[CaptainFever]

That’s what I found too[0]. Made me realise that algorithms aren’t to blame for echo chambers and outrage; it is us humans that are at fault with this.

Examples of echo chamber behaviour on Mastodon: all differing replies are labelled as “replyguys”, but agreeing replies are allowed. Defederation is common due to drama between administrators. Debates are discouraged and free speech is commonly villianised.

Examples of outrage behaviour on Mastodon: Check out the Fediblock hashtag (don’t), which has a big “outrage of the week” tone, everything from Hive to Raspberry Pi to journalists.

I’ll try to add a bit of value to my comment. The way I’m resolving this is to recognise this and filter them out actively. This is one place where algorithms do indeed make it harder (because it can “sneak back in”). Particularly, I filter out all political posts and any anger posts, especially anger posts about an out-group (“us vs them”).

Is this creating an echo chamber as well? Maybe. But I can try rationalising this by saying that an echo chamber of neutrality is better than an echo chamber of a particular side, political or otherwise.

[0] https://mastodon.social/explore