#cwfedimeta — Public Fediverse posts

@caohuak @silverpill Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.

The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.

Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.

NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.

And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.

No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.

The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.

In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.

Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.

Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.

Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.

But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on OpenSimulator from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.

It's every bit as decentralised as any Fediverse software out there. As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.

Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.

As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.

Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.

The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.

In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.

I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.

Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.

As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.

OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.

All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.

Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #VirtualWorlds #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #Decentraland #TheSandbox #Blockchain #Crypto #Cryptocurrency #Cryptocurrencies #NFT #NFTs #Cryptobros #Cryptomining #CryptoScam #CryptoCrash #NFTCrash

@Feli Sorry, aber das Verlinkte läßt sich nicht immer zwingend zu 100% anwenden und im Fediverse schon mal erst recht nicht.

100 Zeichen sind zum einen eine hoffnungslos veraltete Beschränkung. Zum anderen reichen sie bei so manch einem Bild bei weitem nicht aus, um alle Qualitätskriterien einer guten Bildbeschreibung zu erfüllen. Und glaube mir, ich habe schon genügend Artikel zum Thema Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen gelesen, daß ich weiß, wovon ich spreche. Insbesondere möchte ich hier verweisen auf die Artikel von Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica with Four Eyes (veroniiiica.com), die selbst sehbehindert ist.

Die Regel, daß Text in Bildern immer zu 100% originalidentisch transkribiert werden muß, kenne ich, und damit gehe ich weitgehend konform (bis darauf, daß Text, der im Original in Großbuchstaben geschrieben ist, nicht in Großbuchstaben transkribiert werden darf). Daran halte ich mich selbst, egal, wieviel Text auf meinen eigenen Bildern ist, und egal, ob er auf den Bildern, wie ich sie poste, lesbar ist oder nicht. Aber wie soll das garantiert immer in 100 Zeichen passen?

Aktuell arbeite ich seit etwa anderthalb Jahren (!) gelegentlich an den Bildbeschreibungen für eine Serie von Portraits eines digitalen Avatars in einer virtuellen 3-D-Welt; deshalb habe ich auch seit Sommer 2024 kein einziges gänzlich eigenes Bild mehr gepostet. Die Bilder haben schon einen neutralen weißen Hintergrund, damit ich den Hintergrund nicht beschreiben muß. Nun enthält aber jedes Bild drei oder vier leicht unterschiedliche Outfits. Und in den geplanten Posts mit diesen Bildern geht es um diese Outfits, d. h. die Outfits sind der Kontext.

Ich halte mich dabei an "How to create image descriptions for Red Carpet looks" von Veronica Lewis und bei Farben an die Cooper Hewitt Guidelines for Image Description vom Smithsonian Design Museum. Das heißt, das können keine superkurzen Beschreibungen werden wie z. B. bei Katzenfotos.

Die Bilder sollen sogar wie alle meine eigenen Bilder jeweils zweimal beschrieben werden: Jedes Bild bekommt eine vergleichsweise kurze Beschreibung im Alt-Text. Zusätzlich wird jeder Post einen Block enthalten mit langen, detaillierten Bildbeschreibungen inklusive allen Erklärungen, die nötig sind, um die Bilder und die Beschreibungen zu verstehen. Dieser Block wird wahrscheinlich in jedem Bilderpost jeweils länger als 20.000 Zeichen ausfallen. Das ist notwendig, weil Bilder aus virtuellen Welten im Fediverse zwingend hochdetaillierte Beschreibungen brauchen.

Trotzdem müssen natürlich auch die Beschreibungen in den Alt-Texten gewisse Mindestkriterien erfüllen. In 100 Zeichen oder weniger ist das schlicht und ergreifend unmöglich. Ich habe tatsächlich große Schwierigkeiten, die Alt-Texte auf maximal 1.500 Zeichen einzukürzen. Und nein, die sind nicht mit Füllworten aufgebläht. Ich kann sie nur weiter kürzen, indem ich gemäß den oben verlinkten Artikeln wichtige Informationen entferne.

Generell gelten im Fediverse bei Bildbeschreibungen und Alt-Texten andere Regeln als überall sonst. Das 100-Zeichen-Limit ist Bullshit. Das 125-Zeichen-Limit ist Bullshit. Das 200-Zeichen-Limit ist Bullshit. Aus technischen Gründen übrigens auch. Das einzige Limit, das gilt, ist Mastodons 1.500-Zeichen-Limit. Solange Bildbeschreibungen nicht künstlich aufgebläht sind mit Füllworten, persönlichen Wertungen etc., ist alles innerhalb dieser 1.500 Zeichen erlaubt.

Dazu gilt: Wenn jemand dich darum bittet, ein Detail auf deinem Bild genauer zu beschreiben, dann ist deine Bildbeschreibung ungenügend. Auch wenn jemand dich um Erklärungen bittet, ist das zurückzuführen auf Nachlässigkeit deinerseits (wobei allerdings Erklärungen in den Post-Text gehören und nicht in den Alt-Text). Nach Details oder Erklärungen zu fragen, ist fast so schlimm, wie überhaupt um Alt-Text bitten zu müssen.

Wenn du konsequent immer mit Alt-Texten kommst, die nie die 100 Zeichen überschreiten, dann riskierst du, daß dir jemand von Mastodons Alt-Text-Polizei deine Alt-Texte als unzureichend um die Ohren haut und dich als faul und ableistisch abstempelt. Wenn du dagegen Bilder mit 1.000 Zeichen und mehr beschreibst, besteht die Chance, daß du in der @Alt Text Hall of Fame landest.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #Ableismus #AbleismusMeta #CWAbleismusMeta #AltTextPolizei #AltTextHallOfFame

@crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts Bonfire ist Hubzilla bei Wish bestellt.

Entweder ist Bonfire der schlechte Versuch, das Hubzilla-Rad neu zu erfinden, und zwar von Leuten, die gar nicht wußten, daß so etwas schon existiert, und zwar in gut. Guck dir die ganzen Leute an, die über Bonfire jubeln. Soweit ich das gesehen habe, sind das alles nur Mastodon-Nutzer. Und mindestens 75% aller Mastodon-Nutzer haben von Hubzillas Existenz noch nie gehört, geschweige denn davon, was Hubzilla kann.

Oder Bonfire ist der schlechte Versuch, in direkte Konkurrenz zu Friendica, Hubzilla und den Rest der Familie zu gehen, mit viel Blabla statt vernünftig funktionierender Software und mit den vielen Mastodon-Nutzern als Zielgruppe, die noch nie von Hubzilla gehört haben und auch Friendica nicht aus der Nähe kennen.

Praktisch alles, was Bonfire vollmundig verspricht und nach @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂s Erfahrungen immer noch nicht geliefert hat, hat Hubzilla schon vor gut zehn Jahren tatsächlich geliefert. Und wenn nicht vor gut zehn Jahren, dann im Laufe dieser zehn Jahre.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Bonfire #Friendica #Hubzilla #BeiWishBestellt #AufWishBestellt

Ich sag's ja: Bonfire ist Hubzilla bei Wish bestellt. Und Solid auch.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Bonfire #Solid #BeiWishBestellt #AufWishBestellt

@Justin Derrick The question, however, is: What is "high-quality"? How is it defined?

Would the bot go by the definition valid for commercial/scientific/technological websites and blogs, i.e. ideally no more than 125 characters, and only a short and concise visual description with no further information?

Or would the bot go by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's standards, i.e. the longer and more detailed, the better, any and all extra information is welcome in alt-text (because it doesn't fit into the toot), and the limit is 1,500 characters?

That is, if it were for me, the bot would go look both for alt-texts and for image descriptions in the post text body and judge both. Because I do both at the same time for my original images. An extremely detailed long image description in the post itself (character limit for post and alt-texts combined here: over 16 million) that also comes with all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text in the image, plus an alt-text that's as detailed as 1,500 characters (minus notification about the long description in the post) allow, but with no explanations, and I usually have to leave out text transcripts as well because they're too many.

You may say the alt-text is superfluous if it's just a much shorter version of the long description. But as long as the Mastodon HOA demands there be an alt-text to every image, no matter what (especially seeing as I always hide my image posts behind summaries/content warnings, so you can't see right of the bat that there's a long image description in the post), I add alt-texts to my original images.

I'm actually curious about how the bot would judge my descriptions. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it notices that the bits of text in the image are not transcribed in the alt-text. Maybe it'd be irritated because I have headlines in my long image descriptions, because they're so long that they need two levels of headlines. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it goes strictly by WCAG, and a) the alt-texts exceed 200 characters, b) long image descriptions do not belong into the text body by any known official accessibility standards, and c) neither my alt-texts nor my long descriptions are limited to what's supposed to be important within the context of the post.

Anyway, in the meantime, you can follow the account @Alt Text Hall of Fame and the hashtag #AltTextHallOfFame.

CC: @Simon Brooke

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MastodonHOA #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Jeffrey D. Stark I don't know for certain what the majority want in general. And I don't know what they'd want in my very specific case.

I can only try and extrapolate what they might want from other Fediverse users' image descriptions and feedback on other Fediverse users' image descriptions, as little as there is.

The problem with this is that I don't post what everyone else posts. Not real-life photographs, not screenshots from social media etc., but renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. This means that there is next to nothing in my images that anyone is familiar with and that any blind or visually-impaired user has a rough idea what it looks like.

I've seen real-life photographs, sometimes literally focusing on one specific element in them with the whole background blurred out, that were described in over 800 characters. I've seen them be praised for their alt-texts. On the other hand, I've never seen a real-life photograph in the Fediverse be criticised for too much alt-text.

This, however, doesn't easily translate to virtual world renderings. Real-life photographs are much more familiar and much more likely to mostly contain things that people are more or less familiar with. And yet, people love it when they're described in 800 characters and more, all the way to replying with hashtags such as #AltTextAward or #AltTextAwards or #AltTextHallOfFame.

Logical conclusion: If there's more in the images that people aren't familiar with, I'll have to describe more than in these real-life photographs. And there is more in the images that people aren't familiar with.

Virtual world renderings are a largely unexplored edge-case. Only very few people in the Fediverse post these. I think only two describe them. And I'm the only one who really puts some thought into describing them instead of trying to get away with the bare minimum. This means that what I'm trying to do is a first. Nobody has done it before me. There's no prior experience with it.

Thus, I have to go with my own assumptions and conclusions based on a) observations on Mastodon and b) the differences in familiarity between real life and what I post about.

Three things are clear about my images.

First, if sighted people see it, they don't really know what it is, where it is etc.

Second, if non-sighted people come across the image, there is nothing in the image of which they know what it looks like due to having been told often enough what it looks like because they've never been told what anything in the image looks like. But they may want to know what it looks like. And it's their right to know what it looks like.

Third, this topic is such a small niche and so extremely obscure that if you don't know something, you can't just look it up on Wikipedia. You can't even Google it. Generally, the only source of information that could really help you with my pictures, that's me. I'm definitely the only way "to get the larger details and nuances".

And so there's much more in my images that needs to be described. And there's much more that needs to be explained, one of the reasons why I always describe my virtual world renderings twice.

This starts with the location, the place where an image was taken. There are cases in which it does matter where an image was taken. My virtual world renderings are such cases.

If a real-life location is shown in a photo, sighted people may recognise it because it's so famous. Otherwise and for non-sighted people, simple name-dropping is usually sufficient. There's hardly any place in real life that can't be sufficiently mentioned in under 50 characters.

I can't name-drop. It won't tell anyone anything because nobody would know the name I've dropped. If I want to tell people where an image is from, I'll first have to break it down and then explain it and explain the explanation and so forth. I can't tell anyone, sighted or not, where my images are from in under 1,000 characters. Not if I want them to understand it.

As for visual descriptions, the usual advice is to limit yourself to what's important within the context, describe only the one important element in detail and hint at everything else at most. But I don't always have that one important element. I may have about two dozen important elements. Or, more often, the post is about the whole image, the whole scenery, and everything in it is important just the same.

But even if something in the image is more important than something else, I still have to describe everything. I mean, we're talking about what amounts to glances into a whole new universe for 99.999% of all people out there. Sure, many will shrug it off.

Others, however, may be intrigued, curious even. After all, this is evidence that "the Metaverse" is, surprisingly, alive. It is not suggested in AI-generated pictures. It really exists. And it looks better than all of Zuckerberg's propaganda. These people don't care what matters in the image and what doesn't. They go on an exploration trip all across the whole image and take in all the details.

Blind or visually-impaired people can't do this. But they may want to do it. And they've got the right to do it, just like sighted people. So they should be given just the same opportunity to do it. Remember that I can't assume that they know what anything in the image looks like unless there's a real-life counterpart that looks very much the same.

Whenever there's something in one of my images that doesn't exist in real life, I have to assume that nobody knows anything about it. So not only do I need an extensive visual description, but I often also need an extensive explanation of this one item.

Finally, there's one more thing that takes up a lot of room: text transcripts. The rule is that if there is text within the borders of an image, it must be transcribed. I rarely even see the exception "unless it doesn't matter within the context". And, again, it tends to happen that everything in one of my images matters within the context because the context is the very image itself.

What this rule doesn't cover at all is text that is unreadable in the image as it is shown. There is no exception for this kind of text, nor is it explicitly included in this rule. It isn't handled at all. It has never even been thought of. Hence, I must assume that the rule applies to this kind of text just as well.

Before you say that I can't transcribe text that I can't read: I actually can. I don't transcribe text by looking at it in the image. I transcribe text by looking at it in-world. And all of a sudden, those six pixels in a row that are ever so slightly more greenish than the surrounding white are two lines of text. That blot, four pixels wide, three pixels high, is actually a sign with a 1024x768-pixel texture and text that's perfectly legible. That tree trunk in front of that sign? In-world, I can look behind it.

If I can transcribe all this text, and nothing says I must not do so, I assume I must do so. And so I may end up with several dozen transcripts of more or less text which, including their respective contexts in the image description, take up more characters than fit into a Mastodon alt-text. If this is the case, then the text transcripts must go into the long description in the post rather than the short description in the alt-text.

This is not by user request. This is an accessibility rule that I follow.

Now you may say that I don't have to deliver such an enormous infodump at once on a silver platter, whether people want it or not. You may say that they could always ask if they want something more.

But seriously, this is about accessibility. And if people have to ask and then wait for assistance, it isn't accessible. They could just as well ask for the whole image description, and if they don't, I don't have ot write it. It wouldn't make much of a difference.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #A11y #Accessibility

@Greg In such a way that everyone gets what's in the picture? Without ever Googling or asking me anything?

Then go ahead and give me a good, informative image description of no more than 200 characters that's up there with the best of the best on Mastodon and potential @Alt Text Hall of Fame material. One that won't leave any blind user asking, "Yeah, that's fine and dandy, but what does it look like?!"

Without reading my long description or my alt-text first, that is.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextHallOfFame