Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@Saket There's a very good article that summarizes it (+ surrounding research) well, but unfortunately it is in Dutch: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/11/04/het-is-de-sfeer-niet-de-bubbel-a4147353

A *very* concise translation/explanation would be:
- People always tend look for like-minded people to some degree, as a normal social mechanism, to reduce social friction (and this is not a bad thing)
- But they will also venture outside their own group to learn other perspectives
- Understanding for other groups can be actively improved by bringing them together in cooperative scenarios...
- ... *but*, when people are brought together in *combative* scenarios (eg. forced together), it just increases polarization, and actually makes people close up and *not* venture outside their own group

The summary of the summary: people naturally compensate for the risks of an echo chamber, but they stop doing so when you take away their agency and try to force them to interact with others, and it *causes* the 'bubble' problem.

So it's not that 'echo chambers' don't exist as a concept, or that they can't be harmful, but more that the (right-wing) hypothesis of "people must be pulled out of them forcibly" is completely false and the opposite is true.

It's not without reason that right-wingers constantly talk about echo chambers whereas leftists usually don't. It's essentially just a disguised way of saying "we want to force others to listen to us".

Hello new followers who seem to have imported their follow lists from Twitter wholesale: I hope you're prepared for my decidedly more anticapitalist takes here 🙃

@Saket (Nitpick; the "echo chamber" hypothesis, at least in its common form, is a right-wing talking point, and not really supported by evidence: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207159119)

@nova@hachyderm.io @ariadne@treehouse.systems I can only speak for myself here, of course, but my two concerns are:

1. The existence and/or normalization of corporations on the instance
2. The rather unconstructive way in which several users have been replying to my original post, making the same sort of "you must be new to how the real world works"-style patronizing comments that I would get on Twitter

If those two issues are addressed, then I would personally have no immediate reason to distrust Hachyderm. I *think*, but obviously cannot guarantee, that other fedi admins will feel similarly, and that folks would be open to reconsider defederation where it has already occurred.

The practical implementation of this would involve disallowing corporate accounts entirely, and establishing a general understanding within the Hachyderm userbase that the existing culture here exists for a reason, and that people should be respectful of that.

Of course that doesn't mean that criticism of that culture is wholly disallowed, but it should come from a place of understanding (and particularly understanding that those reasons might not apply *to them personally* but can nevertheless be valid), rather than from a place of 'defending the status quo'.

Part of that will also be recognizing that, despite the relative queerness of the Hachyderm population, it on average still has a very privileged population compared to many other instances ("well-paid folks working at big tech companies and startups", to put it bluntly), and that there is a considerable amount of people here who have not been that lucky, and who will eg. be automatically suspicious of anyone who presents their tech job as part of their identity (which I've found common on Hachyderm).

Much of this space is about self-organizing and community with a decidedly anarchist (and non-commercial) approach, and that just isn't very compatible with "well-paid tech workers who promote their employer and generally seem to support hierarchical governance models".

Particularly those in support of capitalism are generally not welcome, due to how capitalism is an active threat to many of us here.

I do think that Hachyderm can mostly coexist with other instances as long as users are aware and mindful of all this in how they interact with others outside of Hachyderm itself.

That having been said, *some* nonzero amount of instance blocks will probably be unavoidable due to fundamental incompatibilities (a risk which grows with instance size), but that's also just a part of how the fediverse works - it doesn't *need* to be one big universal platform with everybody in the same room.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems @nova@hachyderm.io I mean, like I've said, it is ultimately their choice to make. I'm only explaining why I would not trust an instance that does that, and why I expect many others won't either.