Aunt Swiggony @sydneyfalk@elekk.xyz

all those dire warnings about software needing to be accessible and useable by all if it's meant to be used by all

....also applies to FOSS

and while FOSS may not be about selling the software, it still comes up with a lot of excuses why nobody wants to consider [various accessibility issues previously discussed].

it also comes up with a new irritating answer. capitalism will give you a flat "we don't support that". FOSS will end up not just telling you no, but victim blaming you for it. "if you want to see that in the software so bad, just make yourself! pull yourself up by the bootstraps and fork your own version! i don't know why you're whining to the rest of us about it!"

capitalism will pretend to be interested if it can get money out of you. it is not true respect, it is seeing if you are an exploitable resource - but it is still, on some level, acknowledgement.

FOSS often does not even get to the stage of pretending. instead of even the recognition of 'are you an exploitable resource', there's a bitter kneejerk response of "why are you daring to bother us with your existence?"

(there are kinder bubbles of FOSS, yes - but there's also a longstanding baked-in bigotry driving that response. you can't lionize Richard Stallman while also saying you're going to make FOSS a space safe for non-cishet men. it's fundamentally incompatible. and if someone is not willing to recognize over half the fucking population that may want to come participate in and use this stuff, and is going to be pushed out by the sainted leader being a known rapey sexist creep... well...)

and yes, i know that in FOSS the 'free' part in there often means there is not the literal time and money to do every request. a loose conglomeration of individuals doing it in their free time is not going to have the same resources that a large coordinated company with money rolling in does. and i get that being an individual and fielding requests all the time can be absolutely exhausting and irritating. it is easy to end up at the limits of your own time, money, knowledge, and resources.

after all, one of the reasons that accessibility measures get put to the wayside by big corporations, who do have those resources, is... it's expensive to do. programming a basic word processor is one skill set - programming a word processor tailored as to be easily used by someone using a screen reader? that is a different skill set, and often a much more specialized and technically complicated one.

legitimately, it is hard to DIY that. it is a distinct skillset that can be at a much higher level. it's the difference between being able to replace a light fixture in your dining room, and building an entire new addition on your house.

i can't be too mad at FOSS being full of programmers who know how to put in a new light fixture, but not sure how to build the entire new addition to the house starting with pouring the foundation.

but it's still a problem for the people who need that extra work.

and the FOSS attitude towards people needing this - well, it's so often ruled by, let's be honest, techbro jerks. holding it up as more morally pure while the FOSS culture and attitude promotes a response of "if you need something, it's YOUR job to learn this incredibly specialized job despite whatever disadvantages you have, and fuck you for asking" fucking grates.

this has been endemic for awhile, to boot. my father can rant about how in the 80s, he was the one noticing this. sure, he'll use more boomer terms than leftist ones. but when he talks about snobbery, elitism, a disinterest in user interface as a form of hazing, and how even back then FOSS was full of people who had abilities and resources others didn't but no sense of "noblesse oblige" - when the potential audience was smaller, but the gap between haves and have-nots was staggering with the personal computer being not quite a THING at the start much less common...

FOSS has a major culture problem. it's not morally pure from inception. it never has been. it's even debatable in some parts if it is actually morally superior to capitalism in terms of effects on the end user. (at least quicken will tell me to fuck off immediately instead of delivering a sneering guilt trip!)

by all means, support the good parts of FOSS. but don't gloss over the shortcomings, or talk exclusively about how capitalism is responsible for all software that sucks.

there's plenty of free software that gleefully reinforces those bad habits of bigotry, and there's plenty of people making it who consider these cultural problems to not be worth any thought whatsoever.

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I used to be a child of the net. I knew its grounds, people and culture better than the real world around me. Where reality didn't make much sense the net offered casual freedom and lack of borders with a taste of optimist anarchy.

That net is gone now - centralized and monetized into a few major consumerist services funded by advertising and surveillance. There's regional borders, nationalism and artificial scarcity. Analog walls and restrictions imposed on a digital borderless space.

I thought it was just me getting older but it's more than that - what used to be an alternate world and a dream of the future became just another piece of the immediate world with all of its problems and biases.

The net has been domesticated and it doesn't feel like I have anywhere else to go.

I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon in 24 hours than I have in Twitter in a couple of years. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.
As a blind person, this means a lot to me. If you read this and you describe your images, thank you so, so, so much on behalf of all of us. If you don't, now you know you'll be helping random Internet strangers make sense of your posts by typing in a few more words than usual.

Wow, just had a proper look at OARS (Open Age Ratings Service) used in GNOME Software, elementary OS AppCenter, etc., and it’s problematic as hell.

Thank goodness they removed “homosexuality” from the rating (wtf?) but it still represents a very limited world-view.

e.g. “nudity likely to cause offense”

To whom, exactly?

“Intense: Explicit nudity showing nipples…”

Men, put your shirts back on!

Under language: profanity (“defined as blasphemous…language”)

Not a secular rating, then…

DD's mom gave them a soda streamer so they're making soda out of wine lmao

"[12:34 PM PST] We continue to experience increased API error rates for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. The root cause of this issue is an impairment of several network devices. We continue to work toward mitigation, and are actively working on a number of different mitigation and resolution actions. While we have observed some early signs of recovery, we do not have an ETA for full recovery."

u ever think about how wild it is that trillions of tiny organisms composed of interlocking molecular computers are constantly working in an incomprehensible harmony to sustain the vessel of my consciousness throughout time all so that i can just lie in bed having anxiety every morning

And, so it is, that on this day, my subroutine-threaded #Forth subset compiler experiment officially gets its own repository.

https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/shoehorn

Behold, I present to you, Shoehorn. 😏​

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