Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)

Some people are focusing on the first sentence, but I think this part is key. Obviously, if it's a good idea and you're putting in the work, that's probably a good direction. Critique is useful, defending an idea can help prevent you from being blindsided and help to hone your vision.

One of the things a lot of people seem to struggle with is knowing when it's worth it to keep going and when to let go. When working on something, there can be a lot of people coming from all sides saying, "this won't work," "this will work if you just stick with it", "actually, you're just missing X." There's a lot of noise, and the pushback can be fairly cliche at times.

Sometimes, things like you've mentioned like lack of experience will block them. But, depending on how strongly somebody feels about a concept, when they don't necessarily know if it's a good idea, they may just nurture it and see how everything plays out. It's okay if some things fail.

While I'm sure they do want those abilities, I follow the new tab often that I disagree. And frankly, I don't really have any reason to trust what you're peddling.

Or, based on this thread from yesterday, the fresh accounts are bots and/or disinformation: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes[0].

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152085

> the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.

Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.

There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.

You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.

That's all I'm going to say about it.

I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.

You said:

> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.

Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.

You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.

If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.

I don't know about Loops specifically, but generally [Fediverse][0] projects tend to:

- Not rely on a central server.

- Allow you to set up your own server.

- Connect to a web of other servers through the Activity Pub protocol.

- Allow you to modify policies on your server (including restricting which other servers information is shared with.)

Many are also open source.

The creator of Loops also built a different project called [Pixelfed](1) with a focus on decentralized photo sharing (although it can also host video.) Because all these projects speak the same protocol, it's possible that at some point, Loops could show content from Pixelfed. Apparently Loops content is already appearing in Mastodon.

Meta's Threads also has Activity Pub support. Hypothetically, Threads content could appear on Loops and vice versa, if the UI is built to accommodate that style of content and a server admin doesn't block the Threads server (many servers block Threads specifically.)

TL;DR: A web of servers using different pieces of open source software to share social media, without a centralized server.

- [0] https://fediverse.info/

- [1] https://pixelfed.org/

I think a lot of Fedi people want that, but the community is still small. It's a bit of a chicken and egg, so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.

I'm not a Loops user atm though.

If it's anything like the rest of the Fediverse applications, it's meant to give you a full chronological feed of people you subscribe to. While several of these sites seem to have a simple trending page, one of the themes of the Fediverse seems to be getting away from overly predatory algorithms and leaning into letting people curate their own feeds and interactions again.

It sounds a lot like a "be the change" situation. If you want to see other stuff, follow people you like instead of drinking from the hose. It's still a small site, so if you don't see the content you want, then make it or build the community there.

These sites can also have basic interoperability. I don't know if the Loops UI supports subscribing to people in other Fedi networks yet, but I've seen people say Loops videos have started trickling onto Mastodon.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.

Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.

[0] https://open-ui.org/components/tabs/

[1] https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/281-tabs-and-spicy-drama/

Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.

People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.

From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.

I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.

But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.

Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.

That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.

Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.

My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.

I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.

Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.