I think it is the opposite. When you are in your echo chamber you don't realize that your view is toxic because what you get is positive feedback and think that it is in fact "normal".
Bluesky has plenty of toxic communities (e.g. the trans one), but hey are on the "good side" of the political spectrum so they get a pass.
yep, this is what I found. The evidentiary or reasonable basis doesn't matter. You will get shouted down and mass-blocked via shared blocklists, which is an absolutely horrible idea.
As far as I know you can deliberately choose who you follow (like on Twitter) and which algorithm you use to compose your feed (unlike Twitter). It gives me more power to decide what is important to me and what isn't. How is that not an improvement?
An echo chamber, also known as "a community" or "having friends," is basically how most human interaction worked before the Web popularized constant, context-collapsed arguing with various types of reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, bio-essentialists, "race realists," "climate skeptics," etc., about which "evidence" sounds or feels the most correct (rather than what evidence is actually provably correct).
Since moderation of some sort is pretty essential on the open web today, you can either subscribe to the "group think" of the platform you're currently using (like X/Twitter today), or you could do it the Bluesky way, let people chose what blocklists to follow.
As someone who generally don't do blocklists/mutes/blocking much at all, I know what approach I prefer. I like that people have a choice at least, compared to the alternative approaches.
Actually, shared blocklists originated in the desire to avoid harassment. You can make a case for that being group think if you like, but I doubt you'll convince me.
Only for the most part; people online aren't my friends, there is not enough interaction/depth of interaction to get to really know them and being online tends to turn people into fuckwads(1). They just happen to be you're kind of fuckwads.
Being put on a shared blocklist isn't a "stay away from this person"; it's a "tell these thousand people to stay away from these other thousand people regardless of actual basis, because 1 person got offended"
It’s well accepted that people tend to be more unpleasant online, and text doesn’t translate nuance well enough to avoid misunderstandings, no matter how many emojis are assigned to the task.
