• FluidBeef@quokk.auEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Obviously there has to be a space for politics here as we’re trying to build a global, decentralised alternative to corporate social media, and that has to include every form of discussion and a plurality of voices. However, on traditional web forums based around a shared interest it was always a bad idea to let the politics run free, as you’d get flame wars, and eventually a ruling clique with moderator influence banning posters along political lines and a resultingly toxic McCarthyite culture. I think the answer has to be more tools that allow us control over our feeds, more easily - there is space for all of politics free, ml instances, neutral grounds, etc if we are adults about it.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Agreed. In a way though I should expect this. Most people on the fediverse are here for ideological reasons, including myself. We dislike the corporate platforms that the fediverse seeks to replace. Simply having an account here makes a statement. But what exhausts me is when I go onto a community like mildlyinteresting expecting to see pics of three-chambered peanuts and yellow stop signs but most of it is stuff like “French President explains the political consequences of AI” or “There’s a selection bias baked into US democracy that most people never stop to consider. Owning a car significantly increases the likelihood of voting.” Like I can even attest personally to that last one as I don’t own a car and that makes it hard to get out and vote, but that’s not why I came here.

  • Scrollone@feddit.it
    1·
    3 hours ago

    I just want to say that I’m sorry for the current status of the web; I’ve worked on making some apps accessible to blind people and I bet most of them are horrible to use for a person with visual impairments.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      2 hours ago

      It can be hard. I have yet to see an elegant way to navigate threaded chains of comments. It’s like “UltimateGamer386 <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> <tab> [actual content]”. On Reddit, at least Old Reddit, the upvote and downvote controles were the only buttons and were located immediately before the actual comment, so you could go from button to button, then press down arrow to read the comment.

      I have enough vision to navigate to some degree, at least on a desktop. For laptop or phone it has to be a screen reader. I really should be reading braille more.

      I was just thinking the other day that a dedicated semantic tag for user replies like <comment> or <reply> or <post> would be nice, and they could be nested.

      • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 hours ago

        I’m sorry to hear that. I had a friend in college born without eyes. I talked a lot with him about concepts like shapes and colors. He was able to tell how much battery the electric carts on campus had by the sound of the motor, it’s quite interesting. I guess you might have an easier time than someone that lost their vision. I now have a friend that went blind after a car accident, he gets a lot of help from neighbors. He try’s very hard to do things himself, but often needs help. I hope you have a good support network for the things you need in life.

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
    12·
    47 minutes ago

    I don’t see anything political anywhere these days from adding filters and blocks over the past year or two. Whenever I very rarely do, I just block the user or community in Boost, or add another keyword filter to get rid of more spam. Similarly for regular feeds like my phone’s builtin Google News, I started marking them as “Don’t Show Content From [Source]”.

    If enough people do this, perhaps publishers will learn that spamming people with misleading ragebait is a losing strategy. Probably not, though.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I actually didn’t know you could block users on Lemmy until now. I’ve been blocking all the big communities so my main page isn’t clogged with stuff I’m not interested in.

  • lemmyknow@lemmy.today
    92·
    15 hours ago

    I don’t mind politics. Just wish I, who’s never set foot in the US, could come in here waste my time as usual and not have US News & Politics make its way into my feed every time through some non-US News & Politics community.

    Maybe I need to make more use of a skill most USians lack, knowledge of other languages, and find myself more non-US stuff. Not exactly easy, but would pay off easily.

    There’s some great stuff in English, but I wouldn’t miss it much if it means no more US news & politics. There ought to be good shit in other languages. I just need to find the good stuff, and where it be

    • stringere@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      5 hours ago

      Try a multingual lemmy instance. On sh.itjust.works I get German and French posts in my feed all the time from various communities when I browse Local.

      • lemmyknow@lemmy.today
        1·
        5 hours ago

        I do get some posts in different languages here and there, but I don’t really know some of these, so not useful lol. If I could, like, idk, filter or something.

        I’d be down to getting languages I don’t understand if I could get rid of English. As an experiment, a trial. Or at least a similar amount of every language. Boost other languages.

        At this point, I think I’m better taking breaks from Lemmy, or leaving altogether. Not sure it adds all that much to my life

  • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vipEnglish
    32·
    21 hours ago

    Maybe I’m crazy for this, but I don’t like the term politics, I feel like it hides what people are actually talking about. Think about the difference between the statements:

    “I’m not interested in understanding politics, it’s too crazy”

    “I’m not interested in understanding who gets to decide what my rights are, it’s too crazy”

    Or maybe:

    “It’s annoying seeing politics in my feed all the time”

    “It’s annoying seeing people discussing the implementation of mass surveillance in my feed all the time”

    In both cases, do you see how the first one feels like a pretty standard perspective, but the second one feels insane?

    • FridaySteve@lemmy.world
      101·
      11 hours ago

      I don’t know if you realize this, but when people say things like “I don’t talk about politics” that’s just a short form of what they really mean, which is often:

      I don’t want to talk about politics here.

      I don’t want to talk about politics with you.

      I don’t want to talk about politics right now.

      I don’t want to talk about politics like that.

      Surely you have to have seen the changes over the past 10-15 years in online discourse that has resulted in politics invading every available space. It used to be quite easy to avoid political conversations online. And still, a lot of people don’t come online for that and that’s okay.

      They aren’t insane. They’re trying to tell you to calm down. Please take a hint and change the topic when someone says something like that.

      • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
        31·
        7 hours ago

        Imma pull a classic middle of the road …thingy. Sometimes people use “I don’t talk politics” to mean “I’m personally happy with how this part of the system is working so stop complaining” which is kinda shitty when they’re not the one on the ass end of it. It’s also cool to just have some crochet groups where the biggest drama is that I hold the hook like a knitter. Gotta decompress sometimes. Have the strength to do both and all.

    • stringere@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      5 hours ago

      When someone says “I don’t like or follow politics” my reply is something alomg the lines of “well, that’s your choice, but you know who does take an interest in politics? Your boss, their boss, your bank, your landlord… So go ahead and choose not to care about politics, just shut the fuck up with your whinging about the state of the world you’ve just told me you opt out of having a say in.”

      Or something

        • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
          6·
          12 hours ago

          Probably NVDA for Windows. Microsoft has tried to flesh out Narrator but it’s still the MS Edge of screen readers IMO, you use it just to download another screen reader. The fact that VS Code is built around NVDA and not Narrator should show how MS feels about it.

          • 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍@lemmy.world
            2·
            7 hours ago

            I definitely agree that NVDA is the best on Windows. Narrator is eh (you described it well) and JAWS is somehow both costly and shit? I’ll give it to Apple too, VoiceOver is one of the best I’ve used.

            What are your thoughts on AI powered screen readers?

            Personally, despite being rabidly anti-AI, it seems like one of the few positive uses for AI since it can fill in the gaps where web a11y fails. I’m honestly curious about its development, but worried about the technology being tainted by capitalism (as is tradition)

            Disclaimer: I’m not fully blind (though I do have my own complex eye disability), but I’ve done a TON of work on web a11y and appreciate the responses

            • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
              3·
              6 hours ago

              What are your thoughts on AI powered screen readers?

              One of my biggest gripes with AI is that it requires a cloud connection most of the time, and I’m all about my PC being my personal computer.

              In terms of usefulness I can see it maybe for image description.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldOP
      28·
      23 hours ago

      Guide dogs have bathroom breaks at set times, and in my experience if their diet is healthy they’ll drop a duce at the same time each day. In any case, the dog is kept on a leash and given a command to relieve itself. It’ll usually sniff around, then stop to do the deed. Straight back means pee and arched back means poop. The posture can be seen if the handler has sufficient vision or felt with a hand if not. If poop is indicated, you find the dog’s south end and use your foot to mark ground zero. When the dog is done it’s a simple matter of bagging it using your foot as the landmark.