Note by @fastfinge

Rosalyn Anne @Rosalyn@mindly.social

5mo

I’m seeing less blind people post on Masto as of late. And I can’t tell if it’s just because of the amount of cool people I’m following who aren’t blind or because people have left for other platforms. DOn’t get me wrong. I see posts from blind people all the time. It just feels like the number of blind people posting has dropped. Not that there are less posts from blind people in general. But maybe that’s just my field of view talking.

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

5mo

@Rosalyn I think it's probably because the windows clients are falling further and further behind. TWBlue doesn't support polls. Tweesecake still has a bunch of issues and no updates in like a year. Even if people liked web clients, Enafore still has issues with notifications and not updating timelines sometimes. On top of that, Mona on IOS and mac released a new paid version, so people would have to subscribe to it; it's not a one-time purchase anymore. If FastSM ever gets off the ground, or TWBlue gets the promised updates, activity will probably go back up a little. But if FastSM becomes the won, it also supports bluesky, so we might see the community split a bit now that they have a choice.

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Rosalyn Anne @Rosalyn@mindly.social

5mo

@fastfinge Ah yes. I was missing the client issue. My iPad is my main device these days. I have a laptop, but I only use it when strictly necessary. I’m on Mona 7, but that was a one-time purchase for me. Thankfully, Fastsm looks promising. But I suspect you may be right about a future split.

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

5mo

@Rosalyn I'm using it right now. It still has some issues that make it not quite ready for primetime. But they all seem quite fixable.

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Joseph King @jdking92@dragonscave.space

5mo

@fastfinge @Rosalyn I switched from Tweesecake to FastSM last week. FastSM now has some features that Tweesecake didn't, namely the ability to report posts/users, along with some pretty decent pole support and scheduling posts. For me, that's huge. Granted, aside from a couple trolls I haven't had to report many people, but the function's there in case it's needed, which is definitely no bad thing.

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

5mo

@jdking92 @Rosalyn I just wish they'd get the same issue with links that tweesecake had sorted out. A lot of posts that absolutely have links it says have no links and you have to use the clipboard. I filed an issue with some approaches I think would work and an offer to make a pr, so we shall see.

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Bri🥰 @Bri@fwoof.space

5mo

@fastfinge @jdking92 @Rosalyn I saw that issue, but I actually think the issue with links lies within some forks of Mastodon having the ability to post markdown. This absolutely breaks the entire world for some reason and it just hasn't been high on my priorities list to figure out.

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

5mo

@Bri @jdking92 @Rosalyn Some can also just post HTML directly. Either way, when you strip the HTML, you get the link text, without the URL. Usually, the link text is the URL without https in front. But it doesn't have to be. GoToSocial, Akoma, Iceshrimp, Pleroma, Sharky, threads, Lemmy, PiFed, and literally anything other than Mastodon allow for text in the post that is a hyperlink, but does not contain the URL as the link text. Even though Mastodon doesn't allow posting like that, though, it can display that type of post. So because of the way FastSM strips HTML, it can only find links posted by another Mastodon server. Every other server type can post links that FastSM users can neither see 'nor interact with. Even Mastodon forks can do this. As someone effected daily by this issue, because it's completely and totally impossible for me to post links that tweesecake or FastSM users can interact with, no matter what I do, this is a huge priority for me. Only supporting logging into a Mastodon server account is one thing, and I get it. But the way FastSM is currently, you only support viewing posts by, and following, users who happen to also be on Mastodon. If you follow an account using literally anything else, links won't work. And it's impossible for a FastSM user to know they've followed an account on an unsupported server type. It's to the point where I avoid posting any links at all, because every single link I post gets multiple replies (sometimes as many as thirty or more) from blind users who do not understand that the client they use is at fault and in complete violation of the standards, not me. I'm one hundred percent following the standards as defined by the W3C and all of the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. Clients that can't handle formatted links are broken. They need to be fixed. I've had to start just blocking Tweesecake users. I don't want to have to also do that with FastSM users.

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

5mo

@jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri To make all of this so, so much worse, every single fediverse server provides a plain text, non-html version of the post. Tweesecake and FastSM and others just refuse to use it. But if you look in the JSON, you'll find that while the content key contains HTML, _misskey_content and source.content both contain perfectly formatted, plain text versions of post content. FastSM and other clients just ignore them and strip HTML themselves, breaking posts and resulting in constant bitching from blind people. browser.pub/https://fed.interfree.ca/notes/ah4xrewupfr5jqja

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Alex Hall @alexhall@mastodon.social

5mo

@fastfinge @jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri Is it the clients themselves, or the Python libraries they rely on to manage Mastodon? Not that it matters for the end user, but I'm curious if this is a conscious choice the devs made, or if they just trust the libraries to work and haven't worked around the problem yet.

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

5mo

@alexhall @jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri It's both. The libraries assume that the strings they return will be displayed in a web browser, or other HTML capable view. In fact, the content key by default contains spans and divs. However, all of the blind clients just stripped the html using a regular expression so it can be displayed in a text file, while making no attempt to account for anything that might be lost by that approach.

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