• 46 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2025

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  • Nowadays everyone accepted the name “Discord” but I think it’s a pretty poor choice of branding too.

    A terrible name for an app meant to facilitate communication. Always baffled me. But the name is so widely recognized that nobody thinks twice about it.

    I always thought Noosphere would make a cool name for a Discord replacement, especially if it incorporates a way to permanently catalog the knowledge accrued by the community, say as a built-in wiki. That might actually make it viable as a support platform.





  • The sad part is VR has excellent accessibility applications. I have a head-mounted magnifier that’s just a Samsung Gear headset and cheap phone with some gubbinz stuck on the side. (Let’s ignore the fact the magnifier costs $3000 when the components cost maybe $700-$K tops, but that’s assistive tech for ya). If VR really went mainstream It would help reduce the cost of the AT that relies on it.

    Now if only we could find a mainstream market appeal for tiny piezoelectric crystals then braille displays could stop costing an arm and a leg.



  • There’s a reason why Apple is the poster child for accessibility. They control the entire stack from hardware to OS, and have an ocean of money to devote to what is effectively a tiny marginalized portion of their user base.

    Open source is the exact opposite. Any given open source project (especially any given Linux distro) is standing atop a precarious mound of other open source projects that the distro maintainers themselves have no control over. So when accessibility breaks, the maintainers say “It’s not us, it’s GNOME”. Then GNOME says “It’s not us, it’s Wayland”, and so on.

    Imagine I handed you a laptop without a working screen, then when you complain you can’t use it, I said “It’s not my problem” or “We’ll get to it eventually” or “I wouldn’t know how to help you” That’s desktop Linux when you’re blind.

    Apologies if this comes across as a rant. I’m just bitter about the fact there’s all this free, privacy-respecting software out there that’s out of my reach, and I’m stuck selling my soul to Microsoft and Apple.








  • Social media as a whole, honestly. Way back in 2014 I read an article about the “social media cycle” (not their words IIRC). Basically, a new platform gets popular with teens and college-age kids, then their parents join, then the kids have to move to something else because they don’t want to be on the same platform as their parents. I could be misremembering. It was a comparison between Facebook and Snapchat.

    Anyway, the Fediverse helps, but since fedi platforms are largely clones of their normie counterparts (Lemmy/PieFed = reddit, Mastodon = Twitter, PeerTube = YouTube) they inherit many of the same problems. I know I bring this up a lot, but on these platforms, content is the focus, but on traditional forums, people are the focus.