> It comes down, in the end, to whether or not you believe that the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can really exist and, if it can, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.

I'd argue the moderation is the issue. It's one thing to have a discussion between different ideologies, but there's no more conservatives to discuss anything with. They've left twitter too, and the only people left are... not engaging in good faith discussions, to be polite about it.

Users seem to have an expectation of(or rather a desire for) civility, moreso than echo chamber agreement, but the current owner of twitter seems to think that restricting hate-speech is restricting free-speech. Then, for whatever moderation is left, all the most popular alt-right accounts also get an exemption from that, which encourages all their followers to be their worst version of themself.

> but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber.

Are any of us truly going to live better lives if we see a bunch of conspiracy theories and racist rants?

Some of those posts are a result of genuine mental illness. I have a clinically retarded uncle who is a big fan of nazi stuff. I'm glad the internet wasn't around when he was young.

The only people I see complaining about “social media echo chambers” are the ones who other people have decided they don’t want to be near.

Good riddance to them. You aren’t entitled to bother others if they don’t want to hear from you.

She decided that it was less of an echo chamber when lots of people on the platform disagreed loudly with her opinion, which is good in her mind I suppose?

If you think Bluesky is relatively progressive then Mastodon would abhor you.

unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/bateK

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