When comparing Voat vs Mastodon, the Slant community recommends Mastodon for most people. In the question“What are the best Social Networking Platforms?” Mastodon is ranked 3rd while Voat is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Mastodon is:
Private options.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Will be instantly familiar to reddit users
Voat is essentially a Reddit clone. It uses Reddit's layout and basic functionality with only minor tweaks and as such will be instantly understandable to anyone who is familiar with reddit.
Pro Freedom of speech is a big focus of the website
Pro Social publishing
Private options.
Pro Actively developed
Pro Jabber Texting
xmpp
Pro Open Standard
Pro Open Source
Cons
Con Servers can't handle traffic spikes
Voat can't yet handle large groups of people visiting the site all at the same time. This results in the site often being down. Many argue that the main issue is choice of underlying architecture (ASP.NET + MSSQL) that is difficult to scale.
Con Toxic community
Be prepared to find blatant racism here.
Con discontinued
The site is no longer active
Con Lacks OMEMO encryption
The de facto standard for Jabber Texting [xmpp].