kukkurovaca

Epistory is kind of fun. You may want to cross post to !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world

It's hard to say what will help each individual because everybody has different ergonomic needs, and obviously, nobody here can provide medical or occupational health advice.

That being said, some things to think about:

• If you haven't already, make sure that your desk height and typing style are reasonably ergonomic. Conventional wisdom is that you want your forearms to be about level with the floor and your hands should be floating above the keyboard, not resting on your desk.
• For issues that are caused by wrist angle, there are two major features a keyboard can offer:
  • Split, letting you separate the halves so that your wrists aren't pointing inward
  • Tented, meaning that you can change the angle of the keyboard so that you can get the most comfortable position rotationally
• Many ergonomic keyboards also use a column-staggered layout, which should be better for your fingers, but will require some learning curve to get used to
• Some also have keywell designs that are scooped so your fingers don't have to stretch as far

You may want to compare different layouts before deciding on a board to try: https://compare.splitkb.com/

For off the shelf prebuilts, see things like Kinesis, Keyboardio, the Glove80, Ergodox, Moonlander

For something a bit more DIY, Keebio offers a range of split boards, and some of them are available prebuilt in addition to kit form. Some are hotswap as well. Splitkb also makes really good kits.

There are lots of other vendors, like Little Keyboards, Beekeeb, Falbatech, BastardKB, ohkeycaps, and others

If you're doing your own PCB, you could add splitkb tenting puck https://github.com/splitkb/tenting_puck

I guess we'll have to escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism

it's time to move things forward

Also, this bit in particular is very funny to me:

however they’re never going to be able to advertise to most people in the fediverse, who also happen to be some of the most knowledgeable people in some fields.

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, ~~join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you.~~ defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don't have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.

It says that “If everything works fine with your keyboard. Please don’t flash the firmware. There is a chance it can damage your keyboard”. I am aware that if I unplugged during a firmware update it could brick it, but otherwise it would work out fine, right? Would the reset button underneath the spacebar save me in that situation? It is hard to tell whether this is just keychron trying to go the safest route to avoid tech support calls or if this is actually a valid recommendation.

I've seen some stories of folks having issues with flashing cheap keyboards due to driver funkiness or other reasons. It would be weird to see a *good *keyboard PCB designer telling you not to flash firmware, though, because that's a very normal thing for enthusiasts to do and the designer should be testing the board and its firmware to make sure it works.

In terms of Vial vs. Via, Vial is much more full-featured, and arguably a little less newb-friendly just because it has a lot more stuff you can mess with. Many boards have Vial support to begin with, but some don't. I think it's relatively easy to add Vial support to a board that has Via support, but I've never done this because I'm usually building QMK from the command line.

I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that's not really gentrification, it's more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)

Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That's not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying[^1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)

[^1]: Through white techies being constantly obnoxious to POC who have the temerity to try to join the fediverse, the particular culture of content warning policing, and lack of discoverability making it hard to form community. Note: there's no reason to think facebook would improve any of this.

Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It's applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They're used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.

Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it's reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)

Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.

That's definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it's not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.

Gatekeeping is keeping someone without access/power on the outside. People who are already running instances have by definition passed the gate.

That’s not what gatekeeping means.