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@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@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.
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