What PMYB2 said. Voat was down hard for two weeks. People thought the Feds shut it down or the plug was otherwise pulled. Later some goats found that the dev voat site was working so people started posting there, but the real Voat was still down. The original owner, Atko, sniffed around and indicated that Voat could easily be brought back online by Putt, and he reached out to Putt using the only way he knew how (Twitter). It was days before it was brought back up by Putt though. During the outage PMYB2 created a temporary backup refuge, which later grew into this site. It started as just a place for lost Goats to go. Once Voat was back online and Putt finally made a post to try and explain his absence (he literally said he had been ignoring the site and effectively burned out), a number of goats left, some deleting their accounts (like myself).