volt4ire 🌹 @volt4ire@mastodon.social

Before people knew that birds migrated long distance, they didn't really understand why or how completely different species of birds randomly and suddenly appeared during different seasons. "Some theories of the time held that they turned into mice, or hibernated at the bottom of the sea during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time." This was eventually proven to be false when someone found a bird in Germany with an African arrow stuck in its neck in 1822.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch

Don't use @purism's Librem One services...

https://twitter.com/YalePrivacyLab/status/1139039274987327489

fern: a curses-based Mastodon client https://github.com/enkiv2/fern (by @enkiv2)

This is really neat! Love that the fediverse has a wealth of different clients with different philosophies.

@TreacherousNexus The fear for me is that "Open Source" has traditionally not been about the ethics. That's changed, slowly, as the leadership of the OSI has changed, but until the core principles of liberty are what people care about, it's easily co-opted.

Yes, Micosoft is an old boogeyman, but I'm providing a roadmap to actual community acceptance

Fediverse users who are blind or partially sighted rely on screen readers to read posts aloud.

It's important to add alt texts on images you post, so screen reader users know what is in them.

You can do this on Mastodon by clicking on "Describe for the visually impaired" after attaching an image.

But what if you forget?

Well, there's a useful bot which will send you an instant message if you forget to add alt text:

@alt_text

To use it, just follow it!

#FediTips #MastoTips #Mastodon

Very nice analysis of the shortcomings of behaviour change at the level of the individual.

Better to focus on systemic failings, rather than guilt-tripping people for making a wrong choice, when it very often isn’t really a choice at all.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/07/we-cant-do-it-ourselves.html