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.

I suspect that because a huge portion of the HN crowd are educated IT workers / would-be founders, overall there's both a strong support for capitalism mixed with progressive social views. That doesn't really connect well with the political landscape in most of the western world and typically gets you labeled a centrist, regardless of how important those particular issues are to you.