You can listen to people try to convince you that Russia's war is justified and that Tienamen Square never happened for a while if you want, then make up your mind and block them later ;-).

I mean, personally I am not here to discuss politics or get the news. I'm here for memes and nerding out. All that real-world shit doesn't vibe. I wanna laugh.

Bruh. It's not an echo chamber to filter out literal Nazis and other stuff. Ain't nobody changing their mind from "spirited" internet debate and I don't need their garbage in my day.

I feel like the term echo chamber gets thrown around a lot. Imo an echo chamber has to be highly specific. I wouldn't classify every monolingual person as trapped in an echo chamber for example. I would also argue against to idea of having to be weary of creating your own echo chamber online. Use social media how you like, the solution to echo chambers is going outside and touching grass not forcing yourself to interact with every community on the internet.

As if the default Lemmy experience isn't a massive filter bubble in itself. I doubt hardly anyone here would want to federate with Twitter and Truth Social even though that would make your feed, in fact, less of an echo chamber. Hell, a huge number of inctances don't even federate with Hexbear, Lemmygrad or Threads.

Counterpoint: filtering out the furry communities by blocking a single instance

Eating poisoned shit isn't broadening your horizons.

I'm reminded of a quote that goes something like this:

I've been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn't an open market - it's a potluck.

Everybody brings something to the table and you're free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you're not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn't mean that you have to take a bite to know that it's shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists' ideas and seriously debate their value. They're shit and can and should be treated as such.

The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you're free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don't want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.

Personally, one of the reasons that I'm here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don't want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That's fine, but I don't want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.

It doesnt necessarily mean that importent things won't be covered. I just don't need fox news opinion about it.

Unfortunately, the owners of your instance can also choose to block something for you.

I was happy today when I made a post on an obscure community and some guy just passing by on the "new" feed left a comment.

Not everything has to have an opposing perspective, where's the opposing community for knitting? Tearing?

Some people don't come to social media to have their beliefs challenged and that's okay.

You don't have to use filters, just like you don't have to subscribe to subreddits on Reddit. You can just use the default front page if you are afraid of tailoring it to your tastes.

There's a nuance here that you're missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.

I'd say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn't until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like "transgender." And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I've ever seen. Back then, you couldn't even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.