Lemmy

I would love to get the opinions of people who fall for Nigerian Prince scams, or people who actually click the ads that say "There are hot singles in your area" just to diversify my niche online social group.

Reddit has echo chambers in the different subreddits, and they can be about as vicious or more than Lemmy instances.

they're just not representative of the general population.

Good. If I wanted the general population, I'd scroll Facebook

Atheism: yes, I know religion is stupid; but you know what else is stupid, trying to force feed your opinion; I mean, we can’t even joke about church wifi name here

Sure you can. Look again at your link. You linked straight to one heavily down voted comment thread under that post. Click the view all comments link and you can see that virtually all the other comments there are positive, mainly, other funny wifi names. If you find one negative post, already heavily down voted, to be too much negativity for you then you are not going to be happy anywhere on the internet.

The idea that something that affects society can be nonpolitical is just your bias towards the status quo.

Everything was always political, and the status quo has always depended on hordes of lumpen trained to identify with their own oppressors over their own interests.

Before there were networks of right-wing radio and websites distributing right-wing talking points, they just used TV, newspapers, mailing lists, posters, etc. The effect was still 100 million Americans cheering when the national guard shot students protesting against the state sending their friends to die while participating in atrocities in Vietnam.

Even gardening is political; the notion that you should only plant grass and ornamental plants, mow your lawn once a week, and any deviation was a flaw was popularized and enforced by William Levitt to keep people from having too much time to read and become communists.

Similar sentiments spring up after the civil war regarding edible gardening and use of fruiting trees in urban planning, for fear that black people will live off foraging instead of working.

Everything has always been political. People would just deny it to prevent any change

Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an "echo chamber".

The echo chamber argument doesn't account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They're actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn't have echo chambers, it doesn't have meaningful things to say about cases like this.

Well Actually not enough. Debate things till the end and know what is right.

We need some form of wiki to manage those debates so that we only have them once.

Star Trek memes are the only things keeping me on platform lmao