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Accessibility can be done, and frequently is done, from a place of saviourism.

This mindset is one where disabled people are tragic and helpless and must be saved by accessibility.

Saviours are not able to see disability as a social issue they see it as a disabled person issue.

We need accessibility practice to be led by people who see disability as the result of oppression of people with various impairments: you are disabled by society not your impairments.

When you use more progressive framings like the social model you can more clearly see that we all are responsible for inaccessibility, it’s not charity work, it’s deconstructing systems of oppression.

—@nickcolley

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@themadcodger @markrprior @maegul @atomicpoet I keep seeing people recommending PWA as a solution for the lack of mobile apps for the non-Mastodon ActivityPub platforms. And I don’t get it. Those people really must have a thing for pain, because every PWA I’ve tried can most charitably be described as “janky”. Doesn’t feel natural, doesn’t deal with being offline and generally just awkward.

—@MetalSamurai

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@gr0k @atomicpoet @gruber Bluesky only seems simpler just now as there’s only one app and one server. The whole reason for developing AT was it would be federated, but “better” than ActivityPub by allowing truly nomadic user accounts. Of course the nomadic accounts don’t exist, so maybe they’ll never enable federation and just be a centralised Twitter replacement. Then their absence of actual moderation will come to bite them.

—@MetalSamurai

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“Social media overall feels like when I used to go out four nights a week and drink Miller Lite until 3 am: It was cheap and fun and probably created a huge part of my personality, but, yeah, I’m too old to be doing that shit again.”

— Verge EIC Nilay Patel expressing pretty perfectly my own feelings about most social mediums these days

https://embedded.substack.com/p/my-internet-nilay-patel-verge-interview

—@mimsical

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@codinghorror I really hope the GOP starts pushing anti-porn laws, because Dems would win in a landslide in 2024.

When I was in high school, my church had a big Spiritual Growth Workshop at a large Orlando hotel. At the end of the 4-day conference the hotel manager informed our organizer that, as a group, we had broken their record for pay-per-view porn by a pretty wide margin. We broke a porn record in Florida. Do you know how hard that is? (Some pun intended)

—@ukuku

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Yes we have had 146 mass shootings this year, but have you considered how bad things would be WITHOUT all the thoughts and prayers? We would have:

-Super cancer.
-Spiders with chainsaw legs.
-Babies being born with full sets of adult teeth.
-Golden Retrievers going extinct.
-The same number of mass shootings but they were all done by Keanu Reeves, the celebrity we love and trust the most.

—@lowqualityfacts

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Re all that talk about onboarding, UX, and stuff like that on the #Fediverse, especially #Mastodon (but also with #Calckey, which is often praised as the better alternative): I really don’t think that this matters so much.

Sure, Mastodon isn’t the user friendliest interface of the Fedi, or the social media in general. But Calckey is only marginally better, as I’ve experienced using it the past few days. Don’t get me wrong, I love both and depending on Calckey’s development, also if there’s going to be a larger German/European instance, I might make this a home in the Fedi. Just not now, Mastodon (especially if you’re on a large instance like .social) has more than a hand up imo.

But this not what I want to talk about. It’s about the onboarding and UX stuff that allegedly prevents people from embracing the Fedi. I think this rubbish. Even the “best” UX (best according to what?) is still part of the Fedi, a decentralised, non-commercial oriented, non algorithm-based social network of social networks. And THAT is the problem for folks imo.

We have been educated for well over a decade what social media IS: commercial, ad-based, algorithmic, focused on clout, attention, virality. NOT on building organic social relationships online. That was a nice side-effect, but the main thing was: YOU are the product, the most prized commodity, but you have to compete with other products i.e. other people for attention, clout, virality etc. in order to fill the pockets of the network owners (which were not you, but folks like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and now Musk).

Social media culture since the late 2000s/early 2010s has changed our perception of what it means to be social online. Where we originally had social networks, those turned into social media and a business model. AND NOW the Fedi: a complete contra point to that, with a very different culture. Here it is about building organic social relations, in a non-commercial, non algorithm-based environment. And regardless how easy you make the technical onboarding process and the UX, this built-in difference, that’s not just technological BUT CULTURAL, irritates people.

That’s why #BlueSky will fail spectacularly once it truly federates i.e. once there’s not just one node running AT protocol but 1000s or 10th of 1000s. The battle for the future of our social online presences is not won by building a nicer UX experience but by engaging in a war of position (Gramsci!) about what it means to be social online. So yes, it requires online activism just as much as building better interfaces. My two cents.

(Brought to you by Calckey and its 5000 word post limit 😉)

—@jynersolives