that veterinarian may be more different than the people you see in everyday life, but the point of a social media bubble is that the veterinarian and you are likely to be very similar. Otherwise, why would you be on the same subreddit? How would you have met them on the internet if not because you were interested in common topics?
On any anglophone forum, it can happen that just enough participants are North Americans with the same views, that their political and social concerns are considered relevant and important. Some Reddit subs have seen this, too. Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.
Worse, as long as the the mods have free reign to decide what is and isn't politics this is just yet another way of phrasing the real rule of "no things we don't approve of".
It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on.
Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism.
It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.
Only if you hide behind the shield of anonymity. Which you can't really do in the real world.
They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".
This does feel a little like a bubbley description of things.
Other than as a generic pejorative, what "fascists" are regularly on television? What tenets of Fascism are they preaching?
This includes things you might have happily accepted you might have just made a mistake on (but I thought I remembered this documentary about Mandela's assassination...) when your real world social circle pushed back, if only it wasn't so easy to find other people that thought the same, and theories of why you are right all along. Usually with a lot of other baggage linked into you being right and everyone else being wrong
Obviously this isn't always a bad thing: people also use the internet to discover that same sex attraction is actually accepted in places outside their community or that their government's position on a border dispute isn't universally accepted in environments where alternative views are legal to express. And it happens offline too (the original 'Mandela Effect' was apparently conceived by a bunch of paranormal enthusiasts in an offline environment). But if the Azeri vet is one of the few people in the world to not think what you're saying is complete nonsense, you'll be much more likely to find him online. Not all taboos are against stuff which is inherently bad to discuss, and not all beliefs universally held within a community are accurate. But a lot of fringe stuff on the internet is fringe for good reason, and even when such views are quiet widely-held "bubbles" suck in people who would never have had the motivation to seek out an offline group for discussing the coming race war or whose fault their lack of confidence in dating really was.
And the newspaper/channel/site(s) you frequent.
This is not the average vet in Azerbaijan. It's the vet telling a story that fits the values of YOUR bubble. There are probably Azerbaijanis in your own city who you don't know and wouldn't even listen to because they don't live in the same bubble. They might be struggling to put food on the table and they may think that you are a privileged ** and that you think you are morally superior because your bubble also contains privileged **s who happen to live in other countries.
You'd probably get more outside of your bubble by getting acquainted with a person at your local bus stop. But the reality is: you wouldn't want to because they don't live in your bubble.
That phrase is hiding the real issue: on the internet, people engage with what they want to, and ignore what they want to. Attention, respect, engagement don't result from 'suddenly reading a comment'.
When there was only establishment newspapers and media they presented (what they considered) a balanced and responsible view. Now they've lost control of information and communication. Journalists dug deep to find a problem with the internet, and landed on 'the bubble'. The bubble is when people lack a balanced and responsible view...
There is just enough truth to 'the bubble' to keep the idea alive. On the internet it's easy to find radical information, and restrict your information sources to what you want. Back when everyone read the newspaper it kept public discussion narrowly focused [1]. Now we have lots of people who 'do their own research' and hold radical views. Also, the views that were suppressed under the establishment media are public and accessible to everyone.
There have always been people who live in their own little world, or bubble, but now it's much larger number. From the view of companies and social establishments that controlled the news this is a huge problem. From my view of society, I now sympathize with the US being a republic rather than a pure democracy, and I never thought that would happen.
[1] The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." -Noam Chomsky
The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, and roughly the same level of education as you. Your colleagues, by definition, all work in the same business as you. You have (subconsciously) hand-picked your friends to align with you on a multitude of levels.
Meanwhile, on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.