No Stupid Questions

I think a lot of folks are missing the critical flaw with Voat, you had to be voated up to be able to participate or create communities.

Thus, as right wing nuttos joined the platform as first they decided who could make a lot of comments, communities and posts.

So you as Reddit user, tired of Reddit moderation or TOS decide to open a community on Voat but you cant.

To open your community you would have to participate and dance with the nutties that couldnt stop dropping hard n words left and right.

Im all for free speech but I dont want to have to actively participe in their crapshow to be able to get rights to be able to do basic user actions. Worst of all is that you had to pander as downvoats would ruin your chance at opening your own place that wasnt just a nazi summercamp for regards.

Also with nazi speech being the main attraction every normal person would nope the fuck out of there. I did as well, no need to fill my mind with toxicity.

In the past, Reddit alternatives pretty much existed only for the least savory people (i.e. nazis)

Now Reddit has caused an exodus of good users, a bit different.

~~Trump~~ Traitor 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't think Lemmy will have the same fate as Voat. Voat was just loonies going...well....loose. This time, its all of Reddit users.

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.