Most definitely!

I was one of the first users on voat and one of the first banned users on voat. It had horrible admins who were way out of their depth and a posting system that could be exploited. If your account reaches a certain amount of downvotes, it is automatically locked, meaning that bands of users travel from profile-to-profile, destroying any other profiles they dislike.

also, the lack of diversity killed Voat, having nothing but Neo-Nazi and extremist content. This is still a problem that Lemmy faces, where instead of dealing with disagreeable speech, it’s easier to defederate whole instances.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Voat was super duper super racist.

removed by mod

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.

Oh my god I forgot voat existed. Isn’t that a far right hell hole now?

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.

Bro voat was an absolute shit show. The comparison isn’t even there.

I think Lemmy will be more successful because I hadn’t heard of Voat before I got on Lemmy.