This same exact thing happened to the blind community, of which I'm a member of. Blind Twitter was pretty vibrant before Elon took over, but that changed almost completely around November/December of last year. The killer change for us was the death of third-party clients, on which blind people relied almost exclusively. The whole community is on Mastodon now, mostly concentrated around two instances, though there are plenty of people elsewhere.
Glad to hear a new home was found. My child and I began to analyze random public braille the other day out of random interest and found it was surprisingly easy to pick up a few letters, apparently being both alphabetic and potentially conceived as some kind of semi-derived state from regular roman shapes which provides a handy memory reference for we sighted people. I'd be very interested to hear what the best braille interfaces are. How long does it take to learn to use it for input? How do totally blind people handle the presumed need to switch between typing (on a regular keyboard, I would assume) and "input" (fingers on a braille generating device) modes at once? I suppose the staccato nature of this type of interaction harks back heavily to the old days of Unix, limited baud terminals and early micros.
Braille screens are prohibitively expensive. Most blind people on the internet either have enough sight to navigate a heavily vision-optimized interface (high-contrast, large text) or use a screen reader, or both.
As far as input goes, braille keyboards are more affordable, but many users can touch-type (and have their screen reader read back). Dictation is also a mature option at this point.
Blind people need 3rd-party apps because these apps can be more compatible with screen readers, or can be themed in an easier way allowing for blind-friendly presets. In general, official apps tend to be heavily obfuscated to prevent automated scraping and puppeting. Since blind users often need to basically puppet their devices by not using common interfaces, this puts them at odds with corporations who do not care about them and would ban them if allowed. The alternative is of course not to use big tech products but just because you have a disability shouldn't mean you are abandoning at least half the current web.
Understood. What do you feel the tipping point would be on price and features for an open source braille display? In particular, what is the required number of rows / columns for English to make it very useful?
All of the infosec people I follow have moved to Mastodon. As someone with primarily tech related interests, I'm currently finding Mastodon as good or better than Twitter at it's prime.
But they're specifically moving to Mastodon (infosec.exchange and defcon.social), which is not the same as moving to Lemmy, KBin, or PixelFed. For example, Lemmy federates with KBin, but not with Mastodon. Kbin federates both with Lemmy and Mastodon. Also, Mastodon has a Twitter-like UX, while Lemmy/Kbin have a Reddit-like UX. PixelFed has a Flickr-like UX.
It makes a difference, and insisting on calling them ActivityPub or Fediverse servers has strong GNU/Linux vibes, which we should probably avoid too.
You are making the same mistake. There is no Mastodon as a place or protocol. There's ActivityPub and a bunch of server/client software. Mastodon is one of those
People are allowed to be private and not want others to follow them by not saying exactly where they moved. I am allowed to voice my frustration about that.
Segregating communities is the trend now (post web 2.0 social platforms), I don't think that is over dramatizing things.
I'm more about tech people casually dropping they moved to Mastodon, us techies kinda get Mastodon is not a single place like Twitter so the only explanation for not saying "I moved from Twitter to such or such community" is not wanting people to know.
Infosec twitter may be gone, but the infosec spam bots are still there. Just try searching for "Linux kernel" and try to find content by a real human. Before you manage to find one, you'll have to scan through hundreds if not thousands of low-quality bot posts about the latest linux kernel commit, linux kernel CVEs, or linux kernel mailing list posts.
Holy carp, that's handy! The only downside to moving to a new social media platform is curating a new set of people to follow and unfollow, which is more overhead than I'm willing to endure. But starting with a list like this means just having to unfollow people who take a "build a brand" approach via quantity rather than quality. So, thank you.
1. Both high quality and high quantity posts instantly available
2. Reasonable API access, maybe not directly but they want their niche workflows to be supported
3. Clear and consistent moderation. Eliminate disruptive content while giving reasonable people a clear understanding of whether something will be removed before they post it.
Threads has made vague promises to these three but not yet delivered.
I for one welcome the decentralized internet that Elon is ushering in. Things were better when we had small disparate forums where people could develop their perspectives in community. As long as people are members of multiple communities we should have enough cross-pollination and course corrections to keep things mostly on track.
Mods and groupthink are always a threat but it turned out they were a bigger threat still when everyone was trying to be on one social network to rule them all.
This is sad indeed, but it was already infested with low quality trolls before the Elon Musk purchase. The entire Jonathon Scott clown-fiesta was utterly embarrassing.