sharksonaplane

sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

@sharksonaplane

Sharyna Tran

Sharks are cool and comfortable!

Elden Thing | Back & Body Hurts Platinugggggh Rewards Member

Profile pic and banner credits: sharkaeopteryx art by @superkiak! eggbug by eggbug! Mash-up by me!
[Alt-text for pfp: a cute sharkaeopteryx sat on the ground with legs out, wings down, jaw ajar, and hed empty, looking at eggbug and eggbug's enigmatic smile.]
[Alt-text for banner: a Spirit Halloween banner with eggbug and the sharkaeopteryx that Superkiak drew for me looking at it with inscrutable expressions]

I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.

Ask me about language learning/teaching, cooking/eating food, late diagnosis ADHD, and volunteer small business mentoring. Or don't, I'm not the boss of you.

I think people deserve to be young, make mistakes, and grow without being held to standards they don't know about yet and are still learning. So, if you are under 22, please don't try to strike up a friendship or get involved in discussions on my posts.

Please don't automatically assume I follow/know/co-sign someone just because I reposted something from them—sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Also, if you think being removed as a follower when we're not mutuals is a cardinal sin, please do not follow me.

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🐘Mastodon
search for @sharksonaplane@mastodon.sandwich.net and hit follow if you want
Hang out with me on the Auldnoir forum! (you can DM there!)
discourse.auldnoir.org/
Sign my Cohost yearbook 📝
recocards.com/board/cohost-yearbook-sharksonaplane-94772758696c
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twitch.tv/sharkaeopteryx
Add my RSS feed (not working yet but I'll get to it!)
sharkaeopteryx.neocities.org/rss.xml
My Throne link
throne.com/sharkaeopteryx
My Ko-fi link
www.ko-fi.com/sharkaeopteryx
sharksonaplane
@sharksonaplane
arachnixe
@arachnixe
arachnixe
@arachnixe

Happy birthday to this forgotten accessibility feature request.

Months ago I lamented the state of this site's fake dark mode, and how it's an accessibility feature I depend on:

It felt good to get a bunch of attention on it! Thanks to the folks who saw the post and worked to get the devs to pay attention, it got a flood of new comments and rose to become the number one highest voted feature request on their tracker!

Most places that would mean something, but not here, I guess, where the developers can't even be bothered to acknowledge that their users are trying to get their attention. We still haven't heard a peep. They stuck a "planned" label on the feature request long before I ever found it to pacify anyone who cared, and then they left it to rot without saying a single damn word.

One year. How time flies when you're implementing joke timestamp formats, weird one-way DMs (copied from Tumblr!), an alternative post view, and whatever's coming next. (Likes are now florps? Timeline goes sideways?)

I've tried to be polite. I've tried to earnestly persuade people. I've even talked directly with someone on the team begging them to just reply to the feature request acknowledging it (a request which was immediately denied).

I'm tired. Being nice just makes you easier to ignore, after all. What's it going to take to make them care, a sustained campaign for people to cancel Cohost Plus? Ha, I wish that stood a chance of going anywhere. This site is full of True Believers loyal to an LLC that demonstrably does not give a shit.

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in reply to @arachnixe's post:

eladnarra
@eladnarra

I'm sorry it's turned out this way.

I did actually cancel my Cohost Plus a few months ago, when accessibility/alt text stuff blew up a bunch. I was hoping that one day I'd see decent progress, start posting here again, and resubscribe, but... hasn't happened yet. It's honestly more cultural than anything at this point. After seeing so many users rail against accessibility being too hard and wondering in posts if it's even worth the effort... It's not really a place I feel like hanging out. 🙁

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arachnixe
@arachnixe

This place feels like it's by and for west coast tech queers, whose priorities look an awful lot like the priorities of any other west coast techies, just with the Nazis filed off. Silicon valley tech companies also need to be threatened to implement any accessibility, and even then they start weighing whether the legal costs are worth it. :-/

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Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

Maybe it's just the circles I tend to run in...OK, it's almost certainly the circles I tend to run in, but my impression of Cohost has been more of a petit-bourgeois artisanal sort of vibe: one that promotes a sense of relaxation and positivity, but a noticeably limited one. It's all enough to make you wonder what levels of material privilege make that relaxation, that positivity possible in the first place.

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ref54
@ref54

Agreed. We're not exactly talking a niche feature here. A proper dark mode is pretty fundamental. I use the "dark" mode that's here currently and I don't technically need one but it's way past time for this to get implemented.

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krveale
@krveale

You're possibly way ahead of me, but pillowfort has a dark mode, and I have resources to make it easier to check the place out or get set up if you choose to?

It's got some useful accessibility features, but alongside some definite gaps, such as alt-text o images.

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SeafoamGaming
@SeafoamGaming

The more i hang out on the site, the more spiteful i feel certain users and staff are towards feature requests

It doesn’t help that when i pointed out that maybe better tagging would be a good idea for discoverability, like via “common/master tags” I immediately got told to just go to the forums and submit a feature request

Then i go and see how stuff literally rots there with no info or feedback and it feels like a graveyard for “idk maybe we’ll do this later” ideas rather than uh, an actual way to get our voices heard.

I’m honestly bewildered the dark mode here is as awful as it is but not surprised by how snooty people are when you point that out. Or point out how the content tagging system is pretty flawed and hard to block properly, (especially again, like with tags due to variations of the same word all being their own thing, which with no master/unified word, almost makes tagging useless) or how being a freelancer here trying to get eyeballs on your newest work sucks so hard due to discoverability being shunned.

I still remember when a game dev person filed a GDPR request here to delete his page, and it took nearly a god damn month for the staff to even respond to that (only after he bumped the thread and it got traction on the site) which i’m pretty sure violates EU law.

Not gonna ever consider CH+ unless they make the bare ass changes needed for disability purposes, help freelancers and stop treating their idea forum like a graveyard

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