Adrianna TanWhy aren’t more people on Mastodon?
‘It’s the social network where you might be suffering in a literal war zone and people yell at you about adding alt text to photos of your suffering’
Super fun place
wraptile@skinnylatte hot take but a bit of gate keeping keeps the network healthy. If you can't bother adding 5 words on your image to help visually impaired then that's on you - return to the mountains of garbage on Twitter or Threads.
berserk du soleil@wraptile @skinnylatte did you read the post? This was someone in Gaza trying to survive. Maybe you can go see the Wizard and ask for a fuckin' heart. Asshole.
@aetataureate @skinnylatte it's irrelevant who posted it. Maybe you can visit the same wizard for a brain. We could even hold hands while we skip on golden brick road.
@wraptile @skinnylatte this is embarrassing dude
@aetataureate @skinnylatte bye bye :P
Grey 
Jennifer Moore 😷@wraptile - In principle I would agree with "A bit of gatekeeping keeps the network healthy".
The question is, what _kind_ of gatekeeping exactly?
Personally I'd prefer if we didn't have unmoderated signup. That favours growth over sustainability, because each open instance adds to the moderator load for every other instance. (it's not coincidence that a disproportionate number of spammers come from mastodon.social.)
Or, if we're _going_ to have unmoderated signup, I favour development of moderation software options like the old-school "first few posts are reviewed before letting through".
This thread you've joined in on is criticising one specific niche of a niche of gatekeeping: rebuking people in horrific circumstances for not complying with a convention they probably didn't even know existed. That kind of rebuke is in my opinion uncompassionate and excessive.
It's also unnecessary: the people in that situation are a tiny proportion of Fedi users, and a small proportion even of the people skipping alt text (some others also with good reason). Even for the people who _need_ alt text, it's generally gonna be pretty obvious "oh right, they're in a war zone, and this probably isn't their first language either".
To my mind, part of the "health of the network" is the ability to take into account that people are in different circumstances with different resources.
@unchartedworlds I'd agree with you generally but this is framed as if a request for etiquette to be followed is some sort of personal attack on the person.
Yeah I didn't add alt text and someone complained about accessibility - it's not that big of a deal, no one should be hurt in this exchange. Raising this as a concern and generalization of entire, incredibly diverse network is just incredibly immature and counter productive.
I don't think it was entirely about the tone of the request ("an attack" or not), I think it was more about the context. This thread started off specifically referring to people in war zones. That's not very similar to the situation of the average person on Fedi.
For some people, they're on here in desperation because if they don't get some money from _somewhere_ for food &/or meds, they or their children or parents will die. They've likely already had bereavements recently, there's likely a lot of pressure on them as someone with the knowledge to be able to make the post at all, most people get very few donations even when they do post.
So then the alt text rebuke is a bit like if someone turned up in person "please, I'm starving" and someone replies "your shoelace is undone". Maybe their shoelace _is_ undone, but that still isn't a good reply!
I thought this post was on similar territory as how I think about it:
https://mastodon.social/@byroncclark/116725143513665560