Every bubble other than the own is unpleasant. Social networks need to reproduce the filters we create in real life (social, territorial, etc.) to represent human interaction.
Facebook is sometimes famously called out for creating those filters. ... although I often struggle to unfollow unpleasant (stupid/hateful/hivemind/low effort) content fast enough.
> That is just a problem of offering good filters.
True, and this is a solved problem in the fediverse. Mastodon dev team have been particularly good at implementing filtering tools at both the user and instance level (like the email filters that block whole domains used only for spam or other abuse).
We've had a couple of waves of folks banned from the birdsite turn up, get asked to set up their own instances, and after a while, you just stop noticing they're there. It's like a normal after-work drinks pub and a skinhead bar being in the same street. You occasionally walk past some unsavoury characters, but you don't have to interact with them.
> Facebook is sometimes famously called out for creating those filters.
No, what FarceBook and goOgle (among others) are called out for is creating echo chambers, not filters. The difference is subtle but crucial. In a nutshell, filters allow you to mute people who abuse you; spamming, flooding, flaming, dogpiling, sea-lioning, all the old favourites from UseNet/ mailing lists and a few new ones. Echo chambers quietly disappear the opinions of people who may disagree with you, however politely, and regardless of how many peer-reviewed citations they offer. You don't even know its happening, leading to dangerous levels of false consciousness, and uncritical partisanship.
There is no universalizable qualitative difference between filters that create a bubble/echo chamber and filters that do not. The word echo chamber and bubble are just meant to transport a value judgement against their existence. Which is why people often talk about other people's echo chamber and their own legitimate anti-abuse filters.
If you hold a non mainstream position you would probably want to teach your feeds to stop bombarding you with the respective mainstream position. A hundred years ago you did that through selecting a fitting club or reading a specific newspaper over another. Today you adjust filters.
What's creating a "dangerous level of false consciousness" is IMO just ignorance and media illiteracy. If people think their media diet is also everyone's media diet, they just weren't properly prepared for sophisticated media.
