Voat was created intentionally and specifically for the (mostly far-right) trolls too unsavory for Reddit. So, if Lemmy is not that, it'll have a head start.
No it wasn't. Voat was originally "Whoaverse", a reddit clone that the developer created as a school project. He literally copy-pasted the HTML/CSS from Reddit and then started gradually rebuilding some of the backend in C#. You can see the original version in the internet archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20140427060403/http://whoaverse.c...
He tried to get people to use it for a while, but since it was just a less-functional and empty Reddit, nobody was very interested. Eventually some of the users/subreddits banned from Reddit started using it since they had been kicked off real Reddit, and the developer ended up welcoming them while justifying it as "free speech". I think he mostly just seemed happy that some people actually wanted to use his site.
It's all been downhill from there, and the original creator even abandoned the site a few years ago and handed it over to someone else.
As the person that hid those upvote/downvote counts, I definitely remember that uproar well.
A relatively small group "migrated" for a few days, but didn't stay. Here's Whoaverse one month after the up/down counts were removed from Reddit (notice that they added visible vote counts, which they didn't have before): http://web.archive.org/web/20140718134533/http://whoaverse.c...
Other than the stickied site announcement, almost all of the posts only have a handful of votes and only a few have any comments.
The banned users were the first group that actually stuck around on Whoaverse/Voat, because they didn't have the option of just going back to Reddit.
This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions.
Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is exactly this content that is being "censored" from Reddit, not these harmless free speech advocates who are silenced by a big company.
Can anyone actually tell me what valuable discussion is being censored on Twitter, Reddit, etc? Banning this type of content is mandatory if you want a platform that is safe and available for trans people, Jews, gay people, women, etc.
People shouldn't have to tolerate people @ing them with slurs, be exposed to "reasoned" arguments for their extermination, or memes dehumanizing them for the sake of "free speech."
Why do you assume that all alternatives have to be "free speech = allowing abuse" alternatives?
E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.
The problem is access to platforms. We haven't found a good way to do this. People should be free to opt in or out of the content they want. What offends one will not offend another. For example a thread on hunting will offend some who love the animals they hunt. There is no universal right or wrong there. On should have access to an online community the other should have the ability to disagree or avoid that community. The problem is when an organisation like Twitter picks a side that free speech becomes an issue. Only because of the monopolistic nature of the platform. But that's what makes the platform good, everyone is there.
When free speech on the internet is discussed, it is within the context of freedom from excessive moderation on a platform. To call a Fediverse a "platform" doesn't seem quite analogous, these communities are more like their own platforms that are far more intensely moderated than even Twitter or Reddit.
Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.
And what stops a network of lemmy instances from being that more intensely moderated Reddit alternatives? That's my point: just because other reddit alternatives have branded themselves as "free speech" doesn't mean all of them have to. And federated platforms might make that easier than one-offs.
Ruqqus is nowhere near as bad as voat is. Moreover, in threads, they are well aware of what happened to voat. They know they have to walk a line between free and open speech and not devolving into a haven for nazis and racists. However, the best way to help them is for more sane users to participate in that community.
I'd argue that raddle is far more intensely moderated than Twitter or Reddit, probably more so than most subreddits.
I may not have done a good job of illustrating it in the previous post, but the example was mainly focused on platforms that bill themselves as an anti-censorship alternative to Reddit. Censorship and free speech on social media are incredibly complex topics, and the development of an endless stream of tiny, far right echo chambers doesn't seem to capture the spirit of this "town square" that free speech advocates are looking for.
