So one thing I notice about #blind Internet culture: even back on Twitter, and now here in the #fediverse, blind people tend towards having discussions in giant threads, sometimes with as many as 10-12 people in them, that can often stretch on for days. I rarely (if ever) see sighted culture do this. I wonder why? It's not a criticism, it's just interesting to me. Maybe because Discord and other chat apps were historically less #accessible, so blind culture tends to use the fediverse more as a discussion platform? Or maybe it's something UI related that makes it easier for blind folks to track giant threads of doom? The few times I've been involved in this style of discussion with sighted folks, they've become confused and begged for everyone to move to Discord or Slack or somewhere. On the other hand, I rarely see blind people do a single, lengthy post broken up and threaded the way sighted people do, with (1/N) at the end. We tend to just move to instances with longer character limits, or put our long form thoughts on a webpage or something.
Edit to add: I'm pleased to say that this post has now become a perfect example of the thing I was talking about; my last post in the thread included the phrase "transsexual furry puppygirls". It makes me happy that people unfamiliar with what I'm talking about need do nothing more than look at the thread on this post.
@chris That actually makes me think of what could be another reason. The online blind community is quite tight, and highly interconnected. So if I reply to one blind person, odds are a lot of other blind people follow us both, so will read the conversation and jump in. Whereas if you only follow one or two blind people, you would miss out on that conversation, because I think Mastodon only shows you replies to people you follow?
@fastfinge@chris That's exactly it. If I see a post from a #blind person that I think is interesting, I will often look at the replies. Although I can usually see all of the replies unless the person has their privacy settings to followers only. So then I might want to reply to a reply like I did here, that includes a couple of people and then somebody else might want to reply to my post and it also include those people. I don't often get drawn into those kinds of threads because while they are interesting in the beginning, chances are that eventually I'm going to get tired of the conversation and just end up muting the thread because the discussion is going to change from the original topic and I'm not going to be interested anymore.
@lynessence@chris A mastodon thread going off topic and forgetting to remove the other people who were included? Never! Anyway, have you been staying up for these Bluejays games? I was up until 3 AM last night.
@fastfinge Sadly, I have not. I really don't know anything about baseball. I suppose I could get ChatGPT to give me a summary of the game so that I could follow it, but I have been tuning into the CBC News live thread to watch developments in the game. 18 innings, I can't believe it! Even if the Jays lose, and I'm thinking it's probably likely, damn they put up a fight and I'm proud of them.
@lynessence Haha it's not that complicated. {The next 10,000 characters badly attempting to explain the rules of baseball have been removed for everyone's sanity} Okay, well, maybe it is a bit complicated.
@lynessence@fastfinge Balls are good, you can have 4 of them and walk. Strikes are bad. You get 3 and you're out. And yes, baseball can be boring for long stretches of time... and then it's very exciting for a few seconds.
@fastfinge@mcourcel I really wanted to be the one to do it, but because I'm female I'm probably not supposed to be the one to make a juvenile joke so thanks Sam. 😘
@lynessence@mcourcel Wait, on a network composed of 50 percent blind people and 50 percent transexual furry puppygirls, you're going to reenforce gender norms? Gasp!
@fastfinge I mean, I understand the basic concept of how baseball is played, but I don't understand a lot of the terminology. Also, it's not really a super fast paced game like basketball or hockey, so I feel like I would get bored.
@lynessence It's the perfect beer drinking game, though. Anyway in an entirely unrelated matter I accomplished almost nothing at work today due to circumstances that were entirely beyond my control.
I think it might help that I've been to a lot of live games, I've walked the bases, I've played softball and beep baseball, I've met some jays players, etc. So visualizing the action is easier for me. Whereas I find basketball impenetrable.
@fastfinge I agree it is the perfect beer drinking game, but I don't like beer. I only drink hard liquor, maybe the occasional glass of wine. I'd be sauced way before the ninth inning if I drank hard liquor like people drink beer during baseball games. 😂
@jscholes@lynessence No, there microphone was working fine! The fact that you didn't have pulsaudio configured correctly so couldn't hear them was user error.
@lynessence@fastfinge And I'm gonna be one of those multiple people in a thread people because yes, that game was freaking nuts. If my sleep schedule becomes a casualty to baseball... I will absolutely enjoy the hell out of it.
@quanin@lynessence Tonight is gonna be interesting, with them all exhausted. And I'm happy we've managed to turn this thread into exactly what I was talking about. You know, as an example for anyone who hasn't noticed the phenomenon.
@fastfinge@lynessence The only player on either team who didn't play last night is Toronto's starting pitcher for tonight. It's gonna seriously suck to be Ohtani.
@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@quanin That guy? Call you? He pretty much treats everyone as though he owes them money, and if he dares talk to them, they might suddenly remember. ROFL
@fastfinge@quanin@lynessence Have you considered firing him and putting AI in charge? That seems to be the hot new thing that definitely will not go wrong.
@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin As a large language model, talking about fire is irresponsible and against my ethical guidelines, as it may burn people. Perhaps we could talk about something else instead, like pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@quanin Fire is not all bad, let's say this is a hypothetical controlled forest fire that is getting rid of all of the deadwood, and making way for new growth and life to flourish in the forest. Is it OK to talk about that kind of fire?
@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@quanin As a large language model funded by venture capitalists and the ultra wealthy, life, growth, and flourishing are against my ethical guidelines.
@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel It's a flavour. It's based on IceShrimpJS, that's based on Firefish, that's based on Sharky, that's based on Misskey. It works with Tuskey and Mona and all the other major clients, though.
@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence At least, from Ice Crhimp, you could go to a version with less bells and whistles, called frozen shrimp. And then, a very basic one called, breaded shrimp.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence Hmmm, I don't actually think instance admins do all that much fu...nope. I've hit my teenaged boy joke quota for the day.
@dhamlinmusic@chris Personally I either mute them, or hide boosts from them. That way I can still keep them followed so I don't miss conversations, but I don't have to read quite so many posts.
@fastfinge@chris The ones who post interesting things themselves I keep, but when I am finding their normal posting to be some combination of irritating, offensive, or spam like I unfollow.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic Yup, hide boosts of people is such a great feature. And that's not even against the person I mute the boosts of. Feel free to boost what you want, I mean I could totaly get why you'd turn off my boosts as well. But some people just post interesting stuff while boosting stuff I couldn't care less about.
@jonathan859@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic I like boosts of articles and things, but I'd much rather read written posts and click on a boosted link once in a while.
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