I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
I don’t remember what caused the Voat’s origin, except it involved Reddit HQ. And then it went under in 2020.
What’s different about this time and with Lemmy to make it a feasible alternative to Reddit? Is it random chance?
I’d say yes. Lemmy isn’t just one community, it’s many different servers talking to one another. If one instance goes down, people can just go to another one.
Voat died because the owner ran out of funds to keep the site up. Unlike Lemmy, he didn’t allow people to donate to help with the costs.
The decentralization is what makes it hard to go down entirely, but a key difference between federation and full decentralization is that while lemmy allows the servers to share content they (crucially) don’t share users, and sharing can be controlled by each instance. So if there is a group of people who frankly aren’t nice to be around they can simply be cut off from the rest.
I’m not quite sure if lemmy allows communities to migrate instances at this point, but even if that is not possible federation is still a way to allow some parts to die while others survive.