Andrew on Nostr: I was thinking about this the other day, that the "ideology bubble" problem is an ...

I was thinking about this the other day, that the "ideology bubble" problem is an area where the concept of "follow topics vs follow people" may have some strengths.

Fundamentally, people use Twitter/Mastodon/Nostr/Bluesky/etc because they want to find and follow people who post about the topics they're interested in.

When the user experience is designed around following people, what tends to happen is we say "I like what this person says about this topic I'm interested in, I'll follow them". That person we follow will then naturally reshare posts from other people who post about that topic, but also with the same views on that topic.

This inevitably creates the feedback loop that creates ideology bubbles in our feed. If you instead follow the topic itself, your feed will (in theory) be anyone who posts about that topic, regardless of viewpoint on it.

I'm sure it's more complex than that, but I'm interested to experiment further on the concept, hence the whole Agora thing!