Voat was actually pretty nice back in the day, smaller than Reddit but has its own niche communities, until the Pao thing happened, Voat committed to absolute free speech, and subs like FatPeopleHate and other subs banned from Reddit moved there, and then slowly it turned worse than /pol/ and the full front page was literally covered in Nazi slogans and N-word.
Then nobody wants to host such a horrid pool of toxic sludge anymore, and they shut down.
I think voat was a, and this is cliche phrasing, boil the frog situation by Reddit.
Reddit kicked all of those worst people off and they migrated to voat before tightening again and pushing a lot of good faith users off. I remember being in a wave of people trying voat but when my wave arrived, the worst elements of Reddit had beaten us to it and had critical mass.
I think the fediverse situation is somewhat different since a large wave of good faith redditors have been pushed off in the last few weeks, and found Lemmy without it having a critical mass of awful people. At the end of the month, when 3PA shut down I’m sure there will be another wave of redditfugees and when they arrive, they’ll find this place as it is now so won’t be immediately repelled, unlike how I was repelled from voat.
It’s a lot more challenging to have that happen with federation, I think. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be actively vigilant of course, but there are a lot more centers they’d have to seize control of individually.
We have to be vigilant though. Can’t let what happened to Voat happen again.
What happened to voat?
Voat was actually pretty nice back in the day, smaller than Reddit but has its own niche communities, until the Pao thing happened, Voat committed to absolute free speech, and subs like FatPeopleHate and other subs banned from Reddit moved there, and then slowly it turned worse than /pol/ and the full front page was literally covered in Nazi slogans and N-word.
Then nobody wants to host such a horrid pool of toxic sludge anymore, and they shut down.
I think voat was a, and this is cliche phrasing, boil the frog situation by Reddit.
Reddit kicked all of those worst people off and they migrated to voat before tightening again and pushing a lot of good faith users off. I remember being in a wave of people trying voat but when my wave arrived, the worst elements of Reddit had beaten us to it and had critical mass.
I think the fediverse situation is somewhat different since a large wave of good faith redditors have been pushed off in the last few weeks, and found Lemmy without it having a critical mass of awful people. At the end of the month, when 3PA shut down I’m sure there will be another wave of redditfugees and when they arrive, they’ll find this place as it is now so won’t be immediately repelled, unlike how I was repelled from voat.
I miss the good old days with the containment subs for the retards.
I think Lemmy is an evolution of that, as now we have containment instances instead.
It will be good if they make their own instances.
Became a hotbed for trolls, open racists, actual neo nazis, etc
It’s a lot more challenging to have that happen with federation, I think. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be actively vigilant of course, but there are a lot more centers they’d have to seize control of individually.