I didn’t realise it’s only visible to server admins. I run my own server, and it seems like server admins can view the votes on any comment, not just for comments or posts on their server. Interesting design choice.

What I haven’t checked is if non-admins can load the vote data, and it’s just the button in the UI that’s hidden.

Although since Lemmy votes are public, it does take some restraint to not message people that downvote your comments/posts and ask them why.

Yeah I don’t think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it’s probably the one most in need of improvements.

I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case

This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features

Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.

The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.

Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’

This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.

The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users that used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.

My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.

The thing is, that’s a fundamental feature of Lemmy. It’s designed such that no one person or company controls the whole thing. Admins that have differing opinions can each have their own servers with whatever rules they want.

That makes it somewhat incompatible with a a basic signup page like what you’re proposing, just like you can’t have a generic “sign up for email” page without picking a specific provider. Having a huge number of users on a single server somewhat defeats the purpose of decentralization - you’re back to a small number of people / a company having control over a major part of the ecosystem.

Perhaps it could redirect people to a randomly selected instance from a hand-picked list, but maybe that’d be even more confusing? I’m not sure.

I still call it Twitter because their emails are still branded as Twitter. I don’t actually use it any more but I do get so much spam through DMs that I’m considering deleting my account. I’m mostly holding it just so nobody squats on my username.

Websites don’t have an actual check for a legit email.

Some do. You can connect to an SMTP server and pretend to send an email (send the EHLO, MAIL FROM, and RCPT TO commands, but don’t actually send any content). A lot of servers will immediately reject as soon as you provide an invalid recipient email address.

Of course, that doesn’t work for any domains with a catchall address (where every address at a domain goes to one mailbox), and some SMTP servers don’t reject the email until later (or even just silently ignore emails to invalid addresses) in order to avoid enumeration attacks.

Do you mean in mixed language documents? Can’t you tell it that parts of the document are in a different language? You could do that in Microsoft Word 25 years ago - Word lets you set the default language for a document, but you can change it per paragraph.

I usually use HTTPS, because a lot of web features only work over HTTPS.

You can use Let’s Encrypt DNS challenges to get real TLS certificates for internal hosts, instead of having to use your own CA or self-signed certificates.

Tailscale has several NAT bypass / hole punching methods for double NAT (including CGNAT) and symmetric NAT, but they don’t work in 100% of cases. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

IPv6 is definitely a good solution since then you don’t have to deal with NAT at all. IPv6 is pretty easily doable in the USA (at long as you’re not using Starlink) but can be harder in other countries that don’t have as robust IPv6 infrastructure.

this means their permissions do not work like docker, and it is not in fact a drop-in replacement for docker

It might a drop-in replacement for Docker if you’re running Docker in rootless mode? Not sure how common that is, though.

I like Unraid because it’s essentially “just Linux” but with a nice web UI. It’s got a great UI for Docker, VMs (KVM) and Linux containers (LXC).

Don’t. Use a VPN like Tailscale or Wireguard. Tailscale uses the Wireguard protocol but it’s very easy to configure, and will automatically set up a peer-to-peer mesh network for you (each node on the VPN can directly reach any other node, without having to route through a central server).

The only things that should be exposed publicly are things that absolutely need to be - for example, parts of Home Assistant need to be publicly exposed if you use the Google Assistant or Alexa integrations, since Google and Amazon need to be able to reach it.

this community is literally built around hosting your own local infrastructure.

That’s part of it, but using a dedicated server, colocated server, or VPS are also considered “self hosted” too. “self hosted” is broader than just having a server at home, and means any server, web service, etc where you maintain it yourself.

Hardware in your own house is generally referred to as a “home lab”.

Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren’t overly technical or arcane. Some examples:

• Use ARIA roles where appropriate
• Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
• Ensure you use <label> tags to label for all your <input>s, alt attributes on all images, title attributes where appropriate (e.g. on <table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.

If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an “Accessibility” tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don’t meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.

It’s a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it’s becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.

I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

It’s probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It’s one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.

It really do be like that. I work with some people who are nearly 15 years younger than me (I’m in my mid 30s and some newer employees have just graduated from university) so I feel this.

schwimmflugel

English

🤔

This is a really well written article. It’s unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.

I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.

Accessibility should be something that’s built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It’s unfortunate.

Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won’t really help with Linux itself though.

For storing the backups, I use a storage VPS. I got one from HostHatch a few years ago during Black Friday sales, with 10TB space for $10/month. Hetzner have good deals with their storage boxes, too - they offer 5TB space for $13/month if you’re in the USA (you need to add VAT if you’re in Europe).

A good rule of thumb is to never pay more than $5/TB/month, and during Black Friday it’s closer to $2/TB/month. The LowEndTalk forum has the best Black Friday deals.

I use Borgbackup for backups, and Borgmatic to handle scheduling them. Borgbackup is a fantastic piece of software.

Borgmatic has an “append only” mode which lets you configure particular SSH keys to only be able to add data to the backup, not delete it. Even if someone/something (ransomware, malicious users, etc) gains access to your system and tries to delete the backups, they can’t. Essentially, this is protection against ransomware.

This is a very common issue with other backup solutions - the client has full access to the backup, so malware on the client system could potentially delete all the backups.

I have two backup copies of most things. One copy on my home server and one copy on my storage VPS. If you do do multiple backups, Borgbackup recommend doing two separate backups rather than doing one then rsyncing it to another server.