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.

Lemmy is not a "free speech" platform, unlike Voat. It can be moderated. Offending instances in the Fediverse can be blocked and all that stuff. As long as the moderators do their job, they can filter everything they want to filter, just like Reddit.

The more interesting question with Lemmy is if the federation will actual have any advantage in the long run, as cutting other instances off is the easiest way to moderate them. Which than in turn means the users have to hop between server, which is annoying and will in turn will lead to more centralization again.

For the time being I see Lemmy not as "The Solution™", but more as a "not-Reddit". It can and will run into all the problems as ever other Web forum will.

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.

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.

I quess it'll be Lemmy/Kbin, or at least for me. What is voat? ;) (never heard of it until this post)

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.

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.

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

Lemmy is already doing much, much better than Voat. Less Nazis too (so far).

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.

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.

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 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.