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?
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.
The one problem with this is that most of the content does seem to be pretty centered on only a couple instances (lemmy.world mostly, with some also scattered in beehaw.org, Lemmy.ml, and sh.itjust.works). If one of those goes down, especially lemmy.world, it will cripple this place pretty bad. Maybe if we one day get a way to backup or export user profiles and communities to other instances, but until then, I think this place has a centralization problem brewing as well.
The thing is, the concern people have with lemmy.world is the same concern we used to have with lemmy.ml. The question of how big an instance ought to be is still unanswered. Maybe lemmy.world is below that level and people will naturally shy away from it once it gets there. On top of that, limited resources on the side of instance owners will drive decentralization. For example, Lemmy.ml shut its doors to new users once it became overloaded. Similar things could happen in the future.
Even if a major instance did go down, we’d just lose the content. The people, for the most part, would migrate to whatever new instances sprung up to replace it.
It’s already gone down. Beehaw has almost most other large instances defederated because of Beehaw’s admins having beef.
The problem was that Voat wanted to be something like Truth Social. Basically, a right-wing version of Reddit. That simply wouldn’t work, not even as a distant second.
Yep, worst case some big lemmy communities go bust, but then people can readily just go to other instances.
Hence the name Lemmy.
Even if a bunch of instances follow each other off a cliff, there’s still going to be plenty who didn’t join that group that will survive.
Wait, what does the name Lemmy mean?
guessing they’re referring to Lemmings, who were mistakenly believed to follow each other off cliffs
Oh, I guess that makes sense in context… But why would the site be named that? I guess I’m missing something.
Lemming. They’re like giant hamster or small woodchucks. Rodents.
Famous for group suicides.
Is it named lemmy because… we all follow each other or something?
I think it’s because even if a bunch of instances follow each other off a cliff, there’s still going to be plenty who didn’t join that group that will survive.
Huh, I guess the survival part just isn’t really what I would associate with lemmings, it’s the following each other blindly part (even if it turned out to be the result of a fake documentary).
I thought it was a Motorhead thing.
If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man,/You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me,/The pleasure is to play, etc.
Something about the transient nature of these sites.–