I never got to see the downfall of Voat. I just heard about how it suffered from the Gab issue (echo chamber) and how they hid the site for it's later life.
Eventually what happened later with Reddit did the same idea better. Essentially as popular subreddits began to get kicked off that were less political but more not advertiser friendly as Reddit began to purge users hard, many of them began to use Reddit clone scripts and the like to start their own sites.
rdrama comes to mind, along with the communities.win group. Notably communities.win has IP2, which is one of the most notorious groups online because of it's focus on IRL streamers (who always wind up getting into fights and mace or "content spray" incidents on stream). As it turns out it's easier to stay online when you're not attracting political drama.
@bronze I knew I recognized that goat from somewhere lol. Maybe the group got it's start there back then, idk. All I remember about voat was that's where fatpeoplehate was able to survive for a while after being shoah'd.
@bronze@grey voats issue was being founded before the massive banwaves which led to other subs making exit plans.
It also took the fedi a while to boom because for years people in this side of the web either kept making Twitter alts or kept joining shitty alt-tech sites run by literal boomers who can't into anything.
@bronze@grey I feel the idea of making a site like voat also became more and more of a liability and single point of failure as 8chan would later show. It's a shame their bunker board and similar idea didn't work out because of dumb imageboard drama.
It's more the idea that Reddit/Voat/8chan are/were websites where you can make a board for anything as opposed to being single topic focused.
It's a problem because you will deal with glowies/hosts using something you had no idea about on your site to shut you down, but it also disrupts apolitical communities using your site to talk. Case in point; what happened to /v/ on 8chan after it went down.
I've noticed 8chan.moe (Mark's board) is still up and still has activity, but that's because /v/ was a closeknit community on 8chan and would go anywhere despite all the drama.
@PhenomX6@grey those are my thoughts every time I think I should open up a forum or imageboard. It just sounds like im taking on a huge liability. I'm the single point of failure and I'm on the hook if some faggot decides to spam the site with CP etc. Thats why I like federated software. No one point of failure and the best some gay janny can do is defederate from you. Its miles above centralized websites IMO.
Of course the other thing with imageboards is with some of the more niche topics, the community moved on to other shitholes (Discord, Twitter, Reddit come to mind) and the newer demographic in these communities doesn't give two shits about imageboards, or they're told they're Neo Nazis who are literally killing trans people.
Case in point; you will never see something like 8chan's /furry/ nowadays because aside from /trash/ on 4chan (which is in perpetual decline), a lot of posters from that board either trooned the fuck out (I know a few who did) and became Twitter addicts or left that scene for good. To make matters worse; the zoomers now joining the fandom got groomed over TikTok and only give a shit about wanting to be in a "community" and not about the talking animal part. They're not like weebs who were into some show and got obsessed with it. They want TikTok attention.
Here's how I see it from someone with an eye on that community; it's also the community had no standards. It had no normie filter, it had nothing a community could relate to, it had no "if you're not into this you shouldn't be here" barrier. If you hinted at even remotely being in said community or sharing interests and had a remote bit of fame, furries would draw you a fursona as a joke even if they were bitching and moaning about it later (see that AZ congresswoman). Furry cons are the shittiest cons you can go to there is nothing good about them period, no redeeming factors, no nothing. Just look at how the fandom is promoted as a place for fuckups to find themselves in a judgement free zone as opposed to an artistic scene. You're not a furry because you like talking animals, you're a furry because you have identity issues and parents who treat you like shit.
Is it any wonder you get shit eaters, roadkill fuckers, groomers, and the like in that area? Or more increasingly, teenagers who need an identity.
@PhenomX6@bronze@grey hmm one one hand the dissolution of the furry community into normie spaces could lead to either the death of the furries as a thing by virtue of being super normalized and littered with possers, or it could be the spreading medium to mass infect the feeble idiots into the furry mindset with shit eaters and roadkill fuckers...