Hey people, I’m loving Lemmy and I’ve become a evangelizer to friends. I think reddit and Twitter are going to be completely replaced in the mainstream by their Fediverse-counter parts, and we’ll all be much happier (minus maybe 2 people). But I think back to last big reddit controversy when Voat was floated as an alternative to reddit-- I hardly used it, I came right back to Reddit because that’s where the good content was. I hope the majority of our former reddit comrades join us in the Fediverse, at least eventually… Either way, I’ll never be going back.
Voat’s primary userbase were people that were mad at Reddit admins for removing subreddits that propagated hate.(Fatpeoplehate, the_donald, coontown, etc.) Because most of the content there was stuff that would’ve been in those banned subreddits, that made the site openly hostile to all but the worst kind of people. For as loud as they were, they simply didn’t have the userbase density to keep the platform alive.
Lemmy’s crowd comes again from people mad at reddits admins for making another decision that they believed was correct for the company at the time, but the distributed nature means that a high density of users that can be advertised to isn’t nearly as important to keep it online.
Ultimately only time will tell if federated services properly replace reddit for us, but I’m with you in that I’m never going back.
This is the key difference, VOAT was basically reddit but with a different owner and full of people who decided they wanted to spew hatred without consequences. Lemmy is so different in all aspects it does not even compare.
If we look at what Spez has in store for Reddit, then we can expect even more people moving to the fediverse. During the protests he let it slip that the next big step he wants to take is trying to monetize subreddits. In the mean time Lemmy and Kbin together seems to be hitting the critical mass of users necessary to have a sustainable growth. The biggest limiting factor right now is probably tech. The architecture is still in its infancy, users don’t have intuitive tools to find communities and mods probably don’t have all the tools they need for moderations.
Yeah I’ve been floating across instances for about a couple weeks now and it seems to get better every day. And the apps are making very rapid progress. This might not be the mass exodus from Reddit yet but I think we’ll be in good shape for the next Reddit misstep. It’s not gonna happen overnight but I’m optimistic for our long term success.
Sounds like they could have just joined 9gag then. No need to make a new platform for that sort of garbage.
I remember Voat. I didn’t even realize that it shutdown… I guess that says enough about it. I’m hoping for some growth on a new platform. Even if it never kills reddit, rather brings enough people to keep lemmy going strong and providing an alternative for those who prefer something else. I wasn’t familiar with idea of federated service before looking into lemmy (never really looked into mastodon or the likes). Still not sure how I feel about it for easy growth but I hope to see it soon.
