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Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit's API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback. This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accessibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated. So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them. https://rblind.com/
It's kinda tricksy. You need to visit the comm from within your own instance. The easiest way is to click Communities, then All, then search for it - however you have to know what you're looking for, and you can't filter or sort by instance.
In this case, searching would be hard, as the comm is called "main". There are probably lots of other mains in different instances.
For you, try beehaw.org/c/main@rblind.com. However, it could be that it's too new for your instance to know about it, in which case I'm not sure but you may just have to wait until beehaw federates with it.
I think there's also a generic way to format links such that anyone can click them from their own instance and get their instance's version, however I haven't learned that yet. Something like !main@rblind.com. Also, things can work different on apps vs the website - for example Jerboa only lets you browse comms you're subbed to.
Often, a quick way to link communities is by formatting a hyperlink like this
[Visible-text-to-click](/c/community@instance.tld)For a this example, formatting the text like
[this link](/c/main@rblind.com)would create this link that most* people can click on that will bring them to that community.*Kbin users will need to replace the
/c/with/m/As a note for Jerboa users: the above link may instantly crash the app. At least, it does for me.
Yep, that's what I've found. I'm thinking of scrapping the app in favour of the website tbh, at least for now.
Ya, I've been told that it's a known bug that they're working on. I still like it as a reader, but to do any sort of adjustment to your account, such as finding communities and adding them, or interacting with replies to your posts, the website is more useful right now.
Hopefully it can catch up soon.
Supposedly a few good updates are coming with v0.18, which could be any day now!
That would be great!
It would be nice if you could just type /c/community@instance. Or /m/ as required.
When you're writing a message on the web version, typing
!and the name of the community will bring up a suggestion box.Typing
!mainand selecting the rblind.com instance autocompletes to[!main@rblind.com](https://rblind.com/c/main)but that links directly to the instance itself. It needs a bit of formatting though to get it to be instance-agnostic.There's a big discussion on Github on how to handle links, because as mentioned, the /c/ won't work for kbin users.
I personally think it should link the instance directly, as it already does, and have a second link in the formatting we mentioned for the local instance link.
Like this: /c/main@rblind.com, won't work when reading the comment on kbin, though, only on lemmy. For people too lazy to click on "view source" (or unaware of it): [](/c/@)
Making that stuff easier and more intuitive is on the dev's list and I apologise for anyone on a screen reader it's symbol gore.