Voat and Poal definitely won't be coming together anytime soon, Voat is centralized and has their own agenda to profit just like Reddit. The Poal devs have already made use of federated tech through PeerTube and possibly Mastodon in the future. Here's my explanation of what I meant by federated https://poal.co/s/Poaldev/63353/6652c3a4-a085-472a-9d9c-5989d7c65264
If the Poal wants to be a true platform for freedom of speech, decentralization seems like the best way forward. By federating, no one would have control over the content of the website, as anyone could selfhost their own instance and submit their content to Poal if that's what the devs wanted.
My issue with the decentralization thing(and I'm not against it) is that if no one has control over platform at all then no one can stop people from implementing censorship.
I helped someone setup a throat instance just a few days ago, anyone can setup one up. Poal.co isn't exactly throat anymore but its still based on it.
Federating would be decentralizing by allowing other instances to post on your website and vice versa. The instance owner can do whatever they like to their platform, they could make their website independent from other instances or simply only let a select few to submit to your website. If one of the instances decide to censor their platform then the user can either change instances or even make their own with different rules. I'm not sure how you could censor all the instances, I don't think that would be possible unless you forced every instance to follow your own set of rules.
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