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

anarchist whose pronouns are "may/hem"

In my experience, most of Mastodon's loyalists don't care about a better fedi because they feel growth is more important than safety, which resembles the motivations of any centralized service.

As much as the bitch and moan about how awful centralized services are, they emulate not only the experience of the centralized platforms themselves but the methodologies said platforms use for gaining an audience. They are fundamentally the same despite using different software.

We already have an open web and need a safe web. And many supporters of Mastodon refuse to acknowledge the need for that and even demonize any effort that focuses on anything other than unchecked growth.

This is why we see the same problems in the fedi as we do on any centralized service. That's not a technology problem.

There is a philosophical difference between the white dudes that love Masto and me because I don't think saving the Masto and helping the fedi are the same thing.

I don't. I'm not interested in saving Masto from itself.

I can credit Masto for raising the profile of the fedi to the point it's being talked about as a real contender in the social media landscape. Still, it's also contributed mightily to the unwelcoming nature of the fedi for people that don't resemble its creator.

So doing what is best for a healthy fedi and what is best for Masto are two separate things for me.

And I find most white dudes prioritize the latter.

@joepie91@social.pixie.town I always had a policy of trying to include at least one of the issues that had fallen into a low priority, and had aged severely, in every release. It's notable how doing so can re-engage users that feel like they've been ignored.

i wish people would start saying "people who need screenreaders" instead of "visually impaired people" or similar, because:

1. not everyone with low vision needs a screenreader. this leads to people thinking their job making things accessible is done by making things screenreader-friendly, while most of it is still violently inaccessible to hard of sight people like me who rarely use screenreaders and rely on things like large text.

2. not everyone who uses a screenreader does so because of low vision. i have low vision and the main reason i use a screenreader sometimes are visual processing issues. the idea that only people who can't see (and thus also can't read) use screenreaders leads to situations like on twitter when we weren't able to actually read the alt text, leaving lots of things inaccessible for lots of people. i missed out on a lot of stuff before i was able to view alt text.

be specific. it matters.

#LowVision #Disabled #Disability #VisualProcessingDisorder

TIL that the scp command does not, by default, compress files it transfers, and that you need to add the -C flag to make it do that, and by doing that I have sped up my transfer speed about 40x, and without this knowledge I have probably wasted literally days of my life waiting for things in the past.

Here are some of the widespread issues with plastic recycling, some well-known, others less so:

- The recycling process produces microplastics that end up in the environment

- That's because most plastic recycling processes require large amounts of water to clean the plastics; the only exception I know of is "dry-pressing", but that's useless for packaging, which is one of the biggest contributors to plastic waste

- Each recycling 'pass' reduces the polymer chain length, thereby making the plastic weaker, meaning it can only be recycled a finite amount of times

- 'Virgin' plastic (ie. produced from raw oil) is cheaper than recycled plastic to produce

- In some countries, the definition of "recycling" includes "burning it for power"

- A major bottleneck in the recycling process is the plastic type sorting stage; these machines are expensive and have limited capacity

- While soluble and metallic contaminants can often be automatically removed, others (such as fabrics) cannot, and require humans to pick it out

- Most sorting processes are optical, and just straight-up cannot sort black plastics because they cannot 'see' what type it is; all light is absorbed

- Sorting by plastic type is a hard requirement; not doing so means you will end up with uselessly weak plastics after recycling

- Only packaging plastics can be recycled in most recycling streams; non-packaging plastics typically have additives that interfere with the recycling process, or aren't even food-safe

- Plastic 'film' is notoriously difficult to recycle into anything useful; we're not just talking saran wrap here, but also for example plastic bags and the shrinkwrap around drinks bottles or cans! Basically anything you can fold without breaking it.

- Composite plastics (ie. things made from more than one plastic type) are essentially just unrecyclable; this often includes things like 'plastic tubs with aluminium lids glued to them'

- Did I mention that virgin plastic is cheaper? Plastic that's collected for "recycling", if not burned locally, is often just shipped to poorer countries to get rid of it, typically with large amounts of contaminants

So yeah, about that 'recycling'...

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