Wow, and I thought the guys that broke into and pissed all in the halls of our high school were going wild.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but I know years back iPhones were preferred by a lot of blind people just in terms of accessibility. Digging through accessibility settings, it looks like you can use Voice Control to tell it to open Lemmy, and VoiceOver to read all the text on the screen without touching it. I don’t know about the example you added to your OP, adding phrases it would need to interpret seems more like a Siri thing (which I don’t use), so I don’t know how well that plays with Voice Control.

I wouldn’t rush out to buy anything unless some Android people confirm it’s not doable. Apple does have people that know the software working at their stores, so they could tell you specifics for sure. And check that I’m not totally wrong, lol.

Someone who knows more about how to/if you can do this on Android will have to answer the specifics for that; I know on iOS you can use custom voice control actions (along with default voice control phone navigation mode) to do more or less what you’re describing. I’m surprised if Android has no accessibility features that work similarly.

Sorry if I’m overlooking something obvious here, but you’re basically asking about accessibility features, right? Whatever settings and features blind users use should let you navigate without looking at it. I realize that’s overly vague but I only know how to get to accessibility features on iOS, sorry!

Although I will say you probably would need to get used to listening to text at a very high speed to use it at the speed you read.

Great argument for and example of how the US government isn’t taxing wealth nearly enough, if we have homeless people and billionaires funding sci fi fantasies for their own amusement in the same country.

In that case the instance you’re on is basically the block list, right? That’s good, especially if most instances are really dedicated to stamping out that kind of thing. But if/when Mastodon gets big, it becomes a problem of scale.

In practical terms it’s kind of unrealistic to expect T&S to deal with people because they have garbage takes; most of their day is going to be dealing with the usual internet nightmare sludge, which is where I think block lists become a real utility on the user end of things. In addition to the advantage of just making the blocked users shout into the void when 90% of the site wants nothing to do with their ass, which I can tell you from observation makes them extremely mad.

On Bluesky anyone who really hates TPOT can make a block list that anyone can subscribe to and you never have to think of it again. You can also easily flag accounts to include on the list.

If TPOT moved en masse to Mastodon, across many different instances, how would someone achieve the same thing? My understanding is they don’t have any similar feature. As long as “just block them all individually or hope they all move to one shitty instance you can block” is the solution, it’s going to fail to attract people.

Correct. Doomerism is at best capitulating in advance.

There are very clearly some people that are accelerationist. I guess it’s possible they think they won’t have to fight, which makes being an accelerationist even shittier.

Also, if it’s wasn’t about you then it wasn’t about you.

I’m not talking about targeted harassment specifically, I mean dozens of accounts leaving bigoted remarks on any post about queer subjects that gets traction (more than a few thousand likes). Melon certainly made the problem worse on Twitter, but there’s a reason prior to that they had an entire department dedicated to dealing with that shit: plenty of people see no problem with it, and it makes social media a nightmare for queer people.

If you don’t have a strong trust and safety team, then you need blocking tools that do the heavy lifting. And having to block 50k bigots manually is why I left Twitter. As long as Mastodon doesn’t have anything that can compete with block lists, it’s going to struggle to attract people who need those features.

If you haven’t watched the dishwasher one, drop everything and go do it now!

If you needed a trans person to come tell you this is not okay: hi! Here I am! Don’t do this. All it does is advertise that you view using someone’s correct name as a privilege that can be revoked for bad behavior.

If anything that makes it more important. We already know how essentially all the Democrats are going to vote. A couple of Republican defections is all it takes to hold the Senate.

The key here is they don’t have to defect on everything. Turning every Republican senator into a never Trumper isn’t happening. But making some of them defect some of the time is a lot more feasible, and requires constant pressure.

God, the doomerism in the comments here fucking sucks. If you won’t even pick up a phone why am I expected to believe you’ll be the hardest antifa soldier there ever was when the revolution comes (which, conveniently, is never)?

This is more embarrassing than those people who spend real life money prepping for a zombie apocalypse. At least those people have things that might actually be useful in a real disaster.

It is literally night and day for queer people. Large accounts can’t post about queer subjects on Twitter without harassment anymore due to how the algorithm works, but if you subscribe to a couple of block lists on Bluesky that is GONE. You might run into the odd freak, but community run block lists will keep the tide at bay.

When Mastodon takes user safety practices as seriously as Bluesky does I’ll consider switching.

My memory of the exacts here are fuzzy, but I think this depended on whether or not your TV picked up digital signal, analog, or both. I remember around that time we had a TV that would pick up static on some channels and have a blue input screen on others.

Yeah, my youngest sibling has definitely seen CRTs. My niblings probably haven’t, though.

If you think this is the only reproductive healthcare that people are dying for lack of in the US, you have vastly overestimated your expertise of the subject matter.

Oh no, not the same thing I’ve been doing since the mid 90s! I might die if I migrate sites again! Or something.

Making a social network only usable by around 5% of the population and then complaining when only 5% of the population shows up is a pretty indicative attitude of why so many FOSS projects struggle to get widespread adoption. You don’t get to choose how tech literate the population is. You either make it more useable or you accept a limited audience.

Has an aggressively unpleasant user base and nowhere near the blocking functionality that Bluesky has, which is essentially mandatory now for minorities on the internet. Not to mention an onboarding process that can confuse the tech literate, much less the average person.

This comment is not an invitation to talk about how actually it’s very simple and intuitive if you follow a 20 step process that relies on detailed knowledge of how federation works.