There was another new account basically created for this thread that got flagged down. Yours, which also looks like it was created for this thread, seems awful similar. (Edit: iirc even the name was similar.)
While I'm sure they do want those abilities, I follow the new tab often that I disagree. And frankly, I don't really have any reason to trust what you're peddling.
I don't know about Loops specifically, but generally [Fediverse][0] projects tend to:
- Not rely on a central server.
- Allow you to set up your own server.
- Connect to a web of other servers through the Activity Pub protocol.
- Allow you to modify policies on your server (including restricting which other servers information is shared with.)
Many are also open source.
The creator of Loops also built a different project called [Pixelfed](1) with a focus on decentralized photo sharing (although it can also host video.) Because all these projects speak the same protocol, it's possible that at some point, Loops could show content from Pixelfed. Apparently Loops content is already appearing in Mastodon.
Meta's Threads also has Activity Pub support. Hypothetically, Threads content could appear on Loops and vice versa, if the UI is built to accommodate that style of content and a server admin doesn't block the Threads server (many servers block Threads specifically.)
TL;DR: A web of servers using different pieces of open source software to share social media, without a centralized server.
Just a side note, reading through some of the other comments, it sounds like Loops specifically isn't currently open source and the intent is to open source it at some later date.
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
I think a lot of Fedi people want that, but the community is still small. It's a bit of a chicken and egg, so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.
> so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.
There are hidden reasons behind centralized solutions, that make decentralized solutions unpopular. If anyone suggests "just go out and make it better", it's missing the point. That's like saying: "don't participate in society, just start your own". In theory it makes sense, in practice it's just ignorance and lack of awareness on how difficult and complex task it is.
Centralized solutions are often just a business, they're not transparent, they're not cooperative, they're not ethical, they're there to conquer market and there's big money behind them, they're part of surveillance capitalism.
These are just examples, but there's lot more, so in context of social media, it's intertwined with the rest of simulation called "real world", so almost no one is going to know what you're talking about, when mention Loops/Mastodon/Bluesky, people know dominant platforms and stick to them and they may do so as part of social pressure and because they compete for status. In this society, you won't gain status by using Loops. People are buying iPhone for status, even though something like Samsung or Fairphone would be good as well. People are buying luxury frames for glasses, because they want to show brand, they don't care that it's more expensive and quality is basically they same.
I don't know why your dragging centralization/decentralization, business model, Fairphone, etc. into the conversation now. It sort of feels like you're overthinking this.
I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.
You said:
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.
You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.
If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.
I'm not overthinking it, if you were right and everything was simple, statistics on popularity of decentralized platforms would look different. That's empirical proof. It's science, you can read what Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Shoshana Zuboff or Tristan Harri wrote about media, you can notice that right now it's all global Skinner box experiment or you may ignore all that and go with "vibes" on why decentralized platforms fail to gain real popularity.
One approach is based on science, other bases on unfounded feelings. Some people will use these decentralized platforms, but that's not the point. My point is that it's not as simple as just telling people around you "just use this". There are systemic reasons why most people don't use them and serious analysis starts once you get it. Without that it's just wishful thinking, so sure, you will get something on these platforms, but it's like one commenter here mentioned, he tried Loops, used it for a while and it's mostly trash for him, while better community will never appear there.
To get real traction and user base on such decentralized platforms, we would need to change the way society functions first. That's why it's impossibly hard challenge. Without foundations, such projects are doomed to fail, they just can't compete with mainstream, centralized platforms.
It doesn't feel like you can stay on topic here. I'm not trying to discuss the general viability of these platforms vs. centralized ones, or other social networks. Your complaint was:
> the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.
Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.
There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.
You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.
I don't have a Loops account, but check multiple sites for news and information, landing on the loops homepage several times. I haven't needed a login to see videos appear for some time.
If it's anything like the rest of the Fediverse applications, it's meant to give you a full chronological feed of people you subscribe to. While several of these sites seem to have a simple trending page, one of the themes of the Fediverse seems to be getting away from overly predatory algorithms and leaning into letting people curate their own feeds and interactions again.
It sounds a lot like a "be the change" situation. If you want to see other stuff, follow people you like instead of drinking from the hose. It's still a small site, so if you don't see the content you want, then make it or build the community there.
These sites can also have basic interoperability. I don't know if the Loops UI supports subscribing to people in other Fedi networks yet, but I've seen people say Loops videos have started trickling onto Mastodon.
If we've concluded that's it's okay to have elements that change/morph, as we seem to with the introduction of things like details, a native tab-like element feels like a glaring omission. Tabs have been a long-standing UI pattern and forcing every site to implement their own is a nightmare for accessibility. (The page you're reading is maybe already in a browser tab.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page?
Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.
People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.
The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.
But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.
Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.
That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.
Ah yeah I had totally forgotten about Helvetica having such a history. Though I wonder what you mean by putting Arial in that position deliberately - if it was alphabetical (which I remember it being) do you mean that Arial was named as such that it started with A?
I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.
From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.
I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.
I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.
I tried not to share too much details while we were still in process of figuring out the details.
The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity.
So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking.
The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.
I would advise against using unbound on the client side as this way all your DNS queries will be unencrypted and visible to your ISP. Besides that, the DNS responses can be modified, this kind of censorship is very popular and used in many countries.
IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole).
It's pretty slick, highly recommend.
(Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
As a satisfied customer, I just recommended their adblockimg DNS on here a few days ago but am happy to do it again. If you really don't want to install anything, at least adblock at the DNS level. https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html
> doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim.
That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.
Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.
I am aware that people who read the blog might base parts of their websites on my examples, so I definitely want to make sure they're accessible as to not cause a negative ripple effect on the web.
I don't have a background in accessibility, but I try to do the best I can. I try out what I make with various accessibility tools (e.g. keyboard navigation, screenreaders), and also read up on how things should be handled.
For the radio tabs specifically - they are keyboard navigable, work with screenreaders, and follow the tabbing to content practice mentioned in the WAI-ARIA example[0].
Thanks! Sorry if I came off as brash, time has been tight recently. You've already put a lot of work into a very informative article, and it's appreciated. The outlook is solid. I'd like to find an opportunity to revisit some of my own code with your writing in mind.
Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.
My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.
I don't know about those radio tabs specifically, but your intuition is correct. Many of the ARIA APG (component)patterns require JavaScript to update tab index and ARIA properties for full implementation. Focus management and key-control are two problem spaces that are common across many patterns and require JavaScript.
Focus management:
Focus scopes and restoring focus requires JavaScript. Complex UI components like combo box, grids, and trees require dynamically adjusting tab index and focus. Combo Box requires managing accessibility tree focus separately from DOM focus. Modals implementing focus scopes and restoring focus scopes requires JavaScript.
Key controls:
The ARIA APG patterns call for differences in tab and arrow key control from what the browser would supply. Patterns that involve list of groups use tab to navigate between groups and arrows to navigate within groups.
Thanks for the input. The keyboard control piece is a good call-out.
Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.
Did you read the article? The author specifically addresses accessibility in multiple places, including taking extra steps to work around browser bugs [0].
Given how un-accesible this blog post is (the contrast is quite a crime against humanity, as someone who does web dev for a dsiability charity (well communcity interest company but similar)), I wouldn't go to this for a source on this.
could you give any examples of how the page's accessibility could be improved - apart from your dislike of the background color
you're calling the post un-accessible and telling people to not use it as a source - i'd like to know why you think that, and if there's any way to improve the accessibility
This is not my dislike of the background colour (blue is actually my favourite colour, well teal), nothing in that comment was an opinion. The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) have standards for colour contrast [1]. If you turn on developer tools in your browser and go to accesbility you will see how many elements do not conform to these standards. The site falls astray of this in the most common way, which is blue links on a blue background, making link text very hard to read.
i am aware that the link color specifically is not ideal and i have been playing around with designs that feel similar while having better contrast - but your comment seemed to call the entire site un-accessible, so i was wondering if there's anything else that stood out and that could be improved
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