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?
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?
No, because Lemmy is not a platform, its a software that can be run on a server, and that server running the code is called an instance. The instance is where the platform is. An instance can communicate with other instances, which is called federation. Instances that are deemed problematic by another instance owner can become “defederated” meaning communication is cut off. One well known instance being defederated is lemmygrad.ml, which is an instance that promotes authoritarian-left political views. Another instance is exploding-heads.com (don’t know if I spelt it correctly, I don’t care), which has far-right content.
TLDR: Lemmy is not a singular platform, but an interconnected network of servers (instances). Lemmy will not “die” anytime soon, but certain instances can die.
I would argue that the federation is the platform.
This is the most confusing thing as a new user, and honestly might prove to be a real barrier to gaining additional users: Lemmy is confusing.
Reddit was simple: reddit is reddit, and then you have subcommunities in reddit, and that’s it. But Lemmy/Fediverse/kbin/mastodon/beehive/whatever term is being used, it gets really confusing in what the service im actually on even is or how it relates to these other services. Like, I’m currently talking through kbin.social/, but I don’t even know fully where I am or how kbin relates to all these other things exactly. Is Kbin just some sort of chat container for using lemmy instances, is it a lemmy instance itself, is it a specific group of instances, etc, I don’t clearly know.