home.social

#cwalttextmeta — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cwalttextmeta, aggregated by home.social.

  1. @Mark Wyner Won’t Comply :vm: First of all, you completely forgot the social media posters. The TOC link leads nowhere.

    Also, maybe it's fair to mention that I'm working on an entire wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions, especially for the Fediverse. 46 pages are planned as of now, 24 of them are already written. These will include over 30 pages on how to do things, how not to do things and what never to do at all.

    I won't add step-by-step guides for certain frontends. But I've already started adding rules and guidelines for how to describe images appropriately and write alt-texts in a way that won't break stuff anywhere.

    Even if it's a very incomplete WIP, it's unique in several ways:
    • It's the only wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions. Few writers have even only written multiple pages or articles on this subject.
    • It's the only guide that takes the existence of the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into consideration. This means that it's also the only guide that doesn't assume that Fediverse equals always having only 500 characters for the message text. It actually recommends an additional, longer image description in the message text in certain situations, regardless of whether or not vanilla Mastodon users can do that.
    • It's the only guide that, instead of regurgitating the alt-text rules for webpages and blogs and assuming that they apply to the Fediverse just the same, talks about the peculiarities of posting images into the Fediverse, how Mastodon's alt-text quality criteria are different from the W3C WAI and WCAG alt-text quality criteria, and why it's critically important to know and fulfill Mastodon's requirements for good alt-texts.
    • It's probably the only guide that doesn't assume that you can always precisely target a certain audience for your content and make sure that only those receive it who understand it right off the bat.
    • It is the only guide that lists over 60 references, including your blog post, but also including university webpages as well as over two dozen guides from Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica with Four Eyes.

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
  2. @On a Third Photography Write your image descriptions 100% by hand, full stop.

    For starters, AI descriptions are bad. AIs hallucinate. AIs misidentify stuff if they don't know it. AIs don't mention stuff at all if they don't know it.

    Besides, AIs can only generate generic image descriptions. They don't know the context. They describe stuff that doesn't matter for anyone. They completely omit stuff that does matter because they don't know that it matters. Only you yourself can individually tailor image descriptions to the context of the post.

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
  3. @Jakob Rosin To be honest, what I had in mind wasn't screenshots of text although describing screenshots of foreign-language text can be tricky itself.

    Here are some snippets from my first long image description. It's outdated in a way, but it provides good examples. And this image description did go into the message text (with an additional, shorter description in the alt-text).

    On the ramp to the teleporter, there is a black sign that reads, "Wenn Durchgehen nicht klappt, Klicken Sie das Bild zum Teleportieren. When Walk-Through does not work, Click the Image to teleport."


    The column between the passageways in the background to the left carries a black sign with group joiners for the Metropolis Newsnet group. The sign has the octagonal red Metropolis logo with a white M in the middle and a white edge around it in the top left corner. To the right of the logo, it is labelled in white, "Metropolis Newsnet Gruppe" which is partly German and translates to "Metropolis Newsnet Group". The writing below reads, "Aktuelle Informationen um Metropolis" and "Ankündigungen, Infos, Events, Fragen und Antworten im Chat" which is mostly German and translates to "Announcements, infos, events, questions and answers in the chat". The small neon green writing at the bottom edge reads, "Klick hier und folge dem Link im allgemeinen Chat, um der Gruppe beizutreten. Im Gruppenfenster JOIN klicken.(Click here to join the Metropolis Newsnet group." The German part of this translates to, "Click here and follow the link in the general chat to join the group. In the group window, click JOIN." Right below the black sign are three clickable white panels with black writings on them, "deutsch", "français" and "english".

    To my best knowledge, there's no way a screen reader can switch from English to German, to English, to German, to English within one sentence. Or from English to German, to French, back to English, again, within one sentence.

    Or how about these two sentences from another, even longer image description?
    At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source".

    The screen reader would have to switch from English to Latin, back to English, mid-sentence, not to mention that the screen reader would have to know how to properly pronounce a dead language.

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #ForeignLanguage
  4. CW: Account getting away with way subpar alt-texts only because it's too niche with too few followers; CW: long (over 1,700 characters), Fediverse meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta
    I've just discovered a certain Mastodon account that seems to automatically post images of Second Life avatars. It can be lucky to only have eight followers, one of them being a search engine, the others being Second Life users.

    If it had more follower, it would certainly already have met the wrath of the wider Mastodon community, especially the Mastodon HOA, for breaking Mastodon's unwritten rules.

    And I'm not even talking about nigh-nudity in some of the images with no warning, no image flagging, no hashtag. I'm talking about the alt-texts that are vastly below Mastodon's requirements and quality standards for alt-texts.

    Granted, all things considered, the requirements for good image descriptions by Mastodon's standards have to be extremely hard and tedious to meet, at least by my personal estimations. In fact, they have to be impossible to meet on Mastodon itself due to its tiny character limit, and if this account was somewhere where it could meet these requirements, it'd probably be blocked by loads of Mastodon accounts for its excessively long posts due to the long image descriptions.

    But if more Mastodon users knew it right now, it'd probably be blocked by many more Mastodon accounts than follow it.

    If you post from virtual worlds into the Fediverse, you simply cannot win in the long run. You'll lose either way.

    #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorld #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Mastodon #MastodonHOA #MastodonCulture
  5. @bufalo1973 @Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸 Unlike what's being falsely taught on Mastodon, alt-text is meant to be a drop-in replacement for the image. It is only for a visual description of the image. It is not meant to be informative.

    In general, explanations and other additional information that aren't immediately available in the image to sighted people do not belong into the alt-text.

    That's because the assumption that everyone can access alt-text is just as false as the assumption that everyone can see the image.

    Just like not everyone has two working eyes, not everyone has two working hands which are a hard requirement for opening an alt-text unless they use a screen reader.

    Any additional information must always go into the message text.

    CC: @<10%

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta
  6. @Robert Kingett I've read somewhere that some blind people prefer LLM-generated image descriptions to human-written image descriptions because they're more entertaining. LLM-generated image descriptions often add some whimsy whereas human-written image descriptions just dryly rattle down what's in the image. Basically, through the screen reader, humans sound more like machines than actual machines.

    They usually are aware that LLMs tend to be hallucinating and essentially telling them non-sense. But I've read from one blind user that they don't care whether or not the LLM-generated description is accurate as long as the accuracy isn't a matter of life and death.

    In a certain way, it is understandable. The only people who'd criticise an image description for being inaccurate are fully sighted and therefore capable of comparing the image with its description.

    Blind people won't notice unless the image description describes something so outlandish to them that they have the impression of an utterly surrealist image where there shouldn't be a surrealist image.

    On the other hand, there are also blind people who demand image descriptions be accurate. They simply don't want to be told non-sense, especially not without knowing that they're being told non-sense.

    But even on the sighted side, there's the "human versus AI" debate.

    Some sighted people are fully convinced that LLMs can describe absolutely every image perfectly in absolutely every situation, no matter how obscure the contents of the image are. They're fully convinced that a generic LLM like ChatGPT can write circles around even human experts at any given time.

    Some are simply AI fanbois or fangurls. Others say so in order to convince themselves that what they're doing is the best way: They use image-describing LLMs or even general-purpose LLMs as fire-and-forget tools. They have image descriptions generated, they copy-paste these image descriptions into the alt-texts, they send their posts, and they never take a look at these image descriptions at any point in the process. It's more convenient this way.

    And then they wonder why they're under attack from sighted alt-text activists who call them out for their painfully inaccurate and blatantly obvious AI slop.

    LLM proponents, both sighted and non-sighted, have in common that they never compare the image and the description. Non-sighted LLM proponents simply can't see the image. Sighted LLM proponents put so much faith into LLMs that they can't be bothered to read the description and cross-check it with the image.

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLM #LLMs #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI
  7. @TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

    Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

    For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

    There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

    The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

    Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

    Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:
    • Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
      Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
    • Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
      I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
    • Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
      Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
      So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
    • Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
      One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
      Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
    • On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
      On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
    • Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
      Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
    • Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
      Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
      Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
    • Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
      Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

    Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

    Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

    I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

    CC: @Jan Wildeboer

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse
  8. @Tor Iver Wilhelmsen For starters, making it a hard technical requirement on the server side would exclude and discriminate against
    • actually blind or visually-impaired people who do post images regardless
    • neurodivergent people who, due to their disability, are incapable of turning images into words

    Besides, what's "the platform"? Only Mastodon or the whole Fediverse?

    Just in case you didn't know: The Fediverse server applications that can send posts with images and other media onto your timeline include, but aren't limited to:
    • Mastodon
    • Glitch
    • Hometown
    • Pleroma
    • Akkoma
    • Misskey
    • Calckey
    • Firefish
    • Iceshrimp-JS
    • Iceshrimp.NET
    • CherryPick
    • Sharkey
    • Meisskey
    • GoToSocial
    • snac
    • Hollo
    • Tootik
    • Mitra
    • micro.blog
    • Smithereen
    • Socialhome
    • Friendica
    • Hubzilla (that's what this comment came from)
    • (streams)
    • Forte
    • Pixelfed
    • Vernissage
    • PeerTube
    • Loops
    • Plume
    • WriteFreely (needs an external image host, but still)
    • WordPress
    • Ghost
    • nodeBB
    • Lemmy
    • /kbin
    • Mbin
    • PieFed

    If "the platform" means something with one development team, it's only Mastodon. And everything else I've listed above, and then some, is free to keep alt-text optional.

    If "the platform" means the whole Fediverse, this means that well over 100 Fediverse server applications, all being developed independently from another and especially from Mastodon, often working vastly differently from Mastodon, would have to make it impossible to post images without alt-text. This, by the way, is next to impossible to implement on at least some of them due to the way they handle images and therefore alt-text.

    And you can be certain about one thing: If the Mastodon developers add something to Mastodon, it's very unlikely that Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, the Hubzilla developers, and Mike Macgirvin, inventor of Friendica and Hubzilla and still developer of (streams) and Forte, will follow suit. Other server applications won't because they're dead in spite of still having running servers (Calckey, Firefish, /kbin etc.), they're in maintenance mode which means they won't get new features (Iceshrimp-JS), or their development is on hold (Plume).

    CC: @Dgar

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence
  9. @Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦 This would require three things, however.

    One, any Fediverse server software would have to be capable of altering comments from any Fediverse software. Don't think that posts, comments etc. aren't formatted the same everywhere. They aren't.

    For example, Mastodon would have to know and understand that it would have to remove @⁠[email protected] from Misskey, Sharkey, CherryPick, Iceshrimp etc. notes, @[url⁠=https://mas.to/users/osma]Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦[/url] from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte comments and an invisible shadow mention from (streams) and Forte comments, too.

    Two, anyone in the Fediverse would have to always have full and unlimited permission to alter everyone else's content without their consent. This is particularly crucial in the cases of Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte with their highly advanced and fine-grained permissions systems that don't even cover having your content altered by others.

    Three, edits on any Fediverse software must always be federated to absolutely everywhere and anywhere in the Fediverse, no exceptions, regardless of software. AFAIK, there is Fediverse server software that still doesn't understand edits at all, and that will either ignore received edits or understand them as and treat them like new posts.

    It's very similar to the wish for being able to edit alt-texts into other people's posts which seems to pretty much always come from people who think that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, or at least that everything in the Fediverse is like Mastodon plus one or two extra features.

    And let's be honest: If you give especially Mastodon users the ability to alter other people's posts, they will want to alter other people's posts in lots of other ways. Like, delete summaries on Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte posts because they're "abuse of the CW field" from a "Fediverse = Mastodon" point of view. Remove all hashtags but four, regardless of these hashtags triggering the automated, individual, reader-side content warnings that have existed in the Friendica family since five and a half years before Mastodon was first published. Cutting "long posts" (= everything over 500 characters) down to a maximum of 500 characters because "the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko for only microblogging". Even removing any and all mentions of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Removing text formatting because "it has no place in a Twitter alternative". Or removing all contents from posts or comments altogether.

    Of course, the very same Mastodon users will completely flip their shit if a Friendica user comes and copies their 20-post threads into one long post, deletes the contents of the 19 follow-ups afterwards and replaces the content warning in the abstract field (= their CW field) with an actual abstract, just to fit it into a Fediverse culture that's way older than Mastodon itself.

    #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Misskey #Sharkey #CherryPick #Iceshrimp #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Mention #Mentions #MentionTag #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Permission #Permissions
  10. Are you referring to my mentions being @Erik :heart_agender: and @Roknrol rather than what you're used to, namely @⁠bright_helpings and @⁠roknrol? Using the long name rather than the short name and keeping the @ outside the link rather than making it part of the link? Likewise, the # being outside the hashtag link rather than being part of it?

    This is because I'm not on Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been. So this is not a toot.

    No, really. This is what I post from: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland, https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/profile/jupiter_rowland. I ask you: Does this look like Mastodon? Have you ever seen Mastodon look like this?

    Where I am, this style of mentions and hashtags is hard-coded. And it has been since long before Mastodon was even an idea.

    I'm on something named Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon at all.

    It is its very own project, fully independent from Mastodon (https://hubzilla.org, https://framagit.org/hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla).

    Hubzilla has not intruded into "the Mastodon Fediverse" either. The Fediverse is older than Mastodon. And Hubzilla was there before Mastodon.

    Hubzilla was launched by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in March, 2015, eight months before Mastodon, by renaming and redesigning his own Red Matrix from 2012, almost four years before Mastodon. And the Red Matrix was a fork of a fork of his own Friendica, which was launched on July 2nd, 2010, 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon. (https://en.wikipedia.org/Friendica, https://friendi.ca, https://github.com/friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica)

    Friendica was there before Mastodon, too.

    Here's the official Friendica/Hubzilla timeline on Hubzilla's official website to show you that I'm not making anything up: https://hubzilla.org/page/info/timeline. Scroll all the way down and notice all the features that you may right now know for a fact that the Fediverse doesn't have, but that Friendica has introduced to the Fediverse 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.

    Again, Mastodon has never been its own network. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. When Mastodon was launched in January, 2016, it immediately federated with

    Friendica has been formatting mentions and hashtags the way I just did for 15 years now. When Mastodon was launched, Friendica has been formatting them that way for five and a half years already, and Hubzilla has done so for ten months. It is hard-coded there. It is not a user option.

    That's because not everything in the Fediverse is a Twitter clone or Twitter alternative. [b]Friendica was designed as a Facebook alternative with full-blown long-form blogging capability. And Hubzilla adds even more stuff to this. This is why Friendica and Hubzilla don't mimic Twitter.

    Another shocking fact: As you can clearly see here, Friendica and Hubzilla don't have Mastodon's 500-character limit. Friendica's character limit is 200,000. Hubzilla's character limit is 16,777,215, the maximum length of the database field. And it's deeply engrained in their culture, which is many years older than Mastodon's culture, to not worry about the length of a post exceeding 500 characters.

    One more shocking fact: Friendica has had quote-posts since its very beginning. So has Hubzilla. Both have always been able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot, and they will forever remain able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot. And Mastodon will never be able to do anything against it. (By the way: In 15 years of Friendica, nobody has ever used quote-posts for dogpiling or harassment purposes. Neither Friendica nor Hubzilla is Twitter.)

    You find this disturbing? You think none of this should exist in the Fediverse, even though all this has been in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon?

    Then go ahead and block all instances of Friendica and Hubzilla as well as all instances of Mike's later creations, (streams) (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams) from 2021 and Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) from 2024.

    Or you could go ask @Seirdy / DM me the word "bread" and @Garden Fence Blocklist as well as @Mad Villain of @The Bad Space to add every last instance on any of these lists to their blocklists for being "rampantly and unabashedly ableist and xenophobic by design" due to not being and acting and working like Mastodon and just as rampantly and unabashedly refusing to fully adopt and adapt to the Mastodon-centric "Fediverse culture" as defined by fresh Twitter refugees on Mastodon in mid-2022 as well as refusing to abandon their own culture which is disturbingly incompatible with Mastodon's. Essentially try and have four entire Fediverse server applications Fediblocked once and for all because they're so disturbing from a "Fediverse equals Mastodon" point of view.

    Or you could go to Mastodon's GitHub repository (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon), submit a feature request for defederating Mastodon from everything that isn't Mastodon by design and then go lobbying for support for your feature request.

    As for why I have so many hashtags below my comments, here is what they mean. Many of them are meant to trigger filters, including such that automatically hide posts behind content warning buttons, a feature that Mastodon has had since October, 2022, that Friendica has had since July, 2010, and that Hubzilla has had since March, 2015.

    • #Long, #LongPost = This post is over 500 characters long. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
    • #CWLong, #CWLongPost = CW: long post (over 500 characters long). Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
    • #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta = This post talks about the Fediverse. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
    • #CWFediMeta, #CWFediverseMeta = CW: Fediverse meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
    • #NotOnlyMastodon, #FediverseIsNotMastodon, #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse: This post talks about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. Create a filter for either or multiple or all of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. Otherwise, click or tap any of these hashtags to read more about it in your Fediverse app.
    • #Friendica: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Friendica. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
    • #Hubzilla: This post talks about the Swiss army knif of the Fediverse named Hubzilla. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Hubzilla. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
    • #Streams, #(streams): This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse commonly referred to as (streams). Create a filter for either or both of them if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap either of them to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
    • #Forte: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Forte. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Forte. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
    • #AltText = This post talks about alt-text and/or contains an image with alt-text. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
    • #AltTextMeta = This post talks about alt-text. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
    • #CWAltTextMeta = CW: alt-text meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
    • #ImageDescription = This post talks about image descriptions and/or contains an image with an image description. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
    • #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta = This post talks about image descriptions. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
    • #CWImageDescriptionMeta = CW: image description meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
    • #Hashtag, #Hashtags, #HashtagMeta = This post talks about hashtags. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
    • #CWHashtagMeta = CW: hashtag meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
    • #CharacterLimit, #CharacterLimits = This post is talking about character limits. It is primarily meant for post discovery. But if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about character limits, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
    • #QuotePost, #QuoteTweet, #QuoteToot, #QuoteBoost = This post talks about quote-posts and/or contains a quote-post. If this disturbs you, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
    • #QuotePosts, #QuoteTweets, #QuoteToots, #QuoteBoosts, #QuotedShares = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
    • #QuotePostDebate, #QuoteTootDebate = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
    • #FediblockMeta = This post is talking about fediblocks. It is primarily meant for post discovery.

    Lastly: Having all hashtags in one line at the very end of a post that only contains hashtags is the preferred way in the Fediverse. For one, hashtags in their own line at the end of the post irritate screen reader users much less than hashtags in the middle of the text. It's actually hashtags in the middle of the text that are ableist. Besides, Mastodon is explicitly designed to have a separate hashtag line at the end of the post.