robertmeta

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".