this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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I've noticed this too and have been following the conversation. However, I think self-isolation isn't the answer. Allowing r/The_Donald to go private didn't stop the far right.
What works is challenging these people, constantly. Mockery, abuse, whatever it takes. But building up echo-chambers, or allowing echo-chambers isn't the solution.
its not really an echo chamber, lemmy unlike reddit is decentralised, so nothing is stopping a dbzero user from just making an account on feddit.org and interacting with them, in reddit if the admins decide to ban a community that community is just gone.
also having an echochambers isnt bad, like an instance like blahaj should be allowed to exist and not federate with instances that have a lax policy on transphobia, and thanks to lemmy's decentralised nature you can join or make an instance that does have wide federation
Just because lemmy is decentralized doesn't mean it doesn't for echochambers. I mean look at ml. Or look at what squid did as a moderator to worldnews and political memes.
Echo chambers are absolutely a thing on lemmy. They exist at different scales (instance, sub, individual) but they absolutely exist.
Feddit.org bans criticism of Israel. There is no point in a Zionist instance which does not allow debate on its own turf.
Idk if it's building echo chambers in this case or just wanting to get away from a toxic admin.
See the comments and actively of them before the vote and then as it was happening
Plenty have alleged that db0 admins are toxic. I don't think that but plenty have. See the ptb sub.
People throw around all kinds of slanderous language all the time: it's the internet, our accent is hyperbole. It's fine.
The bigger issue that I see here is the cultural tendency to not want your viewpoint challenged, and that's coming from both sides on this one. It's also an issue on ml and hexbear; and those instances will throw the same accusations right back in the face of the broader fediverse, and not be wrong.
Every defederation hurts the fediverse, and substantially. The issues that came up in 23' between .world and .ml, things like that destroy these kinds of projects. Defederation also doesn't change the minds of those who are on feddit, and for the db0, and versus vice. If you think someone is wrong, you should tell them so, and you need to be able to tell them.
I think it's the wrong move. I think defederation is always the wrong move. It's more important to fight about important things than it is to be comfortable right now. If db0 users think feddit is a bunch of fascist Zionists, then get into the comments and call them out. Don't just let them comfortably be Zionists while you ignore the problem. And the same applies to feddit. If they've got the right of it, take the fight and defend your points.
But defederation is a lazy and community damaging move, not just to db0, but to the entire project. Defederation is how Lemmy dies.
No. Having instances with varying approaches to defederation is good for the fediverse. Having no defederation is how you end up with nostr.
Hard disagree, and thats thoroughly evidenced by the usership and engagement numbers.
The numbers of fediverse users have more to do with onboarding, VC funding for marketing and the inherent nature of federation itself than it has to do with defederation policies
Social networks thrive because they are networks. De-federation collapses the network. Its not more complicated than that.
Less content, less interactions, less engagement.
It is more complicated than that. Vulnerable minorities don't thrive in spaces where they're endlessly playing whack a mole with bigots and trolls.
I didn't leave Twitter for the fediverse because of its network. I left even before Musk, because Twitter was full of hate that the admins didn't feel the need to action.
Your preference is just that... And as long as there is room for your preference on the fediverse without it being the only way to experience it, we can both have the experiences we want.
how do you explain hexbear's growth?
If my instance didn't defederate hexbear I wouldn't be on the fediverse at all.
What makes it different from just blocking the instance at user-level?
Defederating also blocks the users on Lemmy. Instance blocking at the user level just blocks the communities in Lemmy, you have to block each user individually.
It makes it so I don't have to individually block the myriad trolls that emanate from that cesspool. I was seriously a couple pig shit images from never opening this site again.
I was reading the original discussion on dbzer0 and kept wondering what the removed by mod was under every comment agreeing with either partial ban or defed, so I looked at the modlog. It was literally the same pigshit picture posted over and over again, almost twenty times, by the same user, though fortunately I only had to see it once, by choice.
That's a serious personal commitment to assholery right there, and this is apparently just one of the people coming over to do this on dbzer0 comms. To be honest I can't claim to understand some of the political nuance that was coming up in the thread, but that one dude sure did make a strong argument for defed via the modlog, lol. If that's an example of what dbzer0 has to put up with from multiple individual users of another instance, then considering defederation is absolutely a legitimate discussion to have.
That appears to be a troll account from my instance that was created just to do that, but by that behavior they are almost certainly a hexbear. They'll never change
I think defederation only really makes sense if there is a concern of botting. Individual bad actors should be banned on a case by case basis, blanket banning seems shortsighted. However, I do believe there are bots on some instances now, compared to say a year ago where I believe they were more far and few between.
Part of my issue is also with bad actors “flooding the zone”. If enough noise is getting pushed constantly by bad actors/bots, it can sway public opinion just by virtue of people seeing those opinions more often. This was one of the things that killed Reddit for me, personally. Well that and a slew of other issues.
This is what I agree with. Regardless, I think almost the entire thread would agree that the fediverse/ lemmy is not fully cooked when it comes to the issue of federation.
it is important for people to be able to build spaces that provide community for people who have perfectly legitimate reasons for not wanting certain things around.
unfortunately providing that functionality inherently provides the functionality to create echo chambers for arbitrary reasons
you cannot have one without the other and I'd rather have both than neither
Building an echo chamber isn't something done intentionally. Well... Sometimes it is.
It's most often created by avoiding people you find annoying, toxic, etc. As long as you keep up that reasoning you eventually only interact with people who mostly agree with you. You're blinding yourself to counter opinions. The definition of an echo chamber.
When avoiding ideas or being challenged yes. When avoiding abuse no
The former often feels like the later.
Even more so when you're not used to it.
This is only the case if you're annoyed by people disagreeing with you. That's what makes echo chambers.
We tried they still defending the terrorist statr of Israel. It's like debating neonazis it is useless
I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say "what works is challenging people" if the people you want to challenge have an "ignore" button for when you get too loud for their taste.
I mean it is. Look at .ml versus . world versus say.. hexbear.
Banning, defederation,anything to de-voice people: it's constantly being used to create local echo chambers. And it's not like we don't have a down vote button. We have a way to do "no" to content. But banning or defederation is saying "I don't think you should be able to form an opinion on this content". It's very different.
I've been banned from communities merely for downvoting posts in them. Such behavior is toxic (on the part of the community's mods, not me), but that doesn't stop it from happening.
💯 . As a project we've got some governance things to figure out.
Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool's errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a "pick your poison" situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as "the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it"). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.
ah gotcha. Now I understand.
I agree in principal but not in part. I do think its possible to set up echo chambers in the fediverse, and while its not impossible to break out of them, its definitely not convenient.
I agree entirely that its a design/ conceptual issue. I've long argued that the fediverse in its current format is very clearly a "1.0" conception.