That’s pretty much the short of it. Unfortunately, if a social media site proclaims itself to be a “free speech” platform, the inevitable end is that it will be filled with fascists. I had high hopes for Voat back when it started, too.

As for the communities and the fediverse, you probably should subscribe to the midwest.social STL and/or MO instances because they’ve seen a lot more activity. (Links you can subscribe to with your lemmy.world account copied again below.) If these ones on lemmy.world don’t gain much traction I may set them to not allow posts and just keep them up as a redirect to the midwest.social instances.

https://lemmy.world/c/stlouis@midwest.social
https://lemmy.world/c/missouri@midwest.social