paradox of tolerance is just a meme and not even a very good one.
8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this.
this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.
Yeah, it also annoys me when people assume that all of 4chan and 8chan is /pol/. 4chan has plenty of blue boards like /sci/, /g/, and /tg/ that are relatively decent if you can tolerate shitposting, trolling, and bants. When people write racist stuff, a common response is that they should go back to their "containment board". 8chan used to let users create their own boards, and there were plenty of inoffensive ones. On the other hand, I do think 8chan's /pol/ was just so terrible that it made 8chan overall a definite net-negative for humanity. Even the site's original founder has disavowed it at this point. I also agree with you that mainstream sites like Facebook have their own problems.
But still, whenever I see free speech platforms, they tend to attract a majority of far-right users. I think it's because they're the ones who most often get banned from mainstream platforms and need to find alternatives.
8chan, which was usually coded in the media as the most extreme platform managed to be host to both /pol/, /leftypol/, a myriad of queer & lgbt boards and /christian/ as well as boards for other religious denominations and multiple competing sects of gamergate and, of course the q boomers. at one point of polling, /v/ was something like 60% lgbt. on zeronet and the webring you see a similar plurality of views and usecases. there have been hundreds if not thousands of imageboard clones over the years with even less moderation than voat if for no other reason than incompetence. fatchan and chen2 were hardly festering havens of white nationalism. there is far more that leads to a website's culture than speech policies and administrator doctrine, the outright user revolts of SomethingAwful and Neogaf stand as a testament to this. this whole idea that free speech is a one way road to the fourth reich simply does not hold when weighed against the facts, especially considering that the 'sensible' platforms like facebook have been used as the rallying grounds for actual genocide and the livestreaming of murders & kidnappings.