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?
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Please see Rule 7 & do not come to this community ever again. Thanks. First member to get banned right here
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For more explanation regarding the problem with free speech platforms, I’ll point to Mike Masnick’s Twitter speedrun he offered to Elon Musk ([https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/](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.
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.
I think the other Motorheads did a fair job of explaining.
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.
Oh my god I forgot voat existed. Isn’t that a far right hell hole now?
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 is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).
If you ignore all the tankies, it’s great!
The leftists are why there are so few nazis.
Thankies are a very special kind of “leftist”.
The last century of History has shown that the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” isn’t really compatible with the autocracy that tankies love some much and many are so painfully close to fascists (with but a different set of slogans) that they end up loving the likes of Putin.
That said, they seem to have their own instance, whose admins seem very very keen on the whole Centralized Control aspect of things (a very tankie approach to managing speech) so they’re cutting themselves off from the rest of the Fediverse which does sound absolutelly fine (I for one am happy with people having their own circle-jerk safe-space separate from the rest - if it makes them happy whilst not causing problems for the rest then it furthers the whole “the greatest good for the greatest number” thing, IMHO).
Voat was super duper super racist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And we already have Lore! (3 day no shitting guy)
I still don’t know what kbin is.
Honestly though Lemmy needs a rename. The musical artist is significantly more popular and it screws up searches.
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
I propose we fuse them both into a new name: Lembin
Who’s Lemmy?
Lemmy Kilmister of the rock band Motorhead
Hmmm… I’ll check em out sometime.
Lol
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.
@[email protected] 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.
I think a lot of folks are missing the critical flaw with Voat, you had to be voated up to be able to participate or create communities.
Thus, as right wing nuttos joined the platform as first they decided who could make a lot of comments, communities and posts.
So you as Reddit user, tired of Reddit moderation or TOS decide to open a community on Voat but you cant.
To open your community you would have to participate and dance with the nutties that couldnt stop dropping hard n words left and right.
Im all for free speech but I dont want to have to actively participe in their crapshow to be able to get rights to be able to do basic user actions. Worst of all is that you had to pander as downvoats would ruin your chance at opening your own place that wasnt just a nazi summercamp for regards.
Also with nazi speech being the main attraction every normal person would nope the fuck out of there. I did as well, no need to fill my mind with toxicity.
Voat did a couple of things wrong, first they Atko attempted to attract people to his site during the Pao thing, people were looking for an alternative and Atko presented his site as faster as it’s written in C#, and has things to prevent powermods by having mod limits and brigading by having minimum points to comment.
What that means is that the normal people who went there to like things are turned off by the lack of content and went back to reddit, so the only one who stayed are the ones who are there to not like things(to put it lightly), and they get louder because they posted more about the things they not like, and since there is a barrier to entry, they just got more and more people who were there to not like things and pushed out all the original nice communities that were on voat, which turned the site into only a place for people to not like things.
So as long as we have people who like things and tell the people who are here to solely not like things to leave, it should be fine.
People seem super jazzed about the decentralized nature of Lemmy and other stuff in the “fediverse”. I don’t really understand how it works but it seems cool that Lemmy isn’t a single company/website. Can’t have a power tripping CEO or a board that panders to shareholders that way.
People over complicate federation. I write federated software so lemme break it down. Federation just means data sharing. When you post something on a federation enabled website it sends a copy of your post to everyone who follows you and tells their service to store your data in their database in addition to their own data. What this means is that you can’t just blow up a server to shut it down because everyone in the game has a copy.
