  Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies.
Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social
interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote
opinion polarisation or consensus in societies and whether polarisation can be
avoided, particularly on social media. In this paper, we hypothesise that not
only network structure but also the timings of social interactions regulate the
emergence of opinion clusters. We devise a temporal version of the Deffuant
opinion model where pairwise interactions follow temporal patterns and show
that burstiness alone is sufficient to refrain from consensus and polarisation
by promoting the reinforcement of local opinions. Individuals self-organise
into a multi-partisan society due to network clustering, but the diversity of
opinion clusters further increases with burstiness, particularly when
individuals have low tolerance and prefer to adjust to similar peers. The
emergent opinion landscape is well-balanced regarding clusters' size, with a
small fraction of individuals converging to extreme opinions. We thus argue
that polarisation is more likely to emerge in social media than offline social
networks because of the relatively low social clustering observed online.
Counter-intuitively, strengthening online social networks by increasing social
redundancy may be a venue to reduce polarisation and promote opinion diversity.
