#cwcharacterlimitmeta — Public Fediverse posts

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

More and more Mastodon users are acting like alt-texts for profile images are becoming mandatory Fediverse-wide. Never mind that they're currently being rolled out by and by and only on Mastodon even.

Here on Hubzilla, they aren't even a thought, also because Hubzilla doesn't know the concept of images having their own dedicated alt-text database field. (Before you ask: Hubzilla handles images and therefore alt-texts in messages vastly differently from Mastodon to begin with.)

At the same time, more and more Mastodon users are acting like image descriptions for the images in the link previews that are generated automatically in Mastodon timelines are becoming mandatory Fediverse-wide. Never mind that Mastodon itself has barely got enough character capacity to describe these preview images at the high level of detail that so many Mastodon users love, what with its meagre default character limit of 500.

Also, never mind that you'll have to edit your post to describe the preview image because it only appears after you've tooted your toot, so you can't see it before you toot your toot.

Also, never mind that everyone outside Hubzilla will get an image description for an image that's entirely absent because they don't have Mastodon-style link previews, because these link previews are a Mastodon-only thing.

Again, this is even worse here on Hubzilla. Unlike Mastodon, Hubzilla has a preview button that lets you look at your message before you actually send it. But Hubzilla doesn't generate link previews. And Hubzilla's preview button doesn't offer you the option to show you what your message will look like on Mastodon.

So I'd have to

• write and send my message as usual
• switch to a tab with mastodon.social
• look for my message by using the hashtag search
• check whether Mastodon has generated a link preview, and if so, which image it has chosen
• find a copy of the image with the highest resolution possible;
  alternatively, if it's an in-world image from OpenSim, log into OpenSim, travel to that place and take a close look at the place to write a highly detailed image description (takes from five hours to two days)
• switch back to my Hubzilla tab
• edit my message
• add the image description
• re-count the characters in the message
• edit the message
• add a long post content warning with the current character count if there is none, and it isn't a comment; edit the character count of the existing long post content warning if there already is one
• save the edit
• discover that Mastodon hasn't recognised my edit as such, and now there are two copies of the same message on Mastodon, the old one without the image description and the new, longer one with the image description

All just to describe an image that isn't even there for my fellow Hubzilla users. Nor is it there for my contacts on Friendica, (streams), Forte, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, Pleroma, Akkoma, snac2, GoToSocial, Hollo, Socialhome, Mitra, PieFed, Wafrn etc.

By the way, if a message comes from something else than Mastodon, and there's no actual link in it, Mastodon often creates a link preview for the profile or channel page of whoever has sent the message and picks their profile photo as the image for the link preview. Essentially, I'd have to reliably know when Mastodon does that, write two image descriptions for my profile photo (it's a rendering from OpenSim, and I always describe these twice; besides, people should have a shorter description next to my usual detailed description) and copy-paste both into each post for which Mastodon will generate a link preview for my channel page.

Fortunately, Mastodon doesn't show Hubzilla profiles or channels like Hubzilla itself shows them, and neither do Mastodon apps. Otherwise, if Mastodon users figure out that the background image of my channel is part of my channel customisation and not a default Hubzilla Web UI element, they may demand I add an alt-text for the background image, lest I be mass-blocked as an ableist.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

Image descriptions are important in the Fediverse, at least if your posts have a chance to reach Mastodon. But is it only about having image descriptions in general? Is it only about having image descriptions at all? Or is it about image description quality as well?

Blind or visually-impaired users say that anything is better than nothing. But seriously, the image file name as the alt-text is useless. So is a copy of the post text as the alt-text; at least one mobile app for Mastodon seems to do that automatically. So is some gibberish written into the alt-text, just so that there's some alt-text.

So you write a short image description for your alt-text. That should be much better than nothing.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description lacks detail.

Since you can't or don't want to write a longer description, you leave that to an AI.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description is obvious AI slop. The AI is inaccurate, it hallucinates, it misidentifies things and it still leaves out details.

Okay, so you sit down and put quite some time and effort into a hand-written image description that's both accurate and detailed. At least you think so.

And still, someone may come and criticise and/or sanction you for having left out certain details.

If you don't fix your image description to their satisfaction, you're insulted as ableist and blocked very publicly so that as many other users as possible block you, too.

Now, minimum quality standards for image descriptions are evolving over time. What matters now didn't necessarily matter two years ago. Things that don't matter now may matter in two years or in five years. Even today, alt-text activists criticise image posts that are several years old for image descriptions that they consider less than optimal. This means the image descriptions that you write today must be good enough for as long as your image posts stay available. If they aren't, have fun going through all your old image posts, editing them and upgrading the image descriptions to the latest minimum requirements.

There's only way to be safe from Mastodon's alt-text police in the long run: First of all, you must educate yourself about all the rules and guidelines of alt-texts and image descriptions, and there are dozens of websites about these. You can't know beforehand which ones of these rules will be declared mandatory by someone from the alt-text police in the future, so you'd better follow them to a tee already now. Of course, when two rules contradict each other, you must know which one to follow.

Also, you must know that the requirements and quality standards for good alt-texts and image descriptions on Mastodon are different from the entire rest of the Web. What's good enough for the Web isn't necessarily good enough for Mastodon.

Lastly, you must know your audience. And normally, your audience can be anyone anywhere in the Fediverse or even on the Web. There are only very few places in the Fediverse where you can control who will be able to read your stuff, and Mastodon isn't one of them. You must know your audience, and you must at least be able to estimate what they know about the contents of your image, what they don't know and what they need to know. If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something is, explain it, but please do so in the post text and not in the alt-text! If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something looks like, but it may want to know, describe what it looks like.

As for my own images, my strategy is to write two image descriptions for each image. One is the short image description; it goes into the alt-text. I'm going to limit that to a maximum of 512 characters because Misskey and its forks delete alt-texts that are over 512 characters long. The other one is the long image description; it goes into the post text. The long image description is fully detailed, it contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions, and it contains transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not.

Posting memes is a bit easier. There is only one image description that's hopefully short enough to go into the alt-text. But I still need to explain a whole lot of things, and as I can't always rely upon links to websites like KnowYourMeme for explanations, I often have to write a whole lot of explanations into the post.

Ideally, the worst that could happen to me is being criticised for my alt-text exceeding 200 characters or my post exceeding 500 characters or being blocked for the latter. I reduce the chance for that to happen with a summary that includes a long post content warning with the rough length of the post and the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost that can be filtered. I almost always add hashtags for folks to filter.

But I hope that nobody can say I haven't tried hard enough.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

When you see it, you'll shit brix: The Hubzilla timeline.

The "it" that you're supposed to see is:

• The Fediverse did, in fact, not start with Mastodon.
  There was something in the Fediverse before Mastodon: Mistpark was there almost 6 years before Mastodon, Hubzilla was there 10 months before Mastodon.
  Mastodon came into an already existing Fediverse with servers and users and content and a culture.
  The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And it will never be.
• The Fediverse had quote-posts almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  (Accurate implication: The non-Mastodon Fediverse can quote-post any public Mastodon toot with no problems, and it has always been able to do so, for as long as Mastodon has been around.)
• The Fediverse had groups almost 6 years before Mastodon which still doesn't even support groups.
• The Fediverse had better lists than Mastodon lists almost 6 years before Mastodon.
• The Fediverse had reply control almost 6 years before Mastodon where people are still waiting for some kind of reply control.
• The Fediverse had permissions almost 6 years before Mastodon where the concept of permissions is completely unknown.

And if you've really paid attention:

• The Fediverse had no character limit to worry about almost 6 years before Mastodon came along with only 500 characters.
  The Fediverse had 16,777,215 characters almost 6 years before Mastodon had 500 characters.
• The Fediverse had full rich-text formatting almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  The Fediverse could generate bold type, italics, underline, code blocks, bullet-point lists etc. without any Unicode trickery. Almost 6 years before Mastodon was there. And more than 12 years before Mastodon could even only display that stuff.

Although it should be blatantly obvious: This here is not a Mastodon toot. This post comes from Hubzilla directly to your Mastodon apps.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mistpark #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseCulture #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Lists #ReplyControl #Permissions #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #TextFormatting #RichText #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

Just the other day, I found something out. Something very inconvenient about Misskey and maybe also the Forkeys.

It should be commonly known that Misskey has a local limit of 3,000 characters for posts (which it refers to as "notes"). What is not so well-known is that Misskey has a limit of about 8,000 characters, probably 8,192 or so, for inbound messages, ironically fewer than this post is long. Also, it has a limit of 512 characters for alt-text, both locally and in-bound.

Mastodon has a character limit for in-bound content, too, at least for Note-type objects (not for Article-type objects because it refuses to render them fully and links to the original instead). To my best knowledge, it rejects messages with over 100,000 characters. As for its 1,500-charater limit for alt-text, it enforces that by truncating alt-text that's longer.

Misskey, in contrast, truncates everything that exceeds its limits while still letting it in. If your post is longer than the inbound limit of ca. 8,000, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away. If your alt-text is longer than 512 characters, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away.

I don't know which Forkey behaves how in this regard, seeing as all Forkeys I know about have a configurable local post character limit that can be adjusted to well over 8,000. But even if the inbound limit is configurable, too, I don't think any *key admin cranks it over 60,000 or over 70,000 or over 100,000. It's simply unimaginable that someone, anyone, could ever post that much at once if your idea of the Fediverse is pure microblogging.

Also, I don't know what *key users do when they come across a truncated post or what blind or visually-impaired *key users do when they come across a truncated alt-text. Do they even suspect that it's a truncated copy of something that's longer at its source and then go check the source? Either way, it's very inconvenient.

It's especially inconvenient for me. My longest posts by a gigantic margin are image posts with original images. They always have a long image description block in the post itself that tends to be tens of thousands of characters long. It contains highly detailed visual descriptions of all images in the post. It contains all explanations necessary to understand the post, the images and the descriptions. It contains verbatim transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image that I can read, no matter whether or not my audience can.

In addition, each image has a shorter description in the alt-text, along with a bit that announces the long description, including where to find it. I even used to explain how to get to that description for Mastodon users for whom the summary and content warning hides the post text, but not the images, depending on which Mastodon version and frontend they use. This alone took up several hundred characters in the alt-text. All in all, I got to a point in which my alt-texts always ended up either at precisely 1,500 characters or just a few characters short.

I myself am not really bound to character limits. I used to post images here on Hubzilla where I have over 16.7 million characters for the post, including all alt-texts. Now I post them on (streams) where I have over 24 million characters. I could theoretically write alt-texts as long as I want to, seeing as, unlike on Mastodon, they aren't separate text fields; instead, they're being woven into the image-embedding markup code in the post text.

Still, I stick to a maximum of 1,500 characters for alt-text to keep Mastodon from truncating it. If you post images into the Fediverse, the main audience for your alt-text is on Mastodon, and most of them don't understand that there's something, anything, out there in the Fediverse that does not work exactly like Mastodon. And 1,500 characters can be tight already.

But if I have to stay within Misskey's limits, I can hardly post images anymore. At least not with appropriate descriptions and explanations.

Since late 2024, I have been working on-and-off on a series of fairly simple avatar portraits or rather their image descriptions. The idea is for the long description to consist of a preamble that starts with a general summary, followed by explanations, then followed by visual descriptions of what all images in the post have in common. Next come the individual descriptions of each image. Each post shall have three or four images with three or four portraits each, all in the same pose, all with only minor differences in outfits, all with a neutral, bright white background.

In addition, of course, each image shall have an alt-text, and none of the alt-texts shall depend on each other.

Now, the problem is that I have to describe three or four individual portraits in each alt-text. I'm actually struggling to squeeze such a description plus the note that announces the long description into 1,500 characters, especially if I want to fulfill Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica With Four Eyes' requirements for outfit descriptions to a tee in the alt-text as well (https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-for-casual-outfits/, https://veroniiiica.com/writing-image-descriptions-for-red-carpet-outfits/; see also https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/ and https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-create-visual-descriptions/).

But in 512 characters so that even Misskey users won't get a severely truncated version? This is absolutely impossible. Even if I limit the long description announcement to some 100 characters, even if I didn't walk people through how to get to the long description, I'd have fewer than 140 characters on average to describe each individual outfit.

The long description won't fare any better. Currently, the preamble starts with some 14,000 characters of explanations, most of which are necessary to understand the visual descriptions. But when Misskey goes and truncates the post at the 8,000-something mark, Misskey users won't even get to any visual description because all visual descriptions would be chopped off.

What makes matters worse is that the preamble grows the longer, the easier to understand I make it and the less I leave people with unexplained technical or jargon terms which you shouldn't use in image descriptions at all anyway. So the next time I go through it and rewrite it to make it easier to understand, I'll also make it even longer than it already is.

But what if I simply cut all the explanations? For one, I'd leave people to their own devices to understand extremely obscure niche content. They won't. My explanations aren't 14,000 characters long because I've artificially inflated them, but because there is so much to know before you understand the post and the images and the descriptions.

Besides, the visual descriptions alone won't fit into 8,192 characters either. What I currently have is over 5,000 characters of common visual description for all portraits in all images plus about 2,500 characters of individual visual description for the three portraits in the first image. That's over 7,500 characters altogether already. And I still have to describe nine portraits in another three images. The post will end up with some 15,000 characters of visual descriptions unless they grow longer when I simplify them again.

I guess users of Misskey or any Forkey will still have to put up with truncated alt-texts and truncated long descriptions in the future. But my future image posts will contain a paragraph at the beginning that explains that the post and/or the alt-text may be truncated on Misskey and the Forkeys, and that both are uncut at the source. Still, this means that *key users will have to put up with the extra hassle of opening my original post at a source with a quite cumbersome UI. And I've got my doubts that this UI is really accessible.

Unfortunately, this also means that *key users won't get any hashtags along with these posts. But then again, the handling of Identi.ca-style/Friendica-style hashtags with the number sign outside the link is broken on all *keys and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Sharkey #CherryPick #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #A11y #Accessibility