the purpose of my post is not to depress, hate or trash anyone. I don't know the owners of Poal nor did I know the owners of Voat. My reason for this post is merely to inform you all of what I see happening, so take it as you will. When I first went to voat, it was in the early parts of 2015, it was nice, uncensored and good times. I deleted my account there when good ol' puttenstein sold off to his mysterious angel, I saw the writing on the wall early and dipped. What you need to realize is that the shifting of the user base from Voat to Poal (or where ever else people will go) is nothing different then what we saw with Voat's creation and the mass banning /migration in 2015-16 from Reddit. **All this is doing is slowly fracturing each community, as well as further dwindling the buckets you consort in.** Again, this is done by design, not only to demoralize you, but to also put people into easily tracked groups. For those with common sense, look at what is hidden in the "Anti-Lynching" bill that was passed in the US by good ol' Kamala for Jussie Smollets staged hate crime - it had nothing to do with lynching, but it had everything to do with making offensive speech online that crossed state lines a felony. <-- yep, you American posters might want to check into this but I warn you all, watch what you say - they are slowly passing laws to criminalize you for what you type, say or think. Now, while Poal looks nice, it is just another Voat with a couple UI updates and really shitty snowflakes. seriously, remove that shit, maybe you will get more users. Anyway, I digress... **HAVING SOME ANONYMOUS PERSON OR COMPANY RUN THESE FORUMS IS A BAD IDEA.** Look at what Putt did to Voat, the fucker got millions in donations via BTC and is claiming that a text based site is too much for him to run. GTFO with that shit. It's bullshit, that server probably costs him $400/mo and it's not like he ever updated it. It was a classic fucking honeypot. While Poal maybe different, that is only for a short time. it will eventually end up just like Voat if it's not run by the exact same people, or another mossad type organization already. Again, this is by design as they will again break it up and fracture the communities again. They just keep chipping away until there is nothing left but a few isolated groups. It's not that complicated, the answer to these issues is a self-hosted solution. I've been looking at [Lemmy](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy) as it's connected to the fediverse. but at the end of the day, you own your content - not putt or ghost, schlomo, vlad or whoever the hell is behind this place too. You think you are 'shit-posting' here privately? Nope, they are logging everything about you as you (and I now) type away. Fuck that, own your own shit. If you don't know how to setup your own server, just go to upwork or somewhere similar and you can find a competent developer to set this up for you. It runs on a docker and you can have this up and running in virtually no time. The UI is kind of shitty, but at the end of the day you own your shit and you can submit your info privately if you know how to set this up properly. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy For fucks sake, wake up folks, stop being blinded into giving some stranger your info or shitposts.