On top of that, Voat got their main population-spike around the time reddit was cracking down on racist and extremist subreddits, so those are the type of users who shaped the culture of Voat. Lemmy, on the other hand, is getting their population spike from enthusiast users, I.E. the 10% of people most responsible for voting, commenting, posting, and just in general contributing to the site. Therefore, those are the people shaping the growing culture of Lemmy, doing so in a mostly positive way.
There is a phenomenon known as the “Eternal September”. In the earliest internet, the vast majority of internet users were college student. Therefore, every September when freshmen started school, the online communities would get a massive influx of new users; These new users were often poorly behaved or disruptive to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users, and things would settle back to normal. This was known as the “September Effect”.
And then one year the internet started gaining small mainstream attention, and suddenly these chatrooms were being constantly flooded with new, ill-behaved users all the time; And because this “September” never ended, the culture of these communities ended up being washed away by the new people, and irreversibly changed forever; hence the “Eternal September”.
The moral of the story, too many new people to a community too fast can overrun the existing cultural dynamic, and so either you need to be restrained in how quickly you let new people join so they can gradually assimilate, or you need the people joining to already share the same culture you desire.
While other browsers technically exist, it is foolish to think that web browsers are a thriving diverse ecosystem right now, when 74% of all web-browsing is done using a Chrome-based browser. With their influence, if Google decided to start forcing changes on how websites function on a technical level, they could absolutely do that with little to stop it;- what are websites going to do, alienate a supermajority of their users?- And that is why people are so worried about things like Threads, because once a single company has supermajority control of a market, they can use that control as a weapon to get what they want.
I say this as an avid Firefox user: Firefox is niche. And the only reason Safari has 20% is because it is integrated with apple products, if it weren’t for that, Chrome and Chrome-reskins would effectively be the only option.