Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

7mo

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.

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m04 (moved from queer.party) @b@mrrp.place

6mo

@fastfinge this is really interesting!! as a sighted person i think i don't really do this because anyone who i would have an extended conversation with is probably already someone i have added on discord and i could just message them there, and i don't know the rest of my mutuals on fedi very well. i find discord's ui a bit less clunky to use for back and forth chats than a fedi thread - it's easier for me to find the conversation, faster to load, supports more conversation features like replies and reactions, takes less time for me to reply, etc. i wonder if part of the difference you're noticing could be that blind people on fedi are a particularly strong community and might as a result interact with each other/get to know each other more?

and i also find the 1/n thing really annoying, i wish everyone would just move to instances without character limits!! i use the bluesky bridge and my posts very frequently get cut off over there because they exceed the bsky character limit

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

6mo

@b Yes, the blind community is quite strong, and almost all of us moved over from Twitter when they discontinued the API and broke accessibility. It wasn't like in sighted communities where some percent is on Mastodon, and some is on Twitter. Nearly a hundred percent of the blindness community who was active on twitter was forced to move.

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