Yeah. Picking a community is about deciding which echo chamber feels like home.

Like, on HN, if I talk about certain things I get downvoted to hell. So I talk about them elsewhere. Every community has its own biases, and people have different personas they apply to each community.

The fediverse is not a community. It's an ecosystem of loosely-interlinked communities, in about three or four layers: you've got the whole fediverse, the people on your instance, the people you follow, and the people you interact with. (On most instance software you also have topics, though not on Mastodon. There are hashtags too but they aren't used all that much and rarely does a community form around one, though they're useful for discovery.) You've got more potential points of segmentation than on Twitter, and more levels of potential control over what you see. (Add the possibility of having an account on several different instances and keeping to local rules and topics for those instances, and you have even greater control over how you present yourself and how your discussion goes.)

I think even calling it an "echo chamber" is a bit harsh. I have a home in the real world. When I am in it, I do not particularly want a nudist hippie drum circle in it. I do not want a Republican senator organizing his campaign in it. I don't need ten philosophy professors to come in and start debating the finer points of logical positivism. I don't want some guy to be there ranting and raving about how the lizard people are poisoning us all with chemtrails to prevent us from realizing how the world is going to end next Tuesday. There's nothing necessarily wrong with any of those things (though the last guy there might be mentally ill, but that's another complicated issue). But I don't want them in my space, all the time, without invitation (and even then, a solid exit plan).

This is not because I need my home to be an "echo chamber". It is because I need it to be a home. There's nothing wrong with having a "home" on the Internet either. It's just a lot harder to have one when you don't have width, height, and depth helping you delineate a space in the 3D universe, vs. the Internet, which easily degenerates into a zero-dimensional space where no distinctions can exist. Having a home doesn't prevent HN or Twitter from existing; nobody can stay in their homes all the time in either space. But the Internet is definitely getting less and less inviting for lacking the ability to have a "home" in it.

Thanksgiving just went by with HN denizens complaining a bit in some of the comment threads about how they are going to have to spend time with people they don't really want to, and the other holidays are coming up fast for a repeat performance. The homeless-Internet makes every day the day you have to spend like that, makes every minute the minute you have to spend like that. I fully believe people of a free society have some sort of obligation to engage with viewpoints they find uncomfortable (even if really nailing down what that means would be a challenge), but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be doing it all the time, without rest. I wouldn't expect that to produce understanding; I'd expect it to produce conflict and bitterness, not even necessarily because of the views themselves, but just from the sheer tiredness of never being able to rest anywhere for even a moment.

I think it's okay to have some amount of an echo chamber, they happen more or less naturally just because of who you select to be in your personal sphere of influence, but I think I disagree with the way you describe it.

I don't think people need to exist in an echo chamber so they can "be themselves" without social consequence, I think that's actually the biggest problem with echo chambers and why people argue that they should be avoided. Rather, what we need is a higher standard of discourse outside of those echo chambers. It is possible to respectfully disagree with someone without shouting them down/trolling/removing them from the conversation, and from the other side, without reaching a point of disruption that someone might consider that a good resolution. The failure happens at both sides of the conversation, and interacting outside of echo chambers seems to me the only way to gain experience in interacting civilly.

i think the problem is people aren't wired correctly for this option, which wasn't available in a high-bandwidth edition even 20 years ago, to be safe for societies in the long run. the dopamine-driven positive feedback loop that happens in such echo chambers cause a runaway reaction of radicalizing the opinion of the whole bubble to the point where it's a religious issue when confronted about it. you almost admit it yourself and correctly diagnose that HN is also like that.

no idea about that psychology stuff. i heard those words before :)

Echo chambers obviously happen even on sites with larger userbases (follower groups on Twitter, particular subreddits, etc.).

I don't know if having walls built into the system helps or hurts. Or does nothing at all. Ultimately, I don't think it matters since people are going to organize into some form of group no matter what.

An echo chamber would appear to be a derisive term for instances of freedom of association. That being said, it would be nice if "links" to alternate viewpoints could be kept in close proximity to said chambers.

What should bother more people are echo chambers pretending to be open forums. Look no farther than Wikipedia for an ostensibly open community which is in fact an echo chamber allowing no alternate viewpoints; any remark less than fawning for the state of Israel or Judaism is flushed straight down the memory hole and scrubbed off the "Talk" page by an army of Hasbara trolls.