Notices by skye 🏳️‍⚧️ he/him (skye@toot.cat)

@feditips @oedipusnj @starry1086 @moss @MonaApp deleting and reuploading will also break them, so offering a way to change the shortname while giving a warning to that effect would make it that much easier for admins without causing any problems that don't already exist. not every fedi admin is very knowledgeable regarding the tech and those that i've talked to have said that they have no idea how to go about changing them, and they are definitely not the only ones. this is an issue that requires a clean and accessible solution

can someone tell me what the deal with this flatpak shit is? like what is this? why do we have this? why does it suggest installing ONE GIGABYTE of packages for a chat program

@melunaka @Polychrome @Glitchyeen ice cream

@Glitchyeen if i may offer an upgrade

it is a little jarring to realise that the white cis guy nerds feel so much closer to the white cis guy normies than the queer nerdy people

privilege is always going to be the stronger connection if you dont actively seek to break it down

my friends. mates. comrades. colleagues. buddies.

i do not need distro advice. i have been through the list. i have not needed distro advice since i went along with a handful of friends literally making our own distro in like 2006.

my first linux was gentoo — yes, stage 1. i have had SuSe because it was the only that came with out-of-the-box ISDN support that allowed me to go online with a fresh install. i have had arch, and our handmade distro was an arch fork. i have done LFS a handful of times; i have done LFS on an alpha; i have done LFS on an ancient PC with ISA cards.

i have even had NetBSD on a 32-bit SPARC. i have had OpenBSD too, on a Jornada.

i have had a collection of grml rescue CDs. i have had debian (and learned that nothing breaks as reliably as debian does). my first ubuntu was, what, 8.3? i have had fedora too.

please just take 3 seconds to consider that the person you are talking to may not, in fact, be a bloody beginner who has never done a manual kernel configuration, tinkered with package manager source code, or repaired their hardware with a soldering iron.

this kind of behaviour is exactly why i eventually stopped engaging with the FLOSS community at all. any kind of communication, any kind of venting or asking questions is seen as proof that you have no idea what the fuck you are even doing.

this is why FLOSS is a bunch of white men who will frown at anyone who admits not knowing something or having made a mistake. y'all make damn sure to show the rest of us that doing these things means we don't belong. means we're not as good, as smart, and as knowledgeable as you. means any unsolicited advice you pull out off your literal ass will be valuable as gold to us.

this is why i left. 10 years later, nothing has changed. not one thing. i livepost my hysterical experiences after my mint system got completely fucked up by doing an upgrade, and y'all swarm me to ask if i have considered trying a distro that isn't aimed at beginners?

i have, actually. in two thousand and fucking FOUR. there's a reason that i didn't ASK.

hey, people.

both “edit” and “delete and redraft” are accessibility features.

if you see someone delete a post very shortly after creating it, they are almost definitely doing a delete-and-redraft. if they edit, you can see the change pop up live.

speaking for me as a person with both adhd and varying levels of brainfog, i use both features ubiquitously.

i edit for clarity, to add a thought that i forgot, to correct typos or places where my brain randomly banana the wrong word. sometimes also because a picture or link didn’t work the way i expected it to.

no matter how much i proofread, (and the more upset or excited i am, the more likely i am to forget doing that) there will never be a timeline in which i am not constantly editing or delete-and-redrafting my posts.

for the simple reason that i am disabled.

stop being fucking ableists, get off your high horses, and work up some patience to wait while a confused person is clearly in the process of figuring out their thoughts.

hey #blind peeps, can we talk about those custom emoji for a sec?

so i've heard that currently they are not accessible because a #screenreader or braille display would only read the name between the two colons, which is frequently optimised for legth because of mastodon's character limit, rather than legibility.

so what would be the optimal way to deal with them? asking in the sense of: ignore the current constraints of the feature.

should there simply be slightly more descriptive names that are read every time? can y'all even figure out what a "blobcat" is? (not because i think you can't but because being a non native speaker myself, i think i might have some problems with that if i had no visual clues to go on)

or should there be a more lengthy description, maybe stored in an image alt attribute, that is read out each time? which is maybe much more annoying? or read the lengthy description out once but the short name for any repetitions?

what would be the best way to handle it? #accessibility

(RT yes please :boost_ok:)

regarding the language issue, i really don't see how we could reasonably tackle that one, apart from letting server admins edit names wore easily so they could at least customise it to their server language

i'm not involved with any development but i have been talking to my server admin who had some ideas and questions, and i'm gonna do my best to bring any conclusions from this conversation to places where they might get seen, though anyone who is more involved in development of any fedi tools is welcome to do do that proactively

please RT this one! looking for opinions of #blind people on #accessibility of custom emoji for #screenreader and #braille. also interested in opinions of other people who would use text descriptions of emoji.

we can't change the way that unicode emoji are handled, but expanding on @bright_helpings's initial suggestion, i am seeing a real chance here to make them not only _as_ accessible as unicode emoji, but _more_ accessible.

before i take this to the authorities, i would like to know what y'all think of this proposal:

we give each emoji 2 attributes. one is the short fixed name that is already being used and displayed or read in place of the emoji. the other would be a longer editable description, possibly stored as image alt attribute, though there are maybe other ways to implement it. because of the use case, a tight character limit would be either strictly enforced or throw a warning when it is exceeded. based on the size of braille displays, maybe 20 characters for the short name and 40 for the long description. i am not sure of the precise numbers, what would you like?

on the server admin side, we offer a way to easily change both of these attributes. this allows for free optimisation and also translation to the server's main language.

but to improve upon unicode, we additionally give users the ability to edit the long description for each separate use of each emoji, so they can describe their intent in context rather than offering only a context-removed description of the image. this helps blind people as much as autistics and people unfamiliar with the use of emoji.

for use of screenreaders and braille, we offer a global setting to choose between skipping custom emoji entirely, reading the fixed short name, or reading the editable long description.

for sighted users, we offer a global setting to remove all custom emoji, or replace them with either the fixed short name or the editable long description.

edit: i just realised that these two are the same setting rather than 2 different ones.

we also show the long description on hovering (desktop) or tapping (mobile) the emoji.

what does everyone think about this proposal?

@tomek YES ty!!

oh no, a few days someone on here linked a site that showed aggregated user counts of the fediverse, organised by server time, and had a little diagram where you could swith bewteen active last month, active in 6 months, number of instances, etc.

it was NOT fediverse observer

does anyone know what i mean?

@Jain it is the pinkest of noses 🥺

@kathhayhoe image description: diagram showing proportional engagement rates for each platform.
Mastodon 13%, Instagram 5%, Twitter 1.5%, LinkedIn 1.5%, Post 1.5%, Facebook < 0.5%

@lamorito where are all the plant people!

@lamorito ah, that used to be me but turns out that that is in fact curable for the small cost of subscribing to a new special interest

HELLO FEDI WHERE ARE ALL THE TRANS GUYS???

please say hi??? (especially if you’re not white, if you’re disabled, if you’re gnc, or if you really like plants)

I'm just gonna go and say it.

the age from which children should be allowed to change their name, their legal gender, and pick their own pronouns is 0.

they're not going to develop that wish before they have developed a sense for how gender works, and from the moment that they have, they should be able to be who they want to be.

sure, allowing even small children this type of freedom would mean a lot more experimentation, going back and forth, reversing choices, and would require a much more fluid understanding of names, gender and identity.

but why should that be a bad thing?

from time to time I see people arguing that you shouldn't allow trans people to get treatments and surgeries on an informed consent basis.

that therapy and assessments are NEEDED in order to make sure that they're not making a grave mistake.

and to support this argument, there are usually a few examples of trans people who decided against it at the last minute, or who didn't and regret doing it.

and zero realisation that this entire system of therapies and assessments and having to prove your gender over and over and over AND OVER AND OVER again is what leads to these types of situations in the first place.