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I disagree with the current CEO of Mastodon about his stance on mid-sized instances. We don’t want to be run in isolation, we are part of the Fediverse. “Normal users just want the default”, he can repeat that as many times as he wants, it doesn’t make it true because of that.

Diversity is the DNA of the Fediverse and Mastodon is just one part of the whole. Thousands of people spend their time and money to make it successful. Anyone who dismisses that and single-handedly tries to market the Fediverse as a Mastodon brand and use “crowding out” techniques to prevent users from even being encouraged to choose an instance from a diversity will ultimately fail.

I am super disappointed with the direction Mastodon Corporation is taking. If there is not enough headwind here soon, then sooner or later it will lead to a schism.

#Mastodon #MastoAdmin #fediverse

—@louis

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“It began on a cheery October morning in New York City; the company had gathered the press together at a buzzy breakfast spot named Sadelle’s in SoHo. As the assembled reporters ate their bagels and lox, Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras, explained that the open web was in crisis. Sites were too slow, too hard to use, too filled with ads. As a result, he warned, people were flocking to the better experiences offered by social platforms and app stores. If this trend continued, it would be the end of the web as we know it.”

Yeah, well maybe if Google hadn’t played its part in convincing software devs that they should own front ends too and make webpages with client-side JavaScript instead of server-side rendered HTML a lot of this problem wouldn’t have existed in the first place. Just a thought.

https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit

—@theotherbrook

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This, I think, is one reason the air of exclusivity has boosted Bluesky. The same thing was temporarily true for Clubhouse. While it was exclusive, influential people thought of it as a sort of private refuge from what Twitter had become. Everyone wanted in because it briefly became a place where you might hear the cool crowd say something interesting. Then they opened up more and it lost its value. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-45/the-intellectual-situation/the-new-new-reading-environment/

—@buzz

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My opinion on #Calckey, and the other *key forks:

The accessibility isn’t “needing improvement”. The Akkoma-FE needs improvement. Calckey’s accessibility is “practically non-existent”.

This is one of the most advanced Fediverse front-ends with several bespoke complex widgets, which makes accessibility a challenge; it needs to be a priority from the start. Yet it seems to be designed in a way to override all the native browser behaviors to make an interface accessible. It’s dug itself into a moat.

From a minute with the front-end, I see this:

Buttons don’t have readable accessible names.
Much of the interface isn’t keyboard-reachable.
Heavy animations don’t respect reduced-motion settings.
Loading indicators lingering on the accessibility tree.
All the fancy floating windows are contained in section roles that lack accessible names. The title bars are broken into multiple static text elements, one of which is a Unicode symbol.

This was all within a minute of using Calckey. A more thorough look would probably reveal far more.

I’m not optimistic about bolting accessibility onto an already-complex front-end, but I don’t find the situation hopeless! Effort is probably better spent supporting MastoAPI so people can use accessible clients, and on getting non-Calckey servers to support federated back-filling of missing replies so we don’t have to view posts on a remote Calckey instance’s front-end. It may also be possible to create a separate, more-accessible “read-only” static front-end. Akkoma’s static-FE (not enabled on this instance but visible elsewhere) is one good example of this approach.

Everything I wrote should also apply to the other *key forks (Misskey, Foundkey, etc).

I’d be happy to be proven wrong about any of this.

Edit: Calckey appears to have added support for reduced-motion, and will soon get better keyboard support.

—@Seirdy