My Own Private Idaho

Everyone’s talking about Jemima Kelly writing for The Financial Times about how Bluesky is the return of the left/liberal echo chamber because (and I might be paraphrasing just a bit here) people on that platform don’t put up with nazis in the name of balance or civility, as if we somehow don’t know about the paradox of tolerance.

That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).

An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.

Setting aside that not only do I not understand what all that business about Stoke Newington, Perelló olives, and truffle-flavored Torres crisps is all about but also that I don’t know who or what Stoke Newington, Perelló olives, and truffle-flavored Torres crisps even are, yes: people on Bluesky like Bluesky because they generally don’t have to put up with conspiracy theorizers and the overtly-racist, in part because the service has been building smart if imperfect tools for each person to curate their own discussions.

Apparently this is a concern?

People fretting about a non-nazi echo chamber conveniently ignore that the so-called “reasonable” or “principled” conservatives—at least here in the U.S.—were themselves the literal, actual, Overton-shifting path that led to Mine Furor capturing becoming the Republican Party in the first place. The rest of us have no earthly, let alone moral, reason to design online spaces to make any of them comfortable.

(Quite obviously parenthetically, you just know that the Republicans signing on to support Kamala Harris in order to stop Mine Furor are going to want a cookie afterward, as if it isn’t just basic decency and fellow-feeling to want to stop a fascist and then move to do so. Unlike some others on the left, I don’t have a problem with their support. I’ll only have a problem if Democrats give them something in return for it. I mean, Dick Cheney? Does anyone want to argue with a straight face that Dick Cheney isn’t part of how the Republican Party got to Mine Furor in the first place?)

Anyway, the issue for these trollers of concern, of course (or at least one of their issues), is that while there also are right-wing echo chambers in places like Truth Social, none of them have the pure social cachet that Twitter once offered them, and what they’re whingeing about now as social media splinters is that the places gaining traction simply don’t like them.

Boo-hoo.

What’s great about blogs is that in essence and effect you are a one-person echo chamber. If people want to read you they can, but if they don’t want to read you they don’t have to, and everyone can just go about their own lives and opinions as they see fit.

Online communities writ large, however, are allowed to develop along the same lines. They don’t owe you an audience, or a welcome.