I made a slightly provocative social media post yesterday. Rarely for me, I used the identical text and external link on both Mastodon and Bluesky. Apologies to anyone who saw both and felt their time had been wasted. It was for science.
Let’s broaden that definition of “low-quality” apps to include any app that doesn’t provide (and claim) basic accessibility. Why else does Apple have nutrition labels?
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/app-store-guidelines-low-quality-apps/
I wanted to know two things when I made the post: first, how are my audiences on Mastodon and Bluesky different, both in terms of raw reactivity to what I have to say, and in terms of who they literally are. The second thing I wondered was whether most people who responding would be somehow associated with accessibility, or would I also get nods of approval – or disapproval – from friends and colleagues who are connected to me in other ways.For reference I have a little under 1,500 Mastodon followers, 930 on Bluesky.
The post got about twice as much attention on Mastodon as it did on Bluesky. That lines up with my typical experience, though I rarely put the same thing on both platforms. Also, Mastodon does center technology conversation, and I post there more often, making it likely that I’m more interesting to follow there.
Also as I suspected, most people who interacted with me claim some connection to accessibility in their own bios, whether as a user or a builder of those sorts of tools. From this exampled of experiences like it that I’ve had many times, I’ll just go ahead and say it: interest in accessibility topics by people for whom it isn’t lived experience is very limited. This is true despite what writers and podcasters and tech companies like to say about how important accessibility is to them. My own lived social media experience is that most people are uninterested in engaging on the topic unless it helps them prove a point, like Apple cares about accessibility, or isn’t it great that tech is so accessible nowadays.
