The power to fix (open-source) and cross-posting

So, I have been thinking about this community (the Lemmy side in specific) and how to break the chicken/egg problem of trying to move communities.

The first tool I see we obviously have is the ability to make the HTML on this site not suck for accessibility. Ways to jump directly to stories and comment content, etc. This is worth a lot and just having good ergonomics could massively help convince users to post here.

If the RBlind community had our own fork of Lemmy, we could use it, test our UI improvements for the blind and then contribute back to the project tested fixes that won’t impact sighted users in a negative way. Over time the main Lemmy project could gain a level of faith in the patches and PRs that come in from the RBlind developers fork and quickly apply them.

This level of indirection works well in the Linux projects (sort of trusted maintainers of features) and the RBlind community could be that for accessibility on the Lemmy project. It will mostly be editing html templates (just having nested headers would be huge, see lobste.rs).

Secondly, while it always ends up being a bit hinky a cross-posting bot to connect the two places might be useful, a way to slowly prompt Reddit users to try this instance and keep the two communities at least semi-connected. I am not tallking full comments mirrors, just at least top level posts.

P.S. Legit took me a moment to understand I had to post to the “main” community. I wish the Community tab would say like “RBlind/main” or “Local Community/main”.

Literally,
@Literally@social.coop avatar

@robertmeta perhaps a start could be to collect the current open issues on codeberg and promote them?

For example, this one: "Enable better universal access design via keyboard navigation and shortcut"

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1407

the frontend is mostly typescript and css, most of the work wouldn't be done by a rust dev.

pax,

hey, why just not contribute then wait for a sighted person to fix the issues that they have with the pull request?

robertmeta,

Absolutely, was just trying to create less churn for the Lemmy devs as it appears both them and the kbin devs are a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

fastfinge,

The things we need to make this a reality:

  1. Trusted blind developers comfortable in rust
  2. A developer who can work on this full time

Right now all the moderators have jobs outside of this community, so we’re doing what we can with what time we have. Right now, that’s mostly writing and contributing to issues in the existing Lemmy. Making our own fork, and keeping it up to date with mainstream Lemmy, would be more effort than we currently have time and expertise for.

As for cross-posting, that’s a direct violation of the Reddit terms of service for use of the API. If we did that, it would get /r/blind banned from Reddit, especially in the current environment. I don’t think that would be a good outcome for anyone.

MostlyBlindGamer,
@MostlyBlindGamer@rblind.com avatar

I agree. A fork cold be a long time goal, if we gathered that kind of critical mass, but contributing issues and PRs directly isn’t a bad thing.

robertmeta,

Ah, sad news about the cross-posting.

On the fork, I fear I slightly miscommunicated. I was not talking about a deep fork with major feature deltas. Keeping forks up to date is much easier these days as github added a button into the web ui. Most modern PRs come from forks already in github, as that is the common workflow, fork from lemmy to a personal fork under my github username, make changes, generate PR.

What I was proposing, is a workflow that was instead of:

Lemmy -> robertmeta fork -> Lemmy

it would be

Lemmy -> rblind tracking fork -> robertmeta fork -> rblind tracking fork -> Lemmy

The goal would be three fold, first as mentioned, to gain trust in a source of PRs over time as we would act as gate-keepers. Second to be able to batch accessibility related work so that the Lemmy devs can worry about less PRs. Third, we could test on this site a bit in production use to see how it works before we ship it back to Lemmy proper.

Additionally, I hope neither full time developers nor rust developers would be required as it is mostly going to be html accessibility stuff (typescript, css, html, etc).

Right now, the experience on Lemmy is a fairly huge step down from Reddit for me, so trying to think aloud about best ways to improve it, maybe just direct contribution to Lemmy is best.

fastfinge,

Actually, Lemmy supports custom themes. The eventual plan is to create our own custom theme, make it the default here, and open source it. Also, multiple Lemmy apps with accessibility support are being developed. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be even talking about Lemmy for another few months, when the accessibility ecosystem was more mature. But of course Reddit forced our hand.

robertmeta,

That is a fairly killer feature of federated systems, a great theme here for rblind useres and we can still consume stuff from everywhere in an ideal way.

weirdwriter,

@fastfinge @robertmeta Any particular apps we should pay attention to on iOS or Android for the thread part of Fedi?

fastfinge,

Mlem and thunder. But they are both only on TestFlight right now. Links to join can be found in there communities.

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