this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Ask Lemmy
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I think you are abusing the term echochamber here. An online community only becomes an echochamber under two circumstances:
if the mods make it one. .ml counts due to the right-of-passage banhammer for saying taboo things like facts, logic, reason or calling out hypocrisy. Lemmy does not qualify because .ml is still federated despite being a dumpsterfire of bad faith.
If you use the self-censorship tools to simply ban people, communities or instances you disagree with. Every public online community has bad faith actors. That's what you get for being an audience. That's life. Humanity is also full of people with poor reasoning, varying age and experiences, a few pathologies and posting while drunk/high or masturbating. If you feel you're in an echochamber, you might have crafted one for yourself. Can you tell the differences between someone who is objectively wrong, drunken shitposts, is neurodiverse, has come to a reasonable but different conclusion than you based a different weighting of relevent criteria or is posting in bad faith?
Lemmy provides tools to block bad faith posters, but it's up to you to use them judiciously.
I would argue Lemmy is less of an echochamber as I see more genuine LGBTQ2S+, Anarchist, Tankie, Antifa than reddit ever had. I think the smaller population here just chopped the top of the gaussian distribution curve, and we have relatively fewer "normies". People passionate, and articulate about their things.
I would argue that the open and often extreme hostility towards ideas that go against the group consensus still make it more of an echochamber. Like, for example, if you say something positive about AI and are spammed with deaththreats and other bad-faith character attacks, you're not going to stick around, and even if you do, you're not going to feel safe expressing that opinion, and that option will be effectively stompped out. This sort of behaviour is still very common, even outside of .ml, and just because some topics are more free than Reddit, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
I find the mods heavy on banning death threats. I also consider your example of AI pile-ons to be unpopular, not an echochamber. The distinction is important.
The distinction is in the civility, not the topic. I just used AI because its one of the worst for it right now. People tend to see liking AI (or not hating it enough) as a good reason to attack people - again, not just death threats, but things like attacks on character, or other toxic behaviour. For a more mundane example, there was recently a post on the No Stupid Questions community, asking how Christians could justify not being homophobic or anti-abortion. The question itself, despite its validity, is downvoted significantly, and about half the responses are edgy, unhelpful quips rather than genuine attempts to answer the question - many of which with positive scores. That sort of thing is widespread, which quashes genuine discorse, thus, creates an echochamber.
I see. Good points all around. But I would not consider than an echochamber. That is just a diversity of respondants, many of which are poor quality and low effort.
Some because they are low intellect. Some are children. Some are edgelords and shitposters just trying to provoke for shits and giggles. Some just find the questions so obviously out of whack, that they presume OP to be a shitposter, and respond in kind. Lots of reasons, similar results. I noted a few recent ask lemmy questions where the questions were so malformed, people couldn't tell it it was a bot, esl, neurodiversity etc and made jokes about op. That's a case of garbage in/garbage out. While not cool, if you can't be bothered to make a quality question, you can't insist on a quality answer.
For reference: I go with the standard def:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
That which reinforces bias from innapropriate confirmation or unduly limits discussion of counter views.
The problem is that if that toxicity is widespread enough, and accepted enough, it does interfere with any discussion of opposing viewpoints. When helpful comments that advance the discussion are consistently burried under dozens of unhelpful ones, it makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, and incentivses those whose opinions that go against the ingrained group-think to leave. Akin to the Nazi bar allegory, allowing that sort of toxicity to fester just chases off anyone who doesn't want to join in, leading to a echo-chamber.
Fair point. But how to distinguish it from unpopularity? If the "toxic" waste is disingenuous, bad faith, bot based flooding, we have the tools to suppress it. If something is just genuinely unpopular, you have to be careful calling it an echo-chamber. Lots of folks think toxic of anything that disagrees with their obviously superior opinions.
There is no perfect answer. Garbage in, garbage out. Welcome to humanity.