Blind geek, fanfiction lover (Harry Potter and MLP). Mastodon at: @fastfinge@equestria.social.
How does that help? My personal instance currently has a database of several million posts thanks to the various Mastodon relays. I don’t need to scrape your instance to sell your posts. I don’t, of course, but it’d be easy for some company to create friendlycutekittens.social and just start collecting posts. Do you really have time to audit every instance you federate with?
When watching a movie or tv show by ourselves, blind people can’t see the picture. So unless we are watching with a sighted friend, we would rather save on storage and bandwidth by only downloading the audio.
Audiovault.net is the website you want. Made by and for blind folks, it has thousands of AD tracks in mp3 format. You should be able to just sync them with the video. Though blind folks never bother; we only care about audio anyway.
Yes and no. I left during the API drama and the blackout. First, moving communities wholesale just never works. Community archives don’t migrate, the affordances are different from site to site, etc. That’s why we (speaking for all the folks who run the ourblind.com set of communities) run a Reddit, a Discord, and of course the rblind.com Lemmy. The members and culture are wildly different between the three. And that’s fine. Though because of moderation issues, these days all posts to /r/blind need approval, and sometimes approval can take a day or more. However, Reddit’s decision to exempt the accessibility focused clients (Luna and Dystopia) that most blind folks use meant that a lot of blind people preferred to stay on Reddit, especially those who just consume content from other communities.
Second, creating a home for a new community, and doing it properly, takes a lot of time and effort! It’s taken us over a year to get the server infrastructure for rblind.com to a place I’m happy with. We had almost a week of downtime a while back, and until recently email delivery was extremely dodgy. While those things are fixed now, we’re still in process of creating a custom (more accessible) theme for our Lemmy. So even over a year later, I would still consider the rblind.com Lemmy to be in an alpha state. Signups are more than welcome, but we’re not actively working to push people over from elsewhere. Despite that, we’ve got a couple active daily users (mostly in off-site communities), folks make regular posts to our main community from Mastodon, and we’ve got a couple hundred registered users. It took the Reddit about five years to really take off, and even the Discord took a couple years before it started popping. So I’m happy for Lemmy to slowly build at its own pace, into whatever it decides to become, without trying to make it a clone of Reddit or something else, or forcing the existing communities to move over.
As well, of course, if Reddit does decide to cut off the accessible clients, or do something else that makes it completely screen reader inaccessible, our Lemmy means that no single service can hold our community hostage. Unlike when the API stuff happened, now we wouldn’t be in the position of racing to find a new home. We’ve got somewhere that’s mostly built and ready for people to move in when they need it.
There’s also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Most of those projects remain active in some form.
Surprised nobody has mentioned my two favourites:
Most of the other stuff I listen to is either industry specific or fandom/hobby specific.
I run the RBlind.com Lemmy instance at Accuris Hosting. Decent Virtual Machines, easy IPV6 support, and everything works fine. Prices are a bit on the high end, but it’s worth it to me to use a provider located in my country, where I understand all of the associated laws and can pay in my own currency via my local bank. Also, I’d rather not give money to big tech if I can help it, and support local business instead. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I’m just a mostly contented customer.
Also, of course, the fact that the control panel is screen-reader accessible is super important to me, though I doubt anyone else cares. But unfortunately that’s not yet the case with most of the larger cloud providers like AWS. And if they do deploy an inaccessible update, the company is small enough that I can send an email and get an answer from a human who has actually read what I wrote, rather than a corporate AI.
It’s just as long and incomprehensible as Google’s and Microsoft’s. So I have no idea.
That’s what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.
So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.
Thanks! I didn’t realize there was an announcement on Lemmy, or I would have searched. Unfortunately screenshots are kind of the only way to share posts on Discord, because you can’t link someone to a Discord message on a server they’re not a member of, so I can’t blame you for a screenshot there. However, it is possible to add alt-text on images you post to Lemmy. :-)
Thanks! Perfect. Wish I could award…Lemmy Gold? LOL
Can someone transcribe this for those of us using screen readers? As a server in Canada, We’re also worried about the hosting risk of the piracy community and considering blocking it. I’d love to read the LW statement.
Based on the links you gave, it seems that captions default to off when new servers are created.
Ah, good to know! I don’t use meeting platforms that aren’t accessible by default for everyone. Looks like the problem, at least in Jitsi, is that enable captions defaults to off. It would need to default to on before I could use it.
How many of those support captions?
NVDA. Without it I literally couldn’t use my computer every day, or do my job.
Yes. I already have to pay for a VPS, for a domain…nothing wrong with paying for an SSL cert. At least I can pick my vendor.
So require paid ssl certificates or something. I just can’t sign on to any system that requires me to establish personal friendships with other instance admins so I can beg them for endorsements. Begging Reddit to improve accessibility didn’t work. I have no interest in a system where my instance now needs to beg other admins for the right to federate. Even email doesn’t work this way.
So most modern activitypub servers backfill threads and profiles. My single user instance processes 30000 notes a day. If I was actually trying, I’m sure it’d be easy to grab much more while appearing well behaved.