We will see what happens. Reddit is hard to let go especially for people in othe r/Blind community that fills a very real need. Plus they have been making a lot of cosmetic changes that may help appease some people and bring them back into the fold. Between that very real need we were filling and those cosmetic changes some of us are very likely to be drawn back in.
As for me, a short visit there yesterday proved to me that I cannot allow myself to go back. The r/Blind subreddit was what brought me to that site in the first place and was the one community I was a part of there that was largely resistant to the toxicity so prevalent through the rest of the site. Yesterday's visit was heartbreaking, showing me how much the toxicity of the rest of the site had infiltrated r/Blind...and even so, the urge to dive back in was very strong. I felt like a recovering gambling addict walking into a casino for the first time since giving it up. I just cannot afford to go back to that.
While I hope that we will all continue to be a part of building something new, and hopefully better, we will have to see how may of us resist reddit's siren call.
The need in the fediverse is at least as strong as the need r/Blind on reddit. I cannot imagine that building up this community will take any less time and effort than building up r/Blind on reddit originally did bit it should prove well worth it in the end.
A note to the admins and mods of rBlind.com and its communities:
Thank you for getting this started and providing a community for those of us with no place at reddit can support one another in our blindness and our visual impairments.
No real clue about head counts. Am still new enough to the fediverse that I am still working out how to do some things. For example, I can do most of my text formatting using markdown but have yet to figure out how to get mentions like @[email protected] to work.
I can say it has been quieter than I like over the past few days but am hoping that will turn around over time. Will just keep posting, commenting, and learning how things work in the mean time.
Thank you again and remember to take time out to enjoy the day!
but have yet to figure out how to get mentions like @[email protected] to work.
When you type @-symbol and then at least two characters, a small pop-up thingy appears after a second or few. It should appear above the word you are writing, but at least for me it appears at the top of the screen so that more than half of it is above top edge of the screen. And if the list is short enough, it won't even be visible without scrolling the page up. My instance is running 0.18.1 release candidate, so it might be a bug in that.
That pop-up thingy lists all the users that matches what you have so far written. For example, if you type @we, words like power and Sweden are matches, because there's "we" in them. You can use up and down arrows to select the user you want, and then autocomplete the link with enter. It won't help you to autocomplete the link if you copy-paste the full user name. To autocomplete copy-pasted name, you need to delete the whole instance part of it and the last character of the user name. Then type the last character you just deleted, and the pop-up appears with only one choice - unless that user name exists on more than one instance. If you type the second @ for the instance part, the pop-up disappears, so you cannot narrow the list to only one user in those cases where the user name exists in more than one instance.
Some of drama on Reddit will calm down, but that brings up an important point: there and here, we don’t need to be isolated, because we can connect to other communities and share in different interests.
I fully understand the difficulty to change habit- I recently quit a game I'd been playing almost daily for a majority of 25+ years, and still feel the desire to log in even though I know I don't like being there any more.
showing me how much the toxicity of the rest of the site had infiltrated r/Blind
Everyone is (rightfully) upset about what's going on there, but all the posts that are basically an echo chamber for being upset about the lack of change got old really fast. Same with the automod post (which I complained about), a constant reminder nothing is changing and moreso a hurdle to make interacting there a more annoying process. As someone that's been immersed in useless "gamer rage" with no follow-through whatsoever, it's sad to see the same thing happening again.
And for all that's been done to set up this community, the "meat" of the sub, non-community members' questions, is still found there. Between that and the growing pains of this site and general fedi integration (I would be here more if I could get it to work properly with/from my Mastodon account), I don't feel like either side is really a great fit for what I was getting out of the experience in the past.
@tymmezinni@NoConfigence2192 from how I understand it while you can follow an instance on one platform from an account on the other they are not really compatible, I’m replying from my mastodon account because I follow the @main community on mastodon and thus can see these comments but have had a hard time locating the posts.