Some of your post seems like it is a reaction to a specific anti-echo chamber critique, and if so that may be useful to share because some of the basic assumptions about what an echo chamber is or does seem erroneous to me. For example, when you say about echo chambers

I don’t believe such a community turns into a radicalization timebomb for being like-minded.

Who said that they do, in the first place? Radicalized and radicalizing spaces tend to be echo chambers, but most echo chambers are not those. A heavily-moderated forum about Disney characters can become an echo chamber of pro-Disney viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to start churning out Unabombers.

Echo chamber doesn’t just mean a place with generally homogenous views, it means a space in which all but one viewpoint on a given topic has been eliminated, such that it becomes self-reinforcing and self-insulating (i.e. people in that space become more and more convinced of the viewpoint’s validity and prevalence, and people who do not share the viewpoint already become more likely to avoid the space).

Agreement is good wtf. Consensus should be a welcome occasional checkpoint.

Sure, but consensus in healthy communities is reached through everyone working together to make compromises and to convince each other, not by kicking or driving out anyone with an opposing viewpoint. And “opposing” in this context doesn’t mean inimical or hostile, it just means non-agreeing.

Consensus does not mean unanimity, it just means the agreement of the group as a whole. In a healthy group, a consensus is reached when the plan/ idea has been revised until everyone is on board with it. Kicking people out until only people who agree with the initial plan remain is not healthy consensus-building or community-building.

Sealioning is not a vaccine against radicalization.

“It’s either build an echo chamber or allowing sealioning” is a false dichotomy. You can moderate a space well to keep out bad-faith or enemy actors without creating an echo chamber.

I don’t believe such a community turns into a radicalization timebomb for being like-minded. We need shared values to build upon, lest loneliness swallows us all.

It seems like you’re using “echo chamber” to mean “safe space”, but they’re not the same thing. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this: we’ve got quite a lot of disagreement on any given major issue, but we don’t allow bad actors to remain in the space. There are myriad different Left-oriented philosophies and viewpoints and worldviews, and they’re (generally) all welcome here, but we’re not an echo chamber; you can go into any thread on Palestine and see that there is a lot of disagreement between members on the subject.

Nevertheless I feel that obsessing over the homogeneous aspect of an echo chamber is mistaking the symptoms for the essence. My intuition is that the danger is in the discourse itself and to a certain extent in the platform used.

Once again, I feel like your post is in response or reference to some specific argument or example. Who is obsessing over echo chambers? What discourse about them are you responding to? The discourse on echo chambers is going to differ quite a bit depending on who you’re talking to, and where. If you go into a conservative space like Xitter, it’s more likely to be being thrown around inaccurately to attack any non-conservative space. If you go on Reddit, it’s more likely to be talking about actual echo chambers. Echo chambers are bad, but not everything that gets called an echo chamber is one.

I often get the feeling that echo chambers seem to exist, is that it’s often about one specific topic. It’s easier to find a large group that agrees about a fairly narrow aspect then it is to find a large group that agrees about some complex system.