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This week we bring you Ramy in Egypt from his music studio. NVDA helps Ramy produce music and in his work as a music instructor at a university in Cairo. We whole heartedly agree with Ramy that every blind and vision person should have access to a free screen reader!
“NVDA made my life so simple” – Ramy
Thank you Ramy for sharing how NVDA has impacted you!

https://youtu.be/ucxm2pUh1nw

(And for those using captions, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve gone back to manually created ones 🙂 )

—@NVAccess

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Remember when sighted users were forced to read #AltText because pictures wouldn’t load? I kinda wish instances on here would disable all images for a day or week to demonstrate how it can benefit so many other things in addition to accessibility. Anyway, this article explains that time when images on FB wouldn’t load https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-image-tags-captions-ai-machine-learning-revealed

—@weirdwriter

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Btw for the love of god if you’re trying to get your friends to come to the #fediverse please just stop giving them links to the “join-x” sites and just give them an invite link from your server or a link to the register page from the one you use (or think is reasonably stable for a new user).

On Mastodon doing that means they’ll start with at least one person followed, not sure about on the #threadiverse or if either of the software even have invite codes.

I think the difficulties of federation are somewhat overblown in general, but one thing is for sure: it’s not a hoop most people really *want* to jump through first. Just give them a way to explore, and let help them figure it out themselves once they’re on.

The “join” sites are an attempt to mimic a pattern of centralized sites that just doesn’t work here. They’re unlikely to ever really work.

—@megmac

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Just got an email from YouTube Creators.

"Introducing podcasts on the YouTube Music app"

"Promote your podcast on and off YouTube!"

…and then the fine print:

* Podcasts on the YouTube Music app are currently only available for listeners in the US.

💀

In case you need a refresher on what actually *is* a podcast:

https://jaredwhite.com/podcast/88/
https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/109753291202166582

—@jaredwhite

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Just listened to the podcast where Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) and Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) discuss moderation in a distributed environment. Fascinating discussion and well worth a listen. I’ve been diving into this topic lately as I’ve designed a collaboration tool based on #web3 technologies and want to avoid unleashing something toxic. Anyway, this is a great discussion about how hard it is to design and implement moderation practices in any environment, and the unique challenges in a distributed environment like ActivityPub/Mastodon.

Just an initial two takeaways for me personally:

Studying moderation eventually brings you directly to the need to study and understand human psychology. The really good parts and the really bad parts. Moderating social media takes a special strength to look into the abyss and wrestle with demons. Mike and Yoel touch on this in the podcast.

In this discussion I was also reminded of the anthropological and historical work studying the dynamics of family and tribal groups. The distributed Fediverse reminds me a bit of tribal organizations. I need to dig out some of that older work.

So many folks here on Mastodon are studying this topic in a serious way. Refreshing and exciting to experience the quality of discussion.

The podcast is here:
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/techdirt-464057/episodes/decentralizing-content-moderat-175820469

I always appreciate pointers to relevant work.

#moderation #fediverse #mastodon

—@patrick_townsend

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Obviously, given the standard ratio of 2 #Jews to 3 opinions there will be quibbles but this is one of the best short explainers I’ve read on #Jewish denominations, religious adherence vs secularization , and #zionism. I get a lot of questions given I dress as a visible #Jew and live in a Jewless wasteland of mayonnaise and treif so I might just keep this handy.
https://theconversation.com/jewish-denominations-a-brief-guide-for-the-perplexed-207297

—@dukepaaron

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@dave

The thing we learned from RSS re twitter is unless people work together, and they refused to, the central service always wins.

In RSS that meant that subscription was a complicated process that browsers got in the way of, where in twitter it was one obvious click.

We could still pull this off but we need feature advantages and it has to be easy to subscribe, but bigger picture, people have to actively, religiously work together.

—@davew

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Things I learned today: You can’t update the #Lemmy UI without also updating the backend. Or else you get server errors. Anyway we’re running the latest RC of the UI on rblind.com now. We’re *also* running a development version of the Lemmy backend; that makes me less happy. I did say that rblind.com is still in alpha, though! Anyway some #a11y fixes for #blind folks are in: the upvote buttons are now toggles, selecting a community when posting works better on Android, expand and collapsed for threads are now toggles. Comment nesting still needs to be fixed, but I believe the PR for that was merged, it’s just not in a release yet.

—@fastfinge

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The #RedditMigration just got spicier 🌶

#Lemmy now has 135,369 accounts. That is tracking with my expectations.

But while #Kbin had ~7,000 accounts yesterday, it’s just shot up to 30,930 accounts.

While Lemmy is the 5th most used server software on the Fediverse, Kbin is now in 10th place and it’s growing at a faster rate than Lemmy.

A few days ago, I predicted that the #RedditMigration would result in 150,000-300,000 new accounts being created on the Fediverse. That expectation has already been met.

This #RedditMigration is fundamentally changing the course of the Fediverse. It’s moved the Fediverse from being primarily about microblogging to having more eclectic use cases.

While the #TwitterMigration validated that decentralized social media can appeal to millions of people, the #RedditMigration has validated that decentralized social media has man varied applications – both in the software and use case sense.

SOURCE: https://fedidb.org/software

—@atomicpoet

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For the record, had this been an Imam in a mosque then local law enforcement and FBI would have already arrested him for incitement. #RSSFeed
–

Born In Blood: MAGA Pastor Kent Christmas Delivers a Shocking Sermon | Right Wing Watch

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/born-in-blood-maga-pastor-kent-christmas-delivers-a-shocking-sermon/

Kent Christmas, the radically right-wing pastor of Regeneration Nashville, used his sermon last Sunday to urge those in his congregation to show the same

—@jan