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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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Ham on Wry (@HamonWry@mastodon.world) (Mastodon)
The former guy is right … if they can come after him they can come after you. But first, you have to commit multiple crimes, in multiple states that include rape, tax evasion, the theft of top secret documents, multiple incidents of obstruction of Justice, election meddling, inciting violence, money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
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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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Music Publishers File (Somewhat Weak) Copyright Lawsuit Against Twitter by Mike MasnickMike Masnick

To be honest, I’m somewhat amazed that more copyright lawsuits haven’t been filed against Twitter yet. There have been multiple reports of how the company’s DMCA takedown response systems have been broken/ignored since Musk took over. Without looking for it, I’ve seen full length high def movies show up in my Twitter feed (including movies […]

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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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@Kataphract I don't think anyone's done that at scale, because to do it correctly someone would need to also add support for some other protocols to cover projects like Hometown and Gnu Social. But devs are talking about essentially an ActivyPub client that just handles everything, like Friendica and Peertube and Funkwhale ETC instead of just a Mastodon app.