#cwimagedescriptionmeta — Public Fediverse posts

@Daniel de Kay The biggest cultural difference based on server software has to be between Mastodon on the one hand and the Mike Macgirvin creations Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other hand.

Not only do they have vastly different user bases, but they developed independently from one another. When the Mastodon culture developed, those who shaped it didn't even know the other side, so they couldn't adopt any of its culture.

Said other side's culture dates back to 2010 when Friendica was launched as Mistpark, and since that was almost six years before Mastodon, it couldn't be inspired by Mastodon's culture either.

Add to that that these respective cultures are greatly shaped by technical features and limitations or the lack thereof.

Mastodon's culture is largely built around its 500-character limit which is ample for your typical phone-wielding Mastodon user. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined character limit whatsoever, and its target audience is largely on desktop or laptop computers, often running Linux, with large screens and full-size hardware keyboards.

So it's the most normal thing in the world for them to write in one post as much as they want while Mastodon users debate whether threads are good, or you should always limit yourself to 500 characters or less.

Also, alt-text. Mastodon has many disabled users, including blind or visually-impaired users. And it has a dedicated alt-text field for each image. On top of that, it offers 1,500 characters for each alt-text which, in connection with the 500-character limit for toots, has people write detailed image descriptions and explanations and put them into the alt-text. That's often information that doesn't even belong in alt-text, but there's no room for it elsewhere.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have unlimited room, so putting stuff into alt-text because the post text is too limited seems ridiculous. But they don't have a vocal disabled community, so there's little interest in accessibility. And neither of them has a dedicated alt-text field. Alt-text is supported, but it has to be manually grafted into the image-embedding code in the post. And there's no official documentation for that, I think not even for Friendica which is the only one out of the three with actually useful end-user documentation.

It's similar with content warnings. On Mastodon, they're put into the repurposed summary field, and next to nobody knows that it's a repurposed summary field rather than invented for content warnings from scratch. So since Mastodon has a content warning field, writer-side content warnings are huge, but also cause for drama.

Mastodon 4.0 has introduced filters that can create reader-side content warnings, but hardly anyone uses them, even fewer people support them with keywords or hashtags, many don't even know this feature exists, and it's generally ignored because it's un-Mastodon.

The Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) complex doesn't have a content warning field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a summary field labelled as such. Friendica doesn't even have that; it uses a pair of BBcode tags for that.

And within their own ecosystem, they don't even need it. They've got the "NSFW app" instead, an over-one-decade-old, optional, simple-as-anything substring filter that automatically hides entire posts with all media and everything behind content warnings if it finds one of the entered keywords or hashtags.

So they can't understand Mastodon's commotion about content warnings, and Mastodon users can't understand why they don't add Mastodon-style content warnings.

And then there are all the things that were or are being debated on Mastodon and whether or not it should introduce them. Especially the second-wave Twitter refugees are often staunchly against them.

Full-text search and quote-tweets are being actively used on Twitter to track down and harass members of minorities who have fled to Mastodon. Of course, they don't want Mastodon to introduce either. That is, in the case of full-text search, Mastodon has found a solution, but one that doesn't really federate to the rest of the Fediverse.

Quotes and text formatting are seen as bad, too. Many don't know quotes because Twitter doesn't have them, and so they think quotes could be used as tools of harassment. And both are seen as making Mastodon feel less like Mastodon and more complicated.

Friendica and Hubzilla had all this before there was Mastodon, and (streams) inherited it from its long line of ancestors. Their users have gotten so used to having all this that they don't understand what the problems should be, also because they're so detached from Mastodon's culture. So they keep on using these features unashamedly, even around Mastodon users.

Some differences are rather simple. Take mentions, for example. Friendica has always used long names for mentions, as does its offspring. Mastodon users may find that freaky. Meanwhile, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) users may find Mastodon's mentions cryptic because they use the short name. But even they matter.

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