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alt text, software/politics 

@xgranade@wandering.shop
Comment from cgranade that quotes a message saying "Personally, I don't feel a browser should be political."

Then their own message: "If it's alright, I want to quickly respond to this. I don't mean to distract the thread too much from being an issue about the AI sidebar introduced upstream with 130.0, but I think it's relevant to the issue to be clear about what it means to be 'political'.

In particular, a browser is political almost by definition - decisions about web standards affect who has and does not have power on the web, which is pretty intensely political. Even more so, the decision to be privacy focused is absolutely a political stance, especially with the way privacy violations are used to hurt everyone from pregnant people seeking abortions (to wit, Facebook turning over chats about abortion or advertisers building up profiles based on inferred pregnancy) to queer kids looking for information without outing themselves to homophobic or transphobic parents. Journalists depend on privacy to investigate corrupt officials, exploitative corporations, or other powerful institutions. Those are all intensely political aspects.

That is, I don't think it's a reasonable goal to avoid politics, so much as to ensure that whatever the political implications are of a development decision, that they are intentional and align with the values of the project as a whole.

My understanding about the politics *implicit* in the previous decisions made by the LibreWolf project lead me to believe that a feature designed to erode user privacy, devalue creative labor, and to consolidate power behind a few API gateways is likely not a feature in keeping with the chosen politics of the project. I could be wrong, in which case I'm happy to disagree and find an alternative browser that is more in line with the politics that I and people I care about depend on for our safety."

A lesson I wish I could put on a thumb drive for most humans:

When you're seeking community, shared identifiers and interests will never yield the same results that shared values and praxis does.

Someone being queer, or liking the things you like does not guarantee that they will value you adequately or treat you well.

#Idea

I want an app called "Who to Boycott".

When I download it I am asked 30 questions about how I feel about issues and there is a sliding 1 to 5 scale going from support for to 100% against. It has things like use of fossils fuels, unions, a minimum wage, reproductive rights.

Then everyday it sends me a list of 5 products to boycott and why based on company or ownership stands on my specific issues, and 1 new question.

Based on several institutes that track policy stances and legislation.

re: matrix moderation 

@tastytea@very.tastytea.de @alyx@alyx.social Those still don't work for targeted raids, because the person doing the raid will know the answer(s), and will have embedded them into the bots (because it's a targeted attack) - they rely on the unpredictability of the question in untargeted attacks.

(Leaving aside the accessibility problems you can introduce by asking knowledge questions)

matrix moderation 

I feel like moderation for Matrix would be in a much better place if there were a bot framework specifically for moderation tasks, with a very simple API and one-call methods for all common moderation actions, so that you can actually quickly respond to developing attack strategies

re: matrix moderation 

@tastytea@very.tastytea.de @alyx@alyx.social FWIW, (typical) captchas don't really work for targeted raids, and are less and less working for untargeted ones too

@serapath @hugh I mean, that's definitely possible, was just wondering if there's a more specific disambiguating term for it already 🙂

@kloenk@chaos.social I'm really hoping for a blogpost about this eventually, because it sounds deliciously turbocursed!

@hugh AFAIK 'sneakernet' is just a description for transferring data over physical travel links, but in this case I'm thinking of goods, the same way you might send a parcel

Type of ADHD brain mode where brain is constantly oscillating between two different tasks at high speed, being interested in both but not *quite* interested enough to make any serious headway or commit to either of them

@whreq I was thinking in a more general sense than just hackerspaces :)

I know that turtlemail.app exists, but I'm not sure they intend for "turtlemail" to become a generic term!

What do you call a 'sneakernet' but for physical stuff, transporting stuff (potentially over multiple hops) through people who are going somewhere anyway?

Today's realization:

I am not doing "nothing."

I am calm and comfortable, abiding in this quiet space so my brain can rest and heal.

#spoonieAffirmations

@Em0nM4stodon
That EU law does not require a #CookieBanner unless the web site wants to track your clicks or sell your data.

Because people do not understand this, they think "stupid EU law" instead of...

- "website owner has no respect for consumer rights"
- "website owner has no solid business plan and just hopes for a few bucks from the advertisement industry"

#GDPR

You don't necessarily need to say "image of" in your alt text for users to know it's an image. Screen readers will announce that it's an image. But it can help readers to specify if it's a hand-drawn image, Polaroid, infographic, screenshot, chart, map, diagram, or so on.

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