It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
Yes, but the “censorship” and “freedoms” they talk about isn’t about malicious censorship (I.e. Spez going around quietly editing dissenting comments) or freedom about how our content is used (I.e. Reddit refusing to let people delete their comments).
Their version is about spreading misinformation and hate speech of all kinds, alongside racist and facist ideologies unfiltered and unimpeded. They’re malicious actors acting like victims.
We don’t want any of that, we want all folks to feel welcome, which is why we have to shoot that down. To maintain a tolerant society, we must only be intolerant of the intolerant.
we want all folks to feel welcome
That’s another thing they’ll tell you, to add to your point. They’ll say general society, or lefties, are unwelcoming hypocrits for expressing the need for inclusion while not including fascists.
They’ll word the same opinions in a million ways until they find the way that gets you to allow them to continue blabbering intolerant bull crap.
It’s true, those types will use your own rules against you to wipe you out if you let them. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the playbook of bad faith arguments.
I bet you we’ll see a version of that very argument with the Fediverse when Meta brings “Threads” onto the scene. They’ll preach inclusion then use the old EEE tactic to kill us off.
That’s the Paradox, they use tolerance to fill the space with intolerance.
I said it in a comment below and I’ll write it out again because it is a great point (that I have seen several times on Mastodon, not that I thought up on my own) that the only way to resolve the Paradox of Tolerance is to understand tolerance as a social contract.
Nazis start from not adhering to the contract, because they refuse to tolerate certain identities. TERFS refuse to tolerate trans identities. Neither the Nazi nor the TERF viewpoint is entitled to tolerance. Compare to Furries, who have no problem with non-furry identities but are often not welcomed because they are so very very strange. Tolerance is for furries, not nazis.
Going to bring it up again, the Paradox of Tolerance disappears when you consider tolerance a social contract rather than a moral standard.
Nazis base their identity and politics around not tolerating the presence of various minorities, and therefore aren’t entitled to tolerance themselves.
TERFs base their identity and politics areound not tolerating trans people, and therefore aren’t entitled to tolerance themselves.
Furries don’t base their identity on excluding, invalidating or persecuting someone else, so furries are entitled to tolerance.
So, the furry boards stay but we need to defederate Nazis and TERFs.
There’s always going to be some fuzzy edge cases, unfortunately. When tolerance becomes such an important and powerful thing it will become easily weaponized and subject to misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise.
the guy who gave us the Paradox of Tolerance also gave us Falsifiability, They should teach him in grade school.
I always say that there is no paradox of tolerance, because tolerance doesn’t work that way.
It’s not a wide open door. No tolerance is a compact. It’s a peace treaty. A social contract that can be violated, and those who violate it can then be excluded from it until they stop being hateful idiots.