Hm. I wonder if I can get any fediverse admins onboard to disable all images on their instance on the World Sight Day in October, so that only alt text shows up.
@stefan@luca we had an error this morning that caused just that!
I don't exactly know how it was caused, but it worked on every platform, both the app and website.
I think we activated a stateless firewall in Hetzner. However, this messed something with the media cache or packets sent as foreign media. It's very hard to discern.
I hope this helps in finding the solution to your noble cause!
@stefan@ErikUden I used your code slightly modified because it didn't work and I figured it could have to to with priority: location ^~ /system/media_attachments/ {
return 503*;*}. But it's probably a server caching issue because older images aren't displayed.
@stefan count me in too. I'm interested to see what you come up with on a technical implementation level. Write-only access would at least be a simple switch.
As a semi-obsessive alt text-er, I endorse this message.
(Partly cos it's part of my current day job anyway, and partly as my mother is now legally blind and I understand the real-world ramifications of online accessibility more directly.)
@stefan any advice for servers (like social.coop) using S3 storage for uploaded media? Do you know if there's a way to get the same write-only functionality?
@stefan ah thanks, one of the other social.coop co-admins just found that. Do you know if that would have the same behaviour where uploads would keep working?
@stefan So I was playing around with nginx.conf this morning but no luck, errors here and there. (Tried various locations inside http directive)
You have already provided folder permissions and S3_ALIAS_HOST option for Mastodon which isn't exactly feasible but doable. I host multiple fediverse platforms on a server so I'm not sure how to achieve this on server level properly.
We have until October so hopefully someone with coding knowledge can chip in by then.
I'm sure any admins with some coding knowledge can do it. Problem was, I didn't like modifying files or permissions, so I opted for nginx.conf one-liner, include /etc/nginx/sites-available/blackout.conf; and uncomment the other, created another nginx with wildcard domain.
@stefan As for alt-text no images day, I'm sure it can be achieved via nginx, I'll look into it as someone already posted w github link here, which serves a different purpose by just disabling images with read permission and still have website running online.
My friend Mina @mina came up with this similar idea some time ago, and we plan to promote it regularly until October.
Doing it through the admins would be much more effective.👍😁
Also:
We should contact journalists and NPO's around the globe about this action.
It would be a powerful symbol and the right kind of PR for the #Fediverse.
(1/2)
Excellent. 🤗
We could emulate what the #WWF initiated with #EarthHour or #HoraDelPlaneta in 2007.* People jointly turn off the lights.
When many people(s) join in a visible action, it can become a beacon of hope.
Due to the fact, that #VisionImpairments impacts only a fraction of the population and, as @hspmauli, pointed out today, voluntary "temperance/abstinence is always the problem,"..
...I really ❤️ your idea to make it "automatic" for people, aka users.
This way, we "only" need to convince a "couple of thousands" instance #admins, instead of 15 million #Fedizens.
Brilliant 👏
Once we have a critical mass, we should involve the press.
This is a good thing on several fronts. 👍
Yeah, I like your idea too, it's interesting to consider two approaches, one where people do this voluntarily to raise awareness, and one where everyone is sort of forced to get a small taste of the experience.
I still have to do a lot of research on this, but there will definitely be cases where an instance can't or is not interested in participating, so a combination of these ideas would work really well.
@stefan
Just to be clear:
Due to the #Fediverse's decentralized structure, I would never expect every instance to participate (and let's not forget about the deferated instances either.)
However, if a critical mass of, say, Mastodon.social + a majority of the instances took part, this could constitute a "critical mass" and capture the interest of the press (aka free marcom for the Fediverse and a promotion of awareness for the plights of the vision-impaired) @hspmauli@mina@Gargron@tchambers
@Tealk Great question, and something I am going to be looking into!
One suggestion I saw was to make the upload folder write-only. Pretty clever, as this would ensure people can still upload the images, and have them display the following day.
@stefan That's not clever, because then no pictures are uploaded but only an error is displayed. if so, then the delivery should be prevented, not the upload, because the pictures should be displayed after the event.
I think preventing the upload is too much of an intrusion into user behavior.
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