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119 comments

  • Alt text for blind people in images, a la Mastodon.

    • Could this be solved with an app?

      • I'm not sure but I don't think so. It would require the server to store the alt text for the picture.

        And it would also require people to actually use the feature. I still don't know how Mastodon managed to pull this off in this regard..

    • Would adding ML generated descriptions of images help here? Would be trivial to add in a third party client.

      • Perhaps it would help a bit, I don't know. Even if it does, it would be far less than having the sharer to actually write something, and telling the reader the focus of the picture.

        I'll give you a personal albeit real example of that. I posted this picture in Mastodon, some time ago:

        A machine learning model could theoretically say something like there's a tabby cat in the picture, one semi-abstract acrylic painting, one figurative oil painting. Both paintings rest on a white wall... except that most of those things don't matter, what matters is what the cat is doing towards the viewer.

        Contrast it with the translated version of the alt text that I've provided: A playful tabby cat, leaning against the back of a chair, looking at the viewer. Her head, upper thorax, and paws are visible. One paw is holding the back of the chair; the other paw is on the air, in an "I got you!" movement towards the viewer. It's completely different and, when I wrote this, I hoped that both blind and non-blind users could get something out of the picture that they wouldn't without the alt text.

        And it's the same deal with other Mastodon posters, not just me. This system - where the user is expected to provide alt text - works well, IMO.

    • I do like that Mastodon reminds you to add Alt text before posting an image. People think alt text is just for the blind or near blind but sometimes I have a hard time figuring out why a picture was posted and the alt text clears that up. All that to say, it’s reminders help create the habit of adding text descriptors, which helps everyone.

  • The pie in the sky answer is “get all my friends and relations to use it.”

    More realistically: I wish I could follow or friend a person here.

  • Your own posts should show in your profile even you have Show Read Posts off. And there should be an easy visible toggle while browsing.

  • Increased participation in software development, UI design, UX design, documentation and guides (including wiki and join-lemmy).

    To make all the other things become reality :]

    • This is a common wish in F/OSS circles ... and then the owners/maintainers of F/OSS projects make the process of contributing anything convoluted, difficult, and emotionally draining (via a whole lot of bikeshedding)1.

      When F/OSS projects make contribution culture a thing, they'll get contributors. Until then ... ugh. No. They won't.

      1 Obligatory example: on a particular F/OSS game server a specific command by default gave this massive wave of output that was, for an average user, 95% useless. It listed things the user couldn't participate in. AND it listed the small number of things the user could participate in first, ensuring it scrolled right off the screen before it could get spotted. A user with actual UX design experience posted a long and detailed critique, explaining the problems, explaining why the available suggested solutions were flawed, and made a concrete suggestion for keeping existing behaviour with a simple /all switch on the command while making the default useful for 95% of users. From a quick glance at the code base myself, I figured it would take the maintainers two hours tops to fully implement and test the recommended change. It was a trivial change to metadata in the command processor, not even an actual code change.

      And she got "well akshuallied" to death. A bunch of programmers with zero knowledge of UX, no perceivable talent for tasteful design, and egos that got bruised by the suggestion that their output wasn't perfect dumped on this poor woman (the fact she was a woman being, I suspect, a major factor) to the point she's sworn never to get involved in suggesting anything for a F/OSS project ever again. Because F/OSS communities are just that toxic.

      So solve that problem and you'll get UI and UX designers galore. And maybe get people who'll document too, provided you don't tell them (literally!) that their contributions matter less than code. (Because nothing motivates contribution better than telling people doing the contributions that they don't matter!)

    • That's up to everyone on here to participate in the development of the product!

      Alas I don't think this will happen, people prefer when stuff is done without doing it themselves, because then you need to take responsibilities (myself included)

  • Lemmy has an extremism problem. Partly because of the lack of moderation tools (which is why a lot of mods supposedly left reddit in the first place) and partly because of the lack of moderation, or straight up complacency of some mods.

  • The ability to hide some communities I mod from the All feed.

  • This is probably not 100% lemmy's fault but interoperability with other branches of the fediverse could be better. For example, i can create posts and subscribe to lemmy communities from my pleroma instance but federation of posts and discussions from lemmy to pleroma is somewhere inbeteween "unreliable" and "nonexistant", depending on the moon phase or whatever. Sorting that stuff out would be crucial for making lemmy communities a real fediverse-spanning, platform-agnostic thing.

  • Ban instances like Hexbear and Lemmygrad from showing posts to normal people on All. Make them as difficult to find as possible.

    • I've heard a rumor around the dev channels that a feature taking care of that is coming with the next update, users should be able to block whole instances locally.

      However who you end up getting federated with should probably be your main criteria when picking your home instance. Lemm.ee is awesome because it's federated with almost everyone, but if you can't stomach that maybe you're in the wrong place.

  • [Double reply because it's something else than I commented before.]

    Hot take: I'd make admins+mods start kicking users out for blatant shows of stupidity (rushed certainty, "TL;DR but your wrong lol lmao", blatant context-unawareness, etc.). With the following message: "if you want to behave like a moron, fuck off back to Reddit."

  • That it's filled with people who complain about it being filled with Marxists despite clearly not having any idea what a Marxist actually is.

119 comments