Most of the arguments about social media content policies center around American politics, but Reddit has been banning other potential lightning rods for controversy. They banned DarkNetMarkets, Deepfakes, and SanctionedSuicide in 2018. They banned WatchPeopleDie last year [1].

It's not hard to see why Reddit would ban any of these, but at some point there may be a critical mass of too-controversial-for-Reddit content that isn't just interesting to the Voat crowd. Is that point now? I'll have to wait and see how Lemmy turns out.

The other theoretical advantage of a federated service is that smaller instances are less expensive to run than one big centralized service. There are a lot of people who could afford to run a service on a $10/month VPS as a hobby but who couldn't afford to run anything at actual Reddit scale without corresponding revenue. That's important considering that Reddit leavers are more likely to be posting not-safe-for-brand content even if it's not specifically hateful content.

[1] Not a sub I ever visited, but by most accounts surprisingly non-toxic as a community, considering the subject matter.