Simon Tatham (@simontatham@hachyderm.io)

I started up Zoom this morning and it gave me the message "It looks like we are unable to connect. Please check your network connection and try again." But my network connection was fine. The problem was at Zoom's end, or more precisely, Cloudflare's. (And it seems OK now.) I'm beginning to be annoyed by this reflexive "please check _your_ network connection" coda in these messages. What it is, is victim blaming. And possibly gaslighting too. _Their_ network connection went wrong, and their immediate response is to tell all of us users that _we_ must have done something wrong. It makes us all do lots of pointless work checking things that don't need checking, and it probably makes half of us feel inadequate when we can't find any problem. If you're _going_ to advise users to check their own network connection, take reasonable steps first to ensure the problem really does look like being at the local end. Try pinging a few other independently run well-known sites; try some DNS lookups; if you can't do _anything_, suggest the user checks their connection, but if the rest of that stuff works and only your own server can't be reached, maybe redirect to your application's status webpage instead?

hachyderm.io · Hachyderm.io