Could not have said it better myself. The bubble idea is a myth and, as we've seen here, when people attempt to articulate it, it cashes out as something astoni

Could not have said it better myself. The bubble idea is a myth and, as we've seen here, when people attempt to articulate it, it cashes out as something astonishingly shallow. It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on. Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism. It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.