Is Lemmy more likely to succeed than Voat? Why or why not?
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.
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:
Chances are they'd be screaming it into the void with how fast their instance would get defederated though. :P
IIRC Voat also added the option to block communities, which prevented the hateful ones from showing up on the front page.
That obviously didn't help...
Well yeah their front page was empty.
Holy shit, that’s bad. Who would want to be liable for hosting deplorable stuff like that?
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.
Huh. That archive looks just like I'm looking at /pol.
What a cesspool. I can't help but laugh.
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.
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 disruptive to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users, and things would settle back to normal. 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.
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.
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.
Oh it certainly wasn't free speech. Tons of users trolling neo-nazis got banned.
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
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!
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.
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!
edit: Oh man, I'm out of breath. We might need help. How about every single lemmy user helps us! That's only about 1,300 people we each have to ask! Well, 1,299 for me. At 4 seconds each, that's should only be about 1.5 hours. See you all soon!
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:
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.
It is Random chance.
I have read your comments;
"I think it's probably doomed. It'll never overtake reddit. But, it'll be a nice, quiet, alternative."
No one knows if it is doomed.
You have to start somewhere but you can't expect a platform that has seen an huge influx of users the past weeks to immediately operate on the scale of what Reddit does.
"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!"
Who is claiming the above?
The fun thing is that Mastodon is in your list and before the fuckery with Twitter it didn't really have traction.
Why can't lemmy/Kbin be the same in a year from now?
The problem for Reddit, is that it made people actually look for alternatives. It is stupid for a competitor to make it's customers aware of the competition, but Reddit did exactly that.
Maybe it flops, maybe it stays "niche", maybe it explodes in popularity.
I think it is indeed random chance and just being at the right place at the right time.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 downvoted. That's why I love the transparency here
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.
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
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
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.' lol
If there is no unique culture/point to this platform and it's just reddit 2.0 then people will simply go back to reddit.
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.
So, luckily you can still be connected to the tankies you don't like?
Then don't federate with that server?
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.
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've never gotten settled into an app faster, and I still have 5 days left before I wipe my reddit account
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.
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.
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?
At least then we can just defederate with their instance, yeah?
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
.moeI 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.
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?
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.
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.
preach
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
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.
insert "nobody cares" meme
Many certainly care.
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 ;).
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.
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 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 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.
That distinction is huge. Voat also became the haven for jailbait, fatpeoplehate, and other notorious communities.
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.
@zeppo@lemmy.world wrote:
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
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.
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.
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.
I think that they are, or at least, they're more open to the idea of it.
One of the problems that Voat had was that it launched as a "free speech" service, and was popularised at the time when people were leaving Reddit because they were banned, or had problems with the moderation. For the most part, this didn't really affect users as much as it did troublemakers, and as such, they all ended up flocking to voat, causing it to become rather a cesspool.
That compounded in on itself, and now it's also not the kind of place that you want to launch a new community on, just because of both the reputation of the site, and the audience involved.
By comparison, Lemmy isn't as limited to one site, but was also popularised at a time when the problem was less moderation and free speech focused, and people leaving because they no longer wanted to support the site, owing to what the administration was doing with it. The people leaving tend to be a bit more diverse.
It also helps that Lemmy technically isn't a single site, but more of an interconnected set of sites, that you can join by running a piece of software. Anyone can spin one up, and disconnect from ones that they do not wish to see. If one instance is particularly nasty, it can just be left to its own devices.
Lemmy is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).
If you ignore all the tankies, it's great!
At least from the threads I've read, there's been a harsh pushback against marxist-leninists and the likes. Even more so as their home instance is defederated from all "major players".
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).
Before it was called VOAT, it was WhoaVerse, and back then it had possibilities. It then became a liferaft for people with racist opinions. There were a few who were OK, but most were very extremist. I abandoned that ship.
While I see conservatives here, I also see moderates and liberals. And 99% of the posts aren't about politics. Of course the 400-lb gorilla news stories, such as the Reddit issue is front row and center and that's understandable. But I also see people discussing other things, such as the situation in Russia with the Wagner group, but there are also people discussing science is /c/Science.
Will I agree with everyone here? Will everyone here agree with me? No to both of those. But as long as there is a chance for good discussion, and an exchange of ideas, this place has a real chance of being lively. Reddit won't go down in a day.
In 199-something, I was watching (I think the Screensavers with Leo Laporte) talking about how this new search engine called Google was very optimized. My browser opened up to Yahoo! and it took forever... and I switched back then to the new speed demon. When I connected to the Internet, it was like magic; a page sitting there waiting for me to type in a search query. Today Google is the top dog (and I use duckduckgo now, but that's another story). But Yahoo didn't fade away. Yahoo still gets visitors (about 5 billion per day, but that's small change compared to Google's 68 billion).
What's Google and Yahoo got to do with Lemmy? Once upon a time, Digg was the top dog, and Reddit was the upstart. Now Reddit's the big dog, and Lemmy's an upstart. I believe Lemmy can make history repeat itself.
I don't want "feasible alternative to reddit" tbh. Fediverse is its own thing and it's whatever we make it. We have tools to decide what content we see on our end. We have instances that all have slightly different vibes. Lemmy is just a multiverse, populated by people. So far most people here are cool.
If there becomes an instance that is breeding hatred, they get defederated. The end user can then decide to make an acct there if they wanna see that stuff.
That may not resonate with some people I guess. I really like it's simple organic nature and it allows for flexibility.
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.
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.
Yea I'm not too good at explaining things. 😅
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.
I quess it'll be Lemmy/Kbin, or at least for me. What is voat? ;) (never heard of it until this post)
Voat originally emerged in 2015 during the height of the Ellen Pao scandal that swept Reddit, and quickly garnered some Reddit refugees, particularly those from /r/fatpeoplehate, a subreddit dedicated to hating on the obese.
It almost died that year for three key reasons:
Voat soon became a vessel for Reddit's undesirable communities that Spez had purged. The moment he banned subreddits like /r/n*****, /r/c***town and other subreddits dedicated to glorifying racial hatred, they flocked to Voat and turned it into a white supremacist hellhole. Another thing that spurred the change was Stormfront (a white supremacist/neo-nazi forum) being cut off by their hosting provider.
What ultimately killed the site was COVID-19. A major investor in the site pulled out during the pandemic and after months of failing to secure funding, the owner just gave up and closed the site down on Christmas Day, 2020.
I can attest to this. I went to Voat briefly, shit was wild.
As a site it had merit but unfortunately it ended up scooping up a good number of the forced exiles from Reddit and not nearly as many normal users. Content had a big skew.
The worst part about Voat is that every single rational discussion was derailed by people throwing around slurs everywhere.
It's like the site operated on an alternative to Godwin's Law, but instead of comparisons to Nazis and Adolf Hitler, the probability of a discussion descending into a shit-slinging contest of racist or antisemitic slurs approaches 100% instead.
Voat was an unconditional "free speech" platform that wanted to be an alternative to reddit a few years ago. I think it took about a week until they had to ban the first communities on their site. The_Donald, QAnon and Gamergate was pretty big over there at first and it gradually turned into a neo Nazi platform. It was easily one of the worst sites around when it died.
It was the new Reddit but free speech so full of racists fascists etc
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.
TrumpTraitor supporting subs have already been called out and others urged to defederize with them (is that the right phrasing? I'm still new to this).For that reason alone, I feel like Lemmy will-at the very least--last longer than Voat as a viable reddit alternative.
*Defederate
Defecate them out
Defenestrate them!
Thank you!
I don't think that's a good idea. It's ultimately up to the admins of instances to keep an eye on those tiny communities.
Diversity is important, even for speech you don't agree with -- That is the beauty of democracy.
I disagree.
"Diversity" does not include--nor allow--bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc.
Sorry, but that's not diversity; that's ignorance and hatred.
Yes, if they're being bigotted, feel free to shut them down.
i just hope you endorse your anti-bigotry for all :3
but if they're just a conservative fella following the rules and is being respectful, they have a right to remain.
That's my entire point.
That's correct. If you can find a conservative person who isn't bigoted, racist, or misogynistic, then they're more than welcome.
Moves towards Voat were primarily sparked by the banning of various conspiracy and negatively oriented subreddits (e.g. fatpeoplehate). This association meant people assumed the Voat community was all made up of people from such communities, which in turn meant the site only really appealed to a small subset of the Reddit userbase.
This time around Reddit has annoyed a broader section of the userbase and the move is not associated strongly with any particular group or ideology so I think alternative sites now have a better chance of building a community that will attract others in the long term.
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.
Need to be careful though; just like with the web and email, it can have standards capture where a few corporations control the standard and the main clients used to access the service.
And just like Gopher, Lemmy could conceivably just fade away via neglect.
Personally, I’d love to see someone create an ActivityPub interface for Gopher so it could have its overdue resurgence :D
Voat was a racist, fascist hell-hole where the most terminally-online and unlikeable people on the internet were corralled together. It was the social equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
Lemmy seems to be insulated from Voat's fate because it was a hard left-turn in the face of a platform implosion.
Oh my god I forgot voat existed. Isn't that a far right hell hole now?
It's gone now, thankfully but yes it turned into an alt right paradise before it went kaputt.
There was one Voat. When the one Voat goes bust, Voat goes bust. Like any enterprise, it's failure can be attributed, at least in part, to poor management.
There are many Lemmy's. If one Lemmy collapses, another Lemmy can take its place. The individual instances might be less stable than a centralized social media site, like Voat was, but when federated the whole unit is more resilient than centralized social media.
The one problem with this is that most of the content does seem to be pretty centered on only a couple instances (lemmy.world mostly, with some also scattered in beehaw.org, Lemmy.ml, and sh.itjust.works). If one of those goes down, especially lemmy.world, it will cripple this place pretty bad. Maybe if we one day get a way to backup or export user profiles and communities to other instances, but until then, I think this place has a centralization problem brewing as well.
It's already gone down. Beehaw has almost most other large instances defederated because of Beehaw's admins having beef.
Yep, worst case some big lemmy communities go bust, but then people can readily just go to other instances.
Hence the name Lemmy.
Even if a bunch of instances follow each other off a cliff, there’s still going to be plenty who didn’t join that group that will survive.
Wait, what does the name Lemmy mean?
guessing they're referring to Lemmings, who were mistakenly believed to follow each other off cliffs
Oh, I guess that makes sense in context... But why would the site be named that? I guess I'm missing something.
Lemming. They're like giant hamster or small woodchucks. Rodents.
Famous for group suicides.
Is it named lemmy because... we all follow each other or something?
I think it's because even if a bunch of instances follow each other off a cliff, there’s still going to be plenty who didn’t join that group that will survive.
Huh, I guess the survival part just isn't really what I would associate with lemmings, it's the following each other blindly part (even if it turned out to be the result of a fake documentary).
I thought it was a Motorhead thing.
If you like to gamble, I tell you I'm your man,/You win some, lose some, it's all the same to me,/The pleasure is to play, etc.
Something about the transient nature of these sites.--
Lemmy's FOSS and federated nature are its biggest advantages.
This is just the start of Reddit's board going for the big money. It's at odds with a volunteer modded site and volunteer created content. Mods aren't going to be happy to do unpaid work just so the CEO can get rich. This API stuff is just the first exposure of this conflict. As more mods wonder why they are doing this for free just so what's his name gets rich, more will abandon Reddit and come to Lemmy.
The people who left reddit for voat where those whose subreddits were banned, such as farpeoplehate and shit. Niche communities.
With lemmy the migration is from a much wider number of communities.
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.
After trying Voat and Rukkus a while back, Lemmy seems very different in a good way. Those other efforts felt like libertarian tech bro attempts that imploded under the weight of their own dumbness.
I think due to the decentralised and open source nature, it‘s much better and even if some instances die the project persists. I‘m in IT and it looks like a solid project which has me excited and thinking about how I could contribute. My feelings coming here were also hope for better and a freedom from corporations.
Voat was just another corporation out to make money off hate I guess.
I think the federated nature of Lemmy/kbin will be what keeps it going. It’s not an all or nothing approach but rather many pieces coming together to make something truly interesting. I’m sure there will be plenty of growing pains and drama, but the Lemmy-verse is a community built by the community.
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.
A lot of folks already pointed out Voat's main issues, but the biggest thing here is that any sort of open source thing like this can't really totally fail if anyone is still using it. Voat was still centralized if I'm not mistaken.
I think Lemmy will be more successful because I hadn't heard of Voat before I got on Lemmy.
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.
Who's Lemmy?
Lemmy is God!
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
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.
God. All I can think about is how this feels like a Voat situation. I really really hope not, but I have a bad feeling. I haven't seen a ton of activity since I came in, but maybe I need to look harder.
At least I found mastodon. I feel like that could blow up.
You can find constant activity by searching New>All>Comments.
Nonstop stream of stuff.