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Thinking about how much heat Mastodon gets for being “confusing” when most of the people saying that use Discord on a regular basis. Discord is a UX nightmare. I’ve been on it for several years and still struggle to figure things out. Twitch, too, is confusing as hell. Why do Discord and Twitch get a free pass while Mastodon gets berated 24/7? I’m not saying that the fact that Discord and Twitch have awful user interfaces excuses Mastodon’s problems with onboarding etc., but it’s weird that it seems to be held to a very different standard than other popular platforms.

—@Rachel_Thorn

@bigidea A message to anyone using non-standard font/display characters — for forced cursive, italic, gothic, bold, monotype effects; or flipped, reversed order, &/or rotated/upside-down letters — in usernames, or, worse, in posts: DON’T.

Assistive tech will either announce each character in exhaustive, excruciating technical detail — because each is a glyph with a specific meaning, not the stylized letters they sometimes appear — or simply ignore them, creating an informational black hole. Either way it’s frustrating & annoying as hell.

Most sighted users hate them, too.

They don’t make you look original or different — they instead signal you don’t care about those who use assistive technology.

—@oedipusnj

How long until we start buying greeting cards for Amazon Prime Day — calling parents, holding cookouts to celebrate this most American of annual holidays?

—@pilhofer

Facebook hasn’t done anything to support the open web. All they’ve done is put it in a press release and post an email to a mail list. It’s a long road from there to being on the open web. More likely they’re going to use the open web and leave it a toxic waste site after they leave.

—@davew