Comment on After a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance
DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
“We’ve also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular.”
Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).
As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.
People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.
But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.
I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It’s an awful choice, but you could still do it…
The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn’t really a choice.
I can’t throw myself up the stairs.
Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch’s distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of “optional.”
Gender-affirming surgery is “optional.” Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.
With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.
Yes definitely for hard of hearing and hard of sight people it can be an accessibility issue. I’m mostly deaf myself.
But comparing the situation for abled people in the way it was above doesn’t really work.
The term “accessibility” is not the exclusive domain of the physically disabled. Accessibility affects all people across race, gender, class, age and disability.
It’s questionable to imply choice when the alternative has significant negative consequences.
If I were chained to a wall against my will and given a saw. Sure I have a choice to free myself by cutting off a limb, but at what cost?
That’s not the point I was making. Just that the wheelchair ramp comparison doesn’t work.
(I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord)
This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.
There isn’t much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.
A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It’s the flipside of Wiki’s problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS needs something that can do both. Live group chat, with static discussion forum, and a wiki where it can all be archived. There’s currently nothing popular that fills the bill.
Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and “threads” now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.
cabbage@piefed.social 2 days ago
It's accessibility, and it's also sovereignty.
Another way of rephrasing this decision is "we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X". Which is pretty questionable.