!
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.
I think most of the answers to your questions can be answered by the question that this comment section is responding to, to understand the framing that I’m commenting in:
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
But, this is the first and last Reddit related thread that I plan on participating in, so I’ll be cheering with you, if we ever get the miracle of reddit evaporating. Although, I would be worried where they would all end up.
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.
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.
your ridiculous all or nothing speculation
How is it ridiculous? It’s my 2 cent opinion, lightly founded in observation of when this happened several times in the past, with reddit and several other platforms, to a question, in a forum of less that 1k people, that requires speculation about the future.
Are you going to downvote all of the people saying it will succeed? Wtf? What is the correct answer to this question? And who’s allowed to give it? There’s not a correct or incorrect answer here, just a bunch of idiots guessing. If you don’t understand that everyones opinion for this answer is fairly worthless here, then you’re emotional and/or tribalistic. Feel free to influence the future with downvotes though. I’ll continue enjoying reading what people have to say.
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.
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 downvote
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
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.
This. The community I’ve seen on Lemmy has been way better than the cesspool voat became
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
deleted by creator
Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn’t even there.
This 100%, and the beauty of Lemmy, is that bigots and racists 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
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.
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?
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?
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
.moeAt 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!
I tried voat. Waaaay too racist.
I remember visiting them back whenever the FatPeopleHate debacle was happening and there was already a stupid amount of racism and misogyny on the site. I remember some weird masculinity sub posting stupid images with text inundated with Photoshop effects and whatnot, formatted such that it read like “GIVE YOUR A CHANCE BALLS!” next to a smiling Bill Cosby punching a tiger’s dick off or some shit.
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’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.
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
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’
I have no love for tankies and detest them, but there is a key fundamental difference. Tankies by definition simp for communist or formerly communist regimes and ignore the authoritarian crackdowns and human rights abuses.
Nazis are in favor of the human rights abuses and want genocides. They have a racial superiority complex and desire an ethnostate.
One group ignores and makes excuses for detestable behavior. The other celebrates and advocates for the detestable behavior. It’s a very important difference. I don’t like either, but a tankie isn’t going to try and kill me for being an undesirable. They just won’t defend me if the government unfairly takes action against me or imprisons me.
Depends on your flavour of tankie. I’ve met many who are pro-uyghur genocide and think the holodomor was a good thing.
Certainly, but like you say that’s a flavor of tankie, not a defining trait.
Technology can be used by anyone for good or evil regardless of the morality of the creator.
Even if the devs were literal Nazis, someone could just hard fork the software, and everyone could switch and continue on with their day. That’s why free software is beautiful.
Not saying I feel one way or the other, but complaining someone doesn’t dislike one group enough because they dislike another group more is sort of a weird argument. “I bet you’d feel differently if we were talking about something else entirely, you hypocrit.” doesn’t really hold up.
equal levels of shit imo
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.
Y’know…it matters, but it doesn’t. Technically they wouldn’t have to let a neo-Nazi instance play with others if they didn’t want to, and come to that they could take the same route as Truth Social and just close it off from the rest of the Fediverse.
And thats relevant how?
It’s very relevant to the discussion, literally not even slightly off topic. Voat admins supported horrible shit, Lemmy’s do too.
If this is to be believed, I have no opinion on it but it is definitely relevant. Debate the claim all you want.
The difference is, VOAT was a single website, whos owners could do anything they wanted and enforce their horrible shit. Lemmy is not controlled by the people that created it, by its very nature it cant be. So it doesn’t matter what they believe, it is completely irrelevant to how Lemmy functions.
Maybe you are thinking of Lemmygrad.ml. The ML there stands for Marxist-Leninist (just kidding, I think). Lemmy.ml is free software tankies. I’m one of those myself, so it must be ok ;).
insert “nobody cares” meme
Many certainly care.
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 .
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.
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
