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?

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.world
      41·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      I was thinking, didn’t I try a reddit alternative a while back? Yep, it was Voat. Looked around a bit over a couple days, not much content and the vast majority very questionable. Never went back, let alone signed up.

    • petrescatraian@libranet.de
      1·
      2 years ago

      @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.

      @ilex

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • Nahvi@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • zyS7@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 years ago

          I remember it mostly the way you do. It certainly wasn’t conservative in any sense of the word. Socially, /r/atheism was 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/jailbait and /r/watchpeopledie were 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_donald took 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.