OpenStars

I wrote out a very long and detailed reply to someone, citing sources and putting quite some time into crafting my message, only to be presented with a message "replier blocked" in red font. Or if I attempt via a direct URL to the comment, I get a different presentation of the similar message saying "Your reply was not accepted because Replier blocked", in black text against a pink background (in my dark mode view with PieFed theme, using Firefox on Android).

I am fairly certain that the person I was attempting to reply to has not blocked me, as we talk all the time including DMs even. So I suspect it is the account above them that has me blocked?

Although in this case, why am I able to see their content, if I am "blocked"? The person I attempted to reply to is on a Lemmy instance, but the person who I suspect blocked me is on the same instance as me, PieFed.social. I can see their profile too, but attempting to enter the page to send a DM confirms that one of us has blocked the other, and their username is not in my block list so it must have been them blocking me. I am writing all of this out to show my process of discovery.

Can a visual indicator be added to comments that are going to result in me wasting (potentially significant amounts of) time attempting to reply to but that will result in failure?

Otherwise this amounts to shadow-banning, which is not going to be a good look for Piefed and will hinder its acceptance in the community.

Left to my own devices, while surely I could place a visual icon next to the names of such accounts, there are too many problems with that approach to make it viable. (1) I would have to discover the situation first, (2) plus as seen above what if I am incorrect in my determination there, (3) plus that situation might change over time - e.g. if a block was added accidentally, or otherwise reconsidered and removed.

Having been blocked is crucial information, which is preventing me from discoursing with my actual friend in this case. And currently the only way I seem to be able to discover this fact is to either enter the page to send them a DM or not merely open the reply box but go ahead and compose and make a FULL attempt to send off a reply message to either them or also including everyone who has replied below them as well.

The indicator of this phenomena needs to have occurred MUCH sooner in the process, to avoid frustrations. No means no, I totally respect that much at least, but I wish I had been told that, somehow?

Sometimes community mods set their community-specific themes to something that is entirely unreadable - like dark text on top of a black background for a spoiler box, itself on top of a light-colored background (where the dark text would have been readable, except the spoiler box changing everything). I am having to turn off community theme overrides entirely as a result if I want to read the content.

One suggestion could be to provide a link to an external testing tool, or better yet put some automated testing directly into the code where the community themes are built, to alert people to such accessibility considerations? Honestly the latter might be more work than strictly necessary... but it also sounds kinda fun so I thought I would mention it 🤔🤣.

(in case not obvious, an homage to this post)

- source

This illustration makes use of the double entendre of the techie word "cloud" to mean both a server farm and also those white-ish or grey puffy things up in the sky.

- source

If this is not a good fit for the community let me know.

Edit: for people who can't see hashtags, this is programming humor about a website (where people mainly only care about how things appear from the perspective of the end-user).

(it really would be nice to see a more graceful handling of these)

Edit: and what do you know, 16 minutes after cross-posting this to !piefed_meta@piefed.social, Rimu agrees, changes the code, and deploys onto piefed.social to retain deleted posts. PieFed really is something!! (announcement post)

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