Hi. I would personally say this mailing list has too small a sample rate to be conclusive. Most of the young blind professionals I hang out with are on Mastodon so I would probably start there in gaining views. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Barnes via Blind-sysadmins <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: 23 February 2026 13:07 To: Mailing list for blind system administrators <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Cc: Samuel Barnes <samuellbarnes@gmail.com> Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Re: Would anyone be interested in a blind professionals forum? I don't know many new mailing lists being created. I definitely want to avoid mainstream social media, admittedly for ideological reasons. While it would be inarguably easier to get people on board and easier to manage, I want to encourage a more human-focused decentralized web. Discord seems to be sucking up all the help forums, and I want to avoid that. Discord is a terrible place for a repository of information. Servers are not indexed by search engines, the way conversations are organized, as a never ending torrent of undifferentiated posts, is hard to search, and what search functionality does exist isn't very good. You get people asking the same questions over and over because the one good answer the first time the question was asked has disappeared down the cataract of previous replies, never to be seen again. The fediverse would seem to be a good alternative, but most federated platforms mimic established players in the social media space and inherit many of the same problems. Mastodon is just Twitter, Piefed and Lemmy are Reddit clones, etc. These platforms are biased toward new content rather than old but still relevant content. NodeBB is technically able to talk to other services that use ActivityPub, so we could leverage that to get more people involved, but it's first and foremost a traditional forum, built for long-term discussion rather than casual browsing. Of course this can't go anywhere if NodeBB turns out not to be accessible. I personally navigate it fine, but part of the reason I want to do this is to see if other blind people can also navigate it. Here's a demo forum set up by the developers: https://try.nodebb.org/ And here's a random production instance: https://basenjiforums.com/ On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 4:38 AM Andrew Hodgson via Blind-sysadmins < blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
Hi.
There have been a few attempts to do this before, most haven't gone anywhere. However I don't see that as a reason for not trying. I have often wondered what a successor to this mailing list would look like, as I realise it's a bit outdated now. I think even young blind professionals have moved away from email these days.
Andrew.
-----Original Message----- From: Samuel Barnes via Blind-sysadmins < blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: 23 February 2026 01:53 To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Cc: Samuel Barnes <samuellbarnes@gmail.com> Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Would anyone be interested in a blind professionals forum?
I'm thinking of spinning up an instance of nodeBB to serve as a forum for blind people working in fields not traditionally associated with the blind or for blind people seeking employment outside the "blind employment ghetto" (you know, O&M instructor, VI or special ed teacher, government case worker, lawyer, musician, etc.)
This would host discussions about adaptive strategies for blind professionals in specialized fields, advocacy for blind people in the workforce, and just commiseration.
IT industry topics like those discussed on this mailing list would be a subset of these discussions.
I also have two ulterior motives for doing this. First, I really like traditional forums as a platform and think nodeBB is a promising successor to the venerable (and surprisingly still around) phpBB. I'd like to have other blind folks use it day to day and provide the devs with feedback on how to make it more accessible.
Second, as I mentioned in a previous email, all my certs are expiring next month, and I'm too exhausted to try to renew them. Adminning (and possibly self-hosting) this forum would serve as a personal portfolio of sorts, something I can show potential employers to demonstrate I know what the heck I'm doing. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list -- blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org To unsubscribe send an email to blind-sysadmins-leave@lists.hodgsonfamily.org _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list -- blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org To unsubscribe send an email to blind-sysadmins-leave@lists.hodgsonfamily.org
_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list -- blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org To unsubscribe send an email to blind-sysadmins-leave@lists.hodgsonfamily.org