The thing I've found completely baffling about the apparent Voat exodus (although not from any Reddit communities I'm a part of, as it happens) is that nobody knows what the organizational structure or credibility of Voat is, and nobody even reliably knows who's behind the site.<p>The most that you can find is the GitHub source, which says it's "based in Switzerland, no censorship policy as long as content is legal in Switzerland". This may or may not be true. This was certainly not <i>usefully</i> true, if there's a German host with censorship powers.<p>The user agreement (<a href="https://voat.co/help/useragreement" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/help/useragreement</a>) calls itself "a legal agreement between you and us", with no definition of "us". It also has a DMCA response policy, which strikes me as odd for a Switzerland-based company (but maybe this is normal?).<p>The about page (<a href="https://voat.co/about" rel="nofollow">https://voat.co/about</a>) claims it's a project from two Swedish college students. Even assuming that this is true, this isn't such a best-case scenario: we've seen many examples of sites (4chan, Reddit, etc.) where the founders were in high school or college and were at least somewhat in favor of unrestricted speech, but as their sites grew, and as they themselves grew, they've changed their minds. (Incidentally, parts of the brain that regulate appropriate social behavior, like the prefrontal cortex, only fully develop by age 25.) Even if everything Voat says about themselves is true, we should worry that in a couple of years they'll grow a conscience too.