#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