These are the same people who say "let people like things" but they don't want you to be able to dislike things and totally ignore that there are legitimate reasons to dislike some things. Then they call anything they dislike "toxic" and don't see any disconnect.

Being defederated from beehaw doesn't seem so bad as from what I've seen they represent the overly sensitive, are offended by everything crowd, who, while I largely agree with many of their views, are just exhausting to deal with.

I'm not sure if Lemmy collapses heavily downvoted posts like Reddit does, but if it does it is also playing a part in creating an echo chamber.

I personally don't have a very strong opinion about up-/downvotes but in general I try to stick to only downvoting comments that are not contributing or down right hostile. I refuse to downvote a comment that is attempting to discuss something in a proper manner, even if I completely disagree.

I get your point about it being harder to agree than disagreeing with this type of mindset though, so it's not perfect.

A more perfect(*) solution would be separating sorting by relevance (formerly up-/downvote) from emotional reactions. There's the possibility of having a range of emoji reactions: agree, disagree, inaccurate, like it, bookmarked it, dislike it, find it funny, makes me happy, makes me sad, loveyou for this, what the fuck, find it's bullshit, (etc. but this is not necessarily a good selection). Some of the reactions (disagree, inaccurate ...) could also require a comment of at least (n) words to be left.

(*) oxymoron intentional

Edit: See here what people interested in development are opining about this idea: Add emoji reactions to posts, comments. #29

“Ratioed” on Twitter is when a post has more comments than likes/favorites/whatever. Twitter doesn’t have downvotes. So, more comments than heart things suggests the post is disliked or controversial, as it’s presumed that otherwise people commenting would have also “liked” it or whatever it’s called on Twitter.

The echo chamber effect comes from mass downvoting of dissenting comments by a dedicated faction or the hive mind and mass upvoting by the same. The ticket to virtual popularity is popular soundbites.

Downvotes hide discussion, and upvotes make them more visible. That's not what you want if your goal is to eliminate the echo chamber. Perhaps we should change the default sort to sort by controversial (i.e. lots of votes on both ends).

For example, let's say there are two comments:

1. funny comment largely unrelated to the topic
2. detailed comment with extensive sources, but goes against the common opinion

The first comment is likely to be near the top, and the second will likely be buried near the bottom, and perhaps hidden (e.g. Reddit auto-hides if a comment goes too negative). That's not what you want if your goal is to have productive conversations.

From my experience, people are less likely to click the upvote when they agree with something or think it's relevant than they are to click the downvote button when they disagree. For some reason, disagreement is more likely to provoke a response than agreement. So if you eliminate the downvote as an option, you'll likely get people only voting on things that are relevant or really important to them. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it at least seems to help a bit.