Anywhere you can choose what communities you do and do not interract with is going to be an echo chamber. Lemmy and all social media are echo chambers. We aren’t special.
Don’t take for granted the spaces that are not. I am a firm believer that a well-guided opinion must be bathed in scrutiny — which you are never going to get in an echo chamber.
As human beings we have a tendency to get defensive at the first hint of a challenge. I would urge others to be conscious of this and give yourselves space to consider these challenges to your ideas.
The big difference is that commercial platforms are opaquely curated by corporate interests who decide what people see, what content is allowed, and so on.
That doesn’t really change much. Lemmy is worse of an echo chamber of anything.
And by that you mean that the views here diverge from the echo chamber you’re comfortable living in.
TBH lemmy is the most comfortable social media for me, and yet I recognize that it is comfortable precisely because it’s mostly a leftist echo chamber (with a sprinkling of liberals). The political opinion of the majority of people (that is, conformism/lack of opinion) is not represented here at all, neither is the far-right (and I’m thankful for both).
It’s worth noting that Lemmy has plenty of different instances where opinion varies widely, including heavily liberal ones. I also don’t believe in free speech absolutism because some views, like fascism, are objectively harmful. The way I look at it is the real issue with echo chambers comes from people becoming divorced from reality because they only interact with people who hold identical views. I don’t see this being a major problem on Lemmy instances I frequent.
It can be as bad as reddit if the user wants to by not browsing outside their instance, or by defederating, but at its basic being federated with other instances its the opposite of an echo chamber.
There’s still a selection bias towards technically literate, privacy-conscious, left-of-center (or at least liberal) people. Lemmyverse represents such an unthinkably tiny fraction of Earth’s populace it’s not even an echo-chamber, it’s more like an echo-pocket. However, this allows me to feel comfortable here, which is a huge plus. You just have to keep in mind that every opinion that’s popular here is not representative of anything but the Lemmyverse.
We aren’t special.
You should dial this statement way up. The population of Lemmy is definitely not a representative demographic. Nor is Reddit’s.
We all live in echo chambers, it’s not just Reddit. Lack of understanding and empathy is one of the main issues of the modern era imo
the lack of understanding and empathy are natural side effects of our atomization and it’s been fostered by our capitalist system to make us less willing to join together in our fight in the up vs down class struggle.
When in history has it not been a problem?
The irony
It’s the front page of the Internet, not society wtf
That’s some nice artwork
