Felix 🐊

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Game Dev/Tech Art graduate

Twitter transplant July 1st 2023

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I: @SunshineMemoir (twitter)
H: @mochiartss (twitter)

-: Bi/Demi
-: he/they
-: Adult

Last Notes

2025-10-06 07:45:32 GMT

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Is there somewhere I can learn more about how Mastodon is failing PoC? I haven't heard anything about this so I'm curious to know more.
I'm curious is this is a callout to just the Mastodon developers specifically or to every ActivityPub software developer

2024-12-15 20:24:31 GMT

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i agree with a good portion of this and it's good that people like you are willing to list it out. I imagine this would be particularly insightful for people new to fedi who are interested in hearing about its caveats.
I'd also add people refusing to share a post that lacks alt text to this list, just another hidden rule. People shouldn't refuse to share a post they would otherwise share only because it lacks alt text (except if they're not able to see or understand an image). Don't get me wrong, people *should* add alt text when they can. There's three reasons refusing to share isn't great.
- Fedi doesn't have an algorithm, which means posts aren't going to magically appear to people without being shared. No sharing leads to interesting/important/useful posts not propagating, which leads to people saying that it's difficult to get discovered or find anything interesting. I hear this on a weekly basis at least.
- it literally makes the post more inaccessible than adding alt text in a reply would.
- this strains the relationship with people with learning disabilities, depression, anxiety, OCD, Bipolar disorder and the like, who may need support in the moment but not have spoons to add alt. It ends up gatekeeping a different demographic.
We absolutely can pioneer alt text on the platform, but there's no use in refusing to share posts without it if we would otherwise share them.

2024-06-19 22:15:25 GMT

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Twitter's implementation of these features comes to mind, I don't think it's too far out to say extremists on that platform will do anything in their power to silence opposition. I think about k/iwifarms and other communities taking pleasure in harassing "lolcows" and the like. Perhaps I should have been more clear but I'm not merely thinking in hypotheticals here.
I'm not necessarily trying to argue that it the state of mastodon will outright decline because of these features. Like I said, I'm in support of the features being rolled out nonetheless. However, I do want to touch on what @npub16y4…y28x mentioned about there being "rules of engagement."
Social media websites, like the sort that Mastodon emulates, are largely status games, in that interactions with posts and followers on your account increase your "score." There's no winning, just being ahead of the next guy. While conversation does take place, some people are only here for the game and they don't care about the consequences of their actions on the community. Masto in particular features a public audience with federation. Because of this, it calls into question the inclusion of such a feature. Sure, we all have things we only want friends to weigh in on, so perhaps the most appropriate method through which those things are shared is via private messages instead of public status games.

2024-06-19 21:32:15 GMT

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If the feature makes people happy, I say go for it! But from a philosophical perspective, it's difficult for me to find this as an explicitly net positive change.
If it's more appropriate that only your friends need to read/interact with it it, consider sharing it with them directly. No use in someone writing a letter to a friend and publishing it in a local newspaper and then being confused why people are so curious about their personal life.
It's not necessarily a proactive measure against bullying when bullies may just make new, unrelated posts tagging the OP. There is a potential for bad actors to use it as an echo chamber for harmful ideals, and people hurt by those ideals or their allies will no longer be able to directly intervene. It comes with at least as many caveats as it does benefits.

2024-06-11 13:43:15 GMT

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to the community's credit, I recently brought these issues up in a lemmy thread and to my surprise I was met with multiple people encouraging me to submit some sort of bug report or feedback on my experience, so that is definitely a step forward. I'm still hesitant because I don't know how appropriate it is to dump a laundry list of things that could be improved into a bug report.

2024-06-11 13:38:52 GMT

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I agree, the community has a lot to do with adoption for sure! I've definitely run into my fair share of people willing to defend "features" that just don't hold a candle to other options.
I think another major factor is sane defaults, like if I know how to do something in one program, figuring it out in another shouldn't be *too* different. I'm all for more efficient workflows, but they do actually have to be better than the alternatives. Blender has a particular way it likes to do things that's different from Maya, but the things that are very different are also very fast and intuitive.
Krita, I think, is a worse offender in this regard. It has its own way of doing some things that just aren't much better than competing software. Its implementation of clipping layers is a good example of this, as well as the "eraser mode" that just isn't as powerful as switching to different configurable brushes when pressing a hotkey. Then when you try to find how to turn it off the community responds like "aww but it's such a good feature though :3c" like please, I need to get work done. I wouldn't be in this mess If it just worked like a large portion of industry standard options and switched to a different tool by default.