Samuel Proulx

I run the RBlind.com Lemmy instance at Accuris Hosting. Decent Virtual Machines, easy IPV6 support, and everything works fine. Prices are a bit on the high end, but it’s worth it to me to use a provider located in my country, where I understand all of the associated laws and can pay in my own currency via my local bank. Also, I’d rather not give money to big tech if I can help it, and support local business instead. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I’m just a mostly contented customer.

Also, of course, the fact that the control panel is screen-reader accessible is super important to me, though I doubt anyone else cares. But unfortunately that’s not yet the case with most of the larger cloud providers like AWS. And if they do deploy an inaccessible update, the company is small enough that I can send an email and get an answer from a human who has actually read what I wrote, rather than a corporate AI.

It’s just as long and incomprehensible as Google’s and Microsoft’s. So I have no idea.

That’s what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.

So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.

Based on the links you gave, it seems that captions default to off when new servers are created.

Ah, good to know! I don’t use meeting platforms that aren’t accessible by default for everyone. Looks like the problem, at least in Jitsi, is that enable captions defaults to off. It would need to default to on before I could use it.

How many of those support captions?

If there was a setting to open posts in a new tab life would be perfect.

Yes. I already have to pay for a VPS, for a domain…nothing wrong with paying for an SSL cert. At least I can pick my vendor.

So require paid ssl certificates or something. I just can’t sign on to any system that requires me to establish personal friendships with other instance admins so I can beg them for endorsements. Begging Reddit to improve accessibility didn’t work. I have no interest in a system where my instance now needs to beg other admins for the right to federate. Even email doesn’t work this way.

So what happens to instances who don’t want to participate in a centralized allowlisting project? This is an allow list system, so eventually we just get cut out of federation? I’m still wishing for a centralized deny list, that would keep track of instances blocked by other instances, and block someone once maybe 3 other instances I trust do. That way we can still allow by default, rather than requiring that any admin who wants to set up a new system is required to know another admin who will endorse them. Frankly, I don’t have a personal relationship with even a single other fediverse admin; I wouldn’t want to endorse them, because I just don’t know them, and I’m quite sure they also wouldn’t endorse me. But saying “I trust you to block bad instances most of the time” seems way easier than “I trust you to vet all of your users”.

I’m doing it because I’m a blind person, and this is my community.

So do I!

Don’t depend on this one, yet. The instance is still crashing every six hours or so for reasons I don’t understand and can’t make headway on.

You can’t. Our instance is deeply unstable at the moment. We’re working on it.

Communication with anyone outside of Lemmy is, of course, impossible.