"Accessibility” as a conceptual framework is fundamentally tied to the service model of organization.
This is a framework that sees a problem (eg “people are going hungry”) & provides a service ("give them food”). If you try to scale this you immediately run into the "access" question: who is your service benefiting and who is getting left behind? There are whole industry built around trying to answer this question.
What if, instead of the question being “how do we get people food?” we asked “what do food-insecure families need to be able to secure their access to food on their own terms?” Or a step further: “who in my community is food-insecure, and could I be inviting them to dinner more often?”
“Accessibility” in the service model is just “how can we increase our market penetration?” with a veneer of justice painted on. “Accessibility” in an organizing model looks like “can anybody give Dave a ride to the potluck? He can’t drive himself since his sight has gotten worse.” Do you see the difference?
On social media like the fediverse, posting is treated like a “service” that is consumed by a web of parasocial strangers within your following and your “reach” as you get boosted. This is why you start seeing stuff like image captions, content warnings, etc developed to improve access to (sometimes real, often imagined) increasingly diverse audiences. This is important, sure, but only because we’re playing by the wrong rules in the first place.
Like, say: what if you could provide your own image captions or content warnings on posts when you boost them, to cater these to the desires and needs of your particular community?
I can imagine a social media that centers communities and not audiences while enabling sharing between communities as a form of annotated commentary: the sharer becomes responsible for how the message is received by their peers, not the source.
You can give a man a fish, or you can teach a class on fishing. Or, you can invite your buddy to dinner to eat the fish you just caught and tell him all about how you’ve been getting really into fishing and offer an invitation for him to join you on the next outing. That’s the world I want.
@clarity I remember as a kid, my father always had a spot at the dinner table for my friends. He'd always offer, because my father is a feeder, plus he's always valued talking to folks over dinner.
We were breadline poor, but my father taught me to always keep a spot or more spots open for folks if they wanted to stay for dinner.
@onepict Exactly yeah! Who's gonna turn down dinner? Food particularly is such an important element of our whole lives and I've really been focusing on it lately as one of the central ways we can take care of each other.
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