This completely baseless speculation, which is also entirely incorrect, is currently top comment. Meanwhile, a comment with the correct answer lies downvoted somewhere below. Poal is a fork of Phuks.co, which you can see spelled out on their license page, among other places: https://poal.co/license Voat was a different thing entirely: https://github.com/voat/voat Ideologically, both were founded on nearly identical attitudes towards free speech and rejection of all censorship. The differences that drove the split were technical.