Here's the problem (IMO): Reddit has too many features and too big a userbase to replicate as Reddit itself did a decade ago. voat.co has been in development for years and still lacks crucial systems for things like content moderation, monetization, scaling, etc.

Essentially for a coup of Reddit to occur you have to take a large chunk of Reddit at once. That is very hard to do.

Reddit doesn't have that many features hell it lacks tools for getting notification on sibling, or aunt/uncle comments, and you can't even edit threads more then 6 months old.

It doesn't have a standard spoiler syntax for comments or a spoiler tag(people hack it in with nsfw tags styled to say spoiler but from the main page it will look like porn(ie be marked nsfw)).

It lacks a wysiwyg editor by default. It would be nice to have a nsfw subreddit namespace so that sex related subreddits don't take up possibly safe/useful names and so that you know that /r/humanporn isn't porn. Also a nsfl tag. Ability to expand "ALL" comments. Ability to pick percentage of home page each of your subscribed subs get.

Also a policy that allows removing bad mods from power, ie /r/Holocaust really should not be run by anti-semitic holocaust deniers.

Oh a way to sort posts by reverse age and allow posts in between time x and y not just last hour/day/month/year.

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Of course reddit does have good mobile apps (at least on android), a competitor would need a good mobile app for at least 2 systems which can take a while.

Voat's issue is that it managed to get users from the most controversial communities... and that's about it. If you're not interested in Donald Trump, GamerGate or something similarly controversial, then Voat is simply a really empty forum that doesn't have enough members or posts to keep people returning.

It's having the issue a lot of 'free speech' centric services have; it appeals to a minority who feel censored, but not the mass market that simply want to discuss less controversial topics.

And until there's enough people able to talk about a variety of subjects, the site is basically pigeonholed as the 'place people banned from Reddit might go'.

voat.co was developed because someone wanted to develop something with ASP.net.

Reddit, the software platform is open source: https://github.com/reddit

Voat is run on ASP.NET but it's open source as well:

https://github.com/voat

I'm not exactly proud of it, but I've paid more for hosting my own stuff (or really, having a server that I do almost nothing with) than I have paid in patreon-like subscriptions and flattr. So I don't think the "on your own machines" model is entirely impossible.

With the advent of the cloud and the ubiquity of mobile devices, the next Digg won't be controlled by anyone other than the users. They will supply the storage and bandwidth. The community will truly be in charge, and also be responsible for policing it. When the cost (time) of policing it becomes too much (even with machine-learning bots to remove ads, child porn, hate speech, harassment, etc), then a new version of that model will appear.

While we're at it, we can also throw blockchain at the problem. It will be hosted on Etherium as the DAO (Distributed Authoring Organisation). Policy changes require 51% of the computing power. If someone doesn't like some content, they can fork off and make their own child DAO, living in a universe where that content no longer exists.