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Late 90s to 2000s was the decade of internet glory. Then social media and big tech took over. Now with personalized feeds and searches, along with conflict promoting engagement metrics, many people spend their time within echo chambers and those chambers keep getting more partisan. On top of that, rampant misinformation has made it all the more difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Then social media and big tech took over.
Things like BBSs, Usenet and IRC are all social media. So is Lemmy for that matter.
I don't think social media itself is the problem, it's the big tech / purposefully biased algorithmic content selection part that screws it up.
But you had to deliberately look for BBSs that contained what you wanted. Platforms weren’t as all-encompassing as they are now compared to the scattered and independent phpBB groups of yesteryear. People didn’t have social media in their faces all the time. You had to dial-up and go looking for whatever it was, whether it was AIM, ICQ, or your favorite forum.
No, social media in the super-limited context that it existed in 20 years ago wasn’t an issue. It absolutely is an issue today because of their size, popularity, ease of access, and definitely the algorithms.
Lemmy can have its fair share of echo chamber syndrome. For example, almost nobody here vocally likes Reddit, and if you post anything pro-Reddit, it's likely to be met with a lot of negativity. I'm anti-Reddit too, for the record, but it's good to acknowledge tribalism even when you agree with the tribe. But the nice part is Lemmy can't have competing echo chambers nearly as easily as Reddit can because we're so much smaller.