Notes – Page 101 – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 18 Nisan 5782 (Tuesday 19 April 2022) · 1 minute to read

Facebook: “Your post goes against our Community Standards on human exploitation” Me: “But I’ve been repeatedly assured that this only happens to conservatives! Something something Big Tech something something censorship! Better go join Truth Social! No wait, I’ll stick with something that actually works.”

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Amanda CAARSON

· 11 Nisan 5782 (Tuesday 12 April 2022) · 1 minute to read

I need to go into the bedroom and find out how much of this new John Sanford book is left, because baseball starts in something like five minutes, and everybody knows that baseball comes before books. I suppose the book’s been OK but I’m knocking stars off the final rating over technological inaccuracies and I’ll probably knock one off for the thing about Letty putting all kinds of shit in jeans pockets because we all know the pockets on women’s jeans are about as useless as tits on a bull, and according to other books in the Lucas Davenport series, Letty’s pretty fashion conscious so she’s definitely not wearing men’s jeans.

State College

69 °F Clear

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Amanda CAARSON

· 10 Nisan 5782 (Monday 11 April 2022) · 1 minute to read

So I’ve been in the market for a newer/working RSS reader for a while, and about two weeks ago I decided to try out Substack’s new reader. Here are my thoughts.

First, infinite scroll in your inbox. I hate this and would dearly love to be able to turn it off, but can deal for now.

Feed discovery: For now, you have to have the exact address of the feed. You don’t appear to be able to type in a URL and have the feed discovered. On the other hand, it seems to be pretty forgiving when it comes to parsing and rendering feeds.

Downside: You can’t delete a feed after you’ve added it. I get that this is still in beta, but that seems like something that should be part of any release.

Finally, you can’t yet import or export opml files, but maybe that’s coming in a future update.

Final verdict: I’ll continue to use this for now unless another reader comes along, hopefully one that doesn’t suck. My kingdom for a feed reader that doesn’t suck and that I can use across devices.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 23 Adar II 5782 (Saturday 26 March 2022) · 2 minutes to read

OK Micro.blog in particular and #indieweb in general, we have another insentive to work on accessibility: Mastodon will be accessible, but only to a point, for the foreseeable future.

I am a huge fan of what the federated web represents, and I hoped Mastodon could be a way for more people to participate in that without having to manage the technical aspects of going full Indieweb. But if the federated web is going to carry over one of the worst parts of the corporate web, (intentionally cutting corners when it comes to including everyone while at the same time the expectation of recognition for the parts of the community of disabilities it has included), then it’s time to fedquit.

It’s like silo-quitting, except a whole lot more disappointing.

I can, and will, quit using Mastodon, as soon as I’m done writing this status. I’ll continue supporting the underlying protocols which are the back end of Mastodon on my personal site, in the hope that someday there’s a project that supports open protocols but is built with accessibility in mind from the ground up.

But I believe I’d be missing out on a huge opportunity to help move the IndieWeb forward if I failed to use this moment to encourage other platforms which make it easier for other non-technical people to participate in the IndieWeb to up their game and make sure that everyone is included.