‍fuchsiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa @f0x@pixie.town

My opinion on #Calckey, and the other *key forks:

The accessibility isn’t “needing improvement”. The Akkoma-FE needs improvement. Calckey’s accessibility is “practically non-existent”.

This is one of the most advanced Fediverse front-ends with several bespoke complex widgets, which makes accessibility a challenge; it needs to be a priority from the start. Yet it seems to be designed in a way to override all the native browser behaviors to make an interface accessible. It’s dug itself into a moat.

From a minute with the front-end, I see this:

Buttons don’t have readable accessible names.
Much of the interface isn’t keyboard-reachable.
Heavy animations don’t respect reduced-motion settings.
Loading indicators lingering on the accessibility tree.
All the fancy floating windows are contained in section roles that lack accessible names. The title bars are broken into multiple static text elements, one of which is a Unicode symbol.

This was all within a minute of using Calckey. A more thorough look would probably reveal far more.

I’m not optimistic about bolting accessibility onto an already-complex front-end, but I don’t find the situation hopeless! Effort is probably better spent supporting MastoAPI so people can use accessible clients, and on getting non-Calckey servers to support federated back-filling of missing replies so we don’t have to view posts on a remote Calckey instance’s front-end. It may also be possible to create a separate, more-accessible “read-only” static front-end. Akkoma’s static-FE (not enabled on this instance but visible elsewhere) is one good example of this approach.

Everything I wrote should also apply to the other *key forks (Misskey, Foundkey, etc).

I’d be happy to be proven wrong about any of this.

Edit: Calckey appears to have added support for reduced-motion, and will soon get better keyboard support.

Things you should ask yourself before posting "news" articles about negative subjects in particular:

1. Is this something that nobody saw coming?
2. Is this an article that provides an actionable step forward, some sort of concrete way to deal with the problem?
3. Does this article elevate a perspective of a marginalized group that isn't normally covered?

If you can't answer "yes" to at least one of those questions, *do not* post it.

It's ragebait, it's not useful, and it won't make anyone aware of anything they're not already aware of - all it'll do is make people feel more depressed. It's worse than doing nothing.

If you *can* answer "yes" to at least one of those questions, then post it - but with an appropriate CW, because a lot of us don't always have the energy to deal with negative news.

Just realized that Quora released an overly confident GPT-based thing as well...

I guess they're trying to make their userbase redundant?

Amazon: "The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs."

Oh look, they've finally acknowledged what some of us have been saying ever since *checks notes* Amazon started pushing the microservices/serverless hype on everybody

But nooooo, why would you ever listen to anyone who *isn't* a megacorporation, surely they can't be more competent than Amazon!

(Source: https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90)

@aurynn @mike I think these problems with defederation and misbehaving admins would be much less severe if there weren't large instances that have users who don't even know who their mods/admins are. The "99% of users on that.domain are totally innocent" objection to defederation wouldn't apply if the instance were small enough for nearly everyone to have had some direct interaction with their admin at some point. There'd both be fewer innocent people to affect, and they'd be more likely to have actually noticed the behavior themselves and had a chance to make a choice in how to deal with it.

All of these “defederation is bad” takes are, in essence, saying that instance administrators exist to be vanity domain names and that a single contiguous fediverse is both possible and desired.

I reject both of these premises. Defederate early, defederate often, build the anarchic consensus you want to see.

Recommended #fediblock for decayable-dot-ink

This place hits pretty much every hateful trait bad instances have. Be careful if you actually go to that site. It is quite nasty.

Shout out to the person that sent me the info. Big props.