Maybe Bluesky has "won"

On the other hand Twitter still feels like where things are actually happening but more and more feels like they are about to start terminating anyone with eyeglasses.

I was there when the Digg exodus happened, it doesn't feel like that. It's something else. It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?

After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.

I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.

However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.

And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.

So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".

Secondly, I find it so interesting that you come to HN for "contrary opinions" from your self-described "politically far left" viewpoint.

I hold a politically right viewpoint, and I come to HN for the same reason - it feels far left of my own world view.

I think it's pretty cool that HN can serve as a more neutral safe meeting place of minds.

Strange, because I've noticed over the past few years that HN has been sliding further to the right. Or at the very least it's susceptible to brigading. To be clear, it's not "right winger equals brigade[0]", it's "oh gee someone posted a story about EU external immigration and now the comments are full of people angry about asylum seekers who think the correct solution[1] is to shut down international law and start retroactively deporting citizens".

For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.

[0] I live with right-wingers, so I kinda have to be tolerant of them

[1] If this had been anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, the correct solution would have been to invest in integration and have generous family visas. That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people. The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.