Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

thinking about that one time when deutsche bahn managed to be so late there weren't any more connecting trains going that day, so they paid for a taxi that drove me 112 km to my final destination

Nice, the European Union has officially stated that accessible overlays do not work. This isn't news to most of us, but it's always nice to have something official to point at!

https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/europa-web-guide/design-content-and-development/accessibility/testing-early-and-regularly/accessibility-overlays_en

#a11y #accessibility #accessibledesign

people will really join a decentralised social network and then be like "admins please don't make your own moderation decisions"

Holyyyyyyy, it seems sterilizing vaccines might actually happen? If this ends up working out, it’ll be huge. This would mean vaccines which actually meaningfully stop transmission!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04003-4

The proper title for this is "Rookie pig hurls 2500lb steel rocket through bar storefront and at owner, arrests owner on fabricated assault charge in aftermath"

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-courts/two-videos-lots-of-questions-after-police-suv-crashes-into-st-louis-bar-owner-arrested/article_4b1326f0-9ea1-11ee-b9f8-4bffd8753cda.html

I'd say this ruined my day but my sour mood doesn't hold a candle to the crap the couple victimized by these bastards went through.

We already know Google’s Web Platform Baseline does not consider AT, so it seems unlikely this will be tracked.

Numbers can’t go up if you report on your broken stuff!

Imagine if *all* the listboxes on your site abruptly failed at once.

You would have to get on that *fast* given how much of a barrier that introduced. You might be shouted at. Sued?

Google Chrome broke listboxes across the web for all TalkBack users… let’s see… 9 months ago!

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1425494

#accessibility #a11y #Google #Chrome

Idk how anyone can interact with American medical systems for more than two hours without becoming radicalized lol

So, about that idea of using invite trees for preventing spam on fedi instances...

*Turns off phone so it can charge faster*
*Forgets to charge it*
​

- When marginalized people make progress, look to see who responds as if it's too much. It's usually a small percentage shift like from 95% to 90%, but watch for privileged folks who act like it's already past 50% and into their entire disadvantage.
- Look also for privileged people to take criticisms as attacks. As I've said before, when a marginalized person provides criticism, they'll remember how you respond, and they may never give you a second chance.

Unfortunately it seems that fatigue has sapped me of my strength here, so I'll stop while I'm still focused.

To sum up, it's very possible for admin and moderators to be not so great at identifying and responding to their own privileged assumptions. And while it may result in a set of moderation decisions that have no impact on their white users, the same decisions may expose marginalized users to unacceptable risks to personal safety and comfort.

My instance, rage.love, is moderated according to many principles that are tightly associated with the fedimins' general moderation priorities, and I'm happy to have that protection as a complexly marginalized user. I'm grateful for the moderators and their efforts, on rage.love.

I hope you're happy with yours.

4/4

Please note that I'm about to outline some basic principles of anti racism theory that are the baseline assumptions I've seen fedimins promote, what I promote, and what led me to join them originally. I'm not going to justify these points. If you want to discuss it, feel free to ask, but going deeply into it will require paying me my consulting rates.

Principles:
- It's not possible to be racist to white people. In general, it's not possible to be bigoted towards the people in power.
- Freedom of expression, unmoderated expression, promoting uncareful expression, not being sensitive to people with access needs (e.g. alt text) or trauma e.g. content warnings), are all problematic, and potentially traumatizing.
- When you are told by someone directly affected that something is problematic, you should take it seriously (unless you've seen it before and already evaluated it), and if you believe the criticism is valid, you should make amends.
- You can't unlearn racism or supremacy or colonialism and then just be good. It's a lifetime of learning and reviewing.

3/

I can't do the policy justice with some full accounting of what it is, but hopefully a useful summary is that moderators tacitly or actively associated with fedimins actively protect their users from servers that are not well-moderated and do not share the same priorities, which include many anti-racism principles and other social justice principles.

One big red flag is when moderators of other instances have enough unexamined privilege that they are apparently unaware of it and its impacts on their own thinking and decision-making.

I can't say that it directly follows that a host of other moderation issues are inevitable, but they are tightly associated with this fundamental issue (of unexamined privilege). And of course, there are confounding indicators too.

One thing I tend to look for, and that the fedimins folks I've known look for is understanding and supporting antiracism theory. And it is a fact that you can't do that while just sort of coasting along, being white. It requires study, active examination, and doing the homework (to confront and deconstruct one's internalized colonialist/supremacist enculturation).

2/