Starting your own feminist backchannel
blog.valerieaurora.org
blog.valerieaurora.org
I also disagree on a purely rational level that retreating to an echo chamber can lead to anything positive: on the contrary, this is precisely how strong beliefs and emotions can fester into something malignant. This is for instance why things like the Tea Party exist - because people who shut out dissenting voices quickly become unable to empathize with alternative points of view.
A point about the echo-chamber, though:
Sometimes, if you are optimizing for humor or whatever, an echo-chamber is exactly what you want, because the social mores and cultural touchstones are the same. It's also very hard to have people with widely diverse viewpoints in these groups (worth it though!), because the tendency is just to turtle up and argue back and forth and back and forth and generally suck the air out of the place for anything else. This makes it not fun, and that drives people away, and then your channel dies.
If you want to try that, you need people that are willing to find a point and say "Okay, we clearly agree to disagree here, and let's move on and not revisit this unless circumstances really change or we are just being academic". That's a sort of civility, though, that is very rare.
It's also difficult because you have two people who are meeting and usually who have very different echo-chambers they subscribe to, and so even when they do enter into a discussion they are doing so from such divergent starting points that they're more likely to talk past each other.
There is no environment that would lead the author of parent comment to "empathize with alternative points of view". That's why backchannels are valuable.
First, just having a semi-common mail subject line of [ANGERSOCK-BAD-ATTITUDE] or whatever and then having a list of contacts and reply-all works pretty well. You can easily tag and filter the resulting backchannel, and it helps lend to the general sharing style of "Here is a thing", "Here is a comment on that thing", "Here is a comment on that comment". Longer-form discussion or debate is better suited to IRC.
Second, IRC is really, really good for this. Like, seriously, go setup a channel on Quakenet or whatever for you and your friends today! It's open, there's a lot of clients you can get, and it definitely feels more intimate than certain hangouts or social-web solutions.
Third, try to bring in people with different views. It makes discussions more interesting, makes everyone more moderate, and overall helps people learn. That said, people have to be respectful of one another, or at least have some agreed-upon decorum for teasing and ribbing. Sometimes, it's helpful to hang around and make sure that people who are opposed to, say, a majority opinion on GG or whatever still see that they are still members of a majority on something else (like, chocolate flavors or whatever). Everybody wants to be part of a community, and you can accomplish--with care!--even if that community has different beliefs.
Fourth, group dynamics and conversations can really, really change just by adding one or two people. It's not something to be done lightly, and it may be necessary (say, in the case of the email backchannel) to just address a different subset of the group in order to prevent flamewars or whatever. The main idea is that everyone is part of the community, but again, that they don't feel ostracized for disagreeing on a few points.
Not that the government should have a right to all of your private communications, but maybe it's not a good idea to integrate your team communication platform with your discussing/doing illegal activities hobby. Marginalized folks like Richard Nixon made that mistake and he had to resign before his company fired him, if you can imagine the injustice.