Everyone thinks Newton is smart until they read his cure for the plague

The paradox of tolerance relies on a lot of assumptions that don’t really work in reality. We don’t tend to see more open societies have more intolerance, quite the opposite. Part of the problem is that “the intolerant” is not a single group, but many groups that hate each other. And those who are intolerant towards the intolerant are themselves part of the intolerant.

For a less-political example, let’s imagine hypothetically that Lemmy is very pro-linux. However, some people who absolutely hate linux show up and start posting anti-linux memes. These people get insulted, downvoted, and eventually banned by others on Lemmy, because they’re showing intolerance towards linux.

But then what happens to those anti-linux people? They go off and created their own forums, and talk about how intolerant lemmy is to people who don’t use linux. So whenever a linux user shows up on those forums, they’re inevitably banned. The result of intolerance of the intolerant is that they remain intolerant, and now the tolerant have become hard to distinguish from them, and there’s no way for pro-linux forces to be part of the conversation anti-linux people are having - allowing them to create their own culty filter bubble.

Now imagine an alternative - instead of banning the anti-linux people, pro-linux lemmy users decide to engage with them and correct misconceptions about linux. After all, linux, like many other topics, can get kind of complicated, and linux users need to remember that not everyone has the same background knowledge that they do about the topic. Sure, some linux haters would be persistent, but maybe others would be like “hey, these linux folks are actually kind of cool and helpful, I want to be more like them.” That may sound idealistic, but I think that’s a lot closer to what we see in reality - intolerance thrives in closed off spaces, and dies in open ones.

Sure. My parents had different religions and being an atheist I don’t really have a duty to care about other people’s religions.

Of course it helped that my parents weren’t too seriously religious. And I’ve rejected religious people for having religion-tied views I find appalling. But the religion itself isn’t the issue, just the things that sometimes result from it are.

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it “everything becoming facebook”.

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself “I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet” JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it’s the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that’s not how email would work at all - you’d need a google account to both send and receive emails. That’s why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it’s like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it’s just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that’s how it should be.