#cwmeta — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cwmeta, aggregated by home.social.
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@Truth & Answers Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.
There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.
I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right?) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right?).
But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is 𝕏. Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than 𝕏.
Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.
By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.
In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like 𝕏 is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.
Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.
No.
Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave 𝕏 or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other 𝕏 alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)
All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.
I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.
It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.
They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.
They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!
If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.
They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.
There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).
And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.
First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not 𝕏/Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.
Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
Where are the contact suggestions? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them?
Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these? Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).
Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions? How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do? Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.
Where are groups? Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.
Where are all these things? In the Fediverse, no less? Where are they?
I'll tell you where they are.
Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.
The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.
Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.
He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.
Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then; now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.
He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.
Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.
Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.
One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go; this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.
Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.
I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.
And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.
Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) in 2012.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.
Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.
Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server; the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.
If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.
I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.
As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.
If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.
You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.
You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.
You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.
You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.
If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.
Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.
Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.
Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.
If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #NomadicIdentity #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@Truth & Answers Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.
There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.
I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right?) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right?).
But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is 𝕏. Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than 𝕏.
Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.
By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.
In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like 𝕏 is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.
Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.
No.
Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave 𝕏 or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other 𝕏 alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)
All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.
I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.
It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.
They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.
They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!
If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.
They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.
There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).
And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.
First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not 𝕏/Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.
Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
Where are the contact suggestions? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them?
Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these? Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).
Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions? How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do? Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.
Where are groups? Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.
Where are all these things? In the Fediverse, no less? Where are they?
I'll tell you where they are.
Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.
The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.
Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.
He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.
Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then; now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.
He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.
Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.
Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.
One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go; this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.
Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.
I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.
And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.
Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) in 2012.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.
Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.
Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server; the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.
If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.
I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.
As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.
If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.
You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.
You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.
You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.
You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.
If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.
Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.
Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.
Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.
If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #NomadicIdentity #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.
This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.
Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.The Mastodon side
One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.
Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.
My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.
It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.
So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.
They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.
And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".
Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.
That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.
And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).
The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.The non-Mastodon side
The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.
To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.
From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.
A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.
Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.
Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.
Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.
Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.
Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.
Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.
Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.
Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.
Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").
Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.
Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.The conflict
It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.
Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.
Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.
They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).
They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).
They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.
They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)
They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)
And so forth.
These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.
Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.
So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.
Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.
Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.
Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.
Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.
And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.
How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!
By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.
Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.
Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.
Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.
Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.
And so forth.
It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.
I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.Countermeasures
Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.
On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.
Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.
Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.
Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.
(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.
Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.
I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.
And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.
This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.
Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.The Mastodon side
One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.
Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.
My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.
It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.
So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.
They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.
And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".
Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.
That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.
And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).
The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.The non-Mastodon side
The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.
To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.
From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.
A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.
Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.
Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.
Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.
Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.
Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.
Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.
Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.
Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.
Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").
Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.
Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.The conflict
It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.
Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.
Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.
They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).
They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).
They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.
They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)
They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)
And so forth.
These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.
Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.
So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.
Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.
Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.
Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.
Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.
And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.
How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!
By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.
Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.
Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.
Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.
Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.
And so forth.
It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.
I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.Countermeasures
Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.
On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.
Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.
Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.
Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.
(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.
Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.
I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.
And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@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 - Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
-
@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 - Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
-
@Phantasm
One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.
And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.
Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.
Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.
Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.
At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.
I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.
They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.
For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.
(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)
Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.
CC: @Pawlicker
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture -
@Phantasm
One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.
And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.
Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.
Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.
Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.
At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.
I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.
They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.
For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.
(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)
Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.
CC: @Pawlicker
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture -
CW: Gute Bildbeschreibungen bringen einen sehr viel größeren Aufwand mit sich, als ihr vielleicht glaubt; CW: lang (über 6.000 Zeichen), Fediverse-Meta, Fediverse-über-Mastodon-hinaus-Meta, Zeichenlimit-Meta, Inhaltswarnungen-Meta/Content-Warning-Meta, Hashtag-Meta, Alt-Text-Meta, Bildbeschreibungen-Meta, KI erwähnt (KI-)
(Ausnahmsweise auch mal auf Deutsch. Die englische Version ist hier.)
Bildbeschreibungen sind wichtig im Fediverse, zumindest wenn eure Posts möglicherweise auf Mastodon landen werden. Aber geht es nur um Bildbeschreibungen ganz allgemein? Geht es nur darum, überhaupt Bildbeschreibungen zu haben? Oder geht es auch um die Qualität der Bildbeschreibungen?
Blinde oder sehbehinderte Nutzer sagen, daß alles besser ist als nichts. Aber seien wir mal ehrlich, der Dateiname der Bilddatei als Alt-Text ist nutzlos. Eine Kopie des Post-Texts im Alt-Text auch; mindestens eine Handy-App für Mastodon macht das scheinbar automatisch. Irgendwelcher Kauderwelsch, der in den Alt-Text reingeschrieben wird, damit da irgendein Alt-Text steht, ist auch nutzlos.
Also schreibt ihr eine kurze Bildbeschreibung für euren Alt-Text. Das sollte viel besser sein als nichts.
Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung nicht detailliert genug ist.
Weil ihr eine längere Bildbeschreibung nicht schreiben könnt oder wollt, überlaßt ihr das einer KI.
Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung offensichtlicher KI-Slop ist. Die KI ist ungenau, sie halluziniert, sie identifizert Sachen falsch, und sie läßt immer noch Details aus.
Okay, also setzt ihr euch hin und steckt einen Haufen Zeit und Aufwand in eine handgeschriebene Bildbeschreibung, die gleichermaßen akkurat und detailliert ist. Zumindest glaubt ihr das.
Und es könnte immer noch jemand kommen und euch kritisieren und/oder sanktionieren, weil ihr bestimmte Details ausgelassen habt.
Wenn ihr eure Bildbeschreibung nicht zu deren Zufriedenheit in Ordnung bringt, dann werdet ihr als ableistisch beschimpft und blockiert mit öffentlichem Trara, damit möglichst viele andere Nutzer euch auch blockieren mögen.
Nun entwickeln sich die Mindestanforderungen für Bildbeschreibungen über die Jahre immer weiter. Was heute wichtig ist, war vor zwei Jahren nicht unbedingt wichtig. Was heute unwichtig ist, kann in zwei oder fünf Jahren durchaus auf einmal wichtig sein. Heute schon kritisieren Alt-Text-Aktivisten Bildposts, die schon etliche Jahre alt sind, aufgrund von deren Bildbeschreibungen, die sie als suboptimal ansehen. Das bedeutet, daß die Bildbeschreibungen, die ihr heute schreibt, noch so lange gut genug bleiben müssen, wie eure Bilderposts verfügbar bleiben. Falls nicht, viel Spaß dabei, durch alle eure alten Bilderposts zu gehen, sie alle zu editieren und bei allen die Bildbeschreibungen an die aktuellen Mindestanforderungen anzupassen.
Es gibt nur eine Möglichkeit, langfristig vor Mastodons Alt-Text-Polizei sicher zu sein: Als allererstes müßt ihr euch aufschlauen über die vielen Regeln und Richtlinien für Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen, und darüber gibt's dutzendweise englischsprachige Websites. Man kann unmöglich im voraus wissen, welche dieser Regeln von irgendjemandem bei der Alt-Text-Polizei irgendwann in der Zukunft für zwingend erforderlich erklärt werden, also solltet ihr sie jetzt schon bis aufs i-Tüpfelchen einhalten. Wenn zwei davon sich gegenseitig widersprechen, müßt ihr natürlich wissen, welche davon ihr einzuhalten habt.
Ihr müßt auch wissen, daß die Anforderungen und Qualitätsstandards für gute Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen auf Mastodon ganz andere sind als im ganzen Rest des Web. Was fürs Web gut genug ist, ist nicht zwingend auch gut genug für Mastodon.
Zu guter Letzt müßt ihr euer Publikum kennen. Und normalerweise kann jeder irgendwo im Fediverse oder sogar im Web euer Publikum sein. Es gibt nur ganz wenige Orte im Fediverse, wo ihr steuern könnt, wer in der Lage sein wird, euer Zeugs zu lesen, und Mastodon gehört nicht dazu. Ihr müßt euer Publikum kennen, und ihr müßt zumindest einschätzen können, was euer Publikum über den Inhalt eures Bildes weiß, was es nicht weiß und was es wissen muß. Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, was etwas ist, erklärt es, aber bitte im Post-Text und nicht im Alt-Text! Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, wie etwas aussieht, das aber vielleicht wissen will, dann beschreibt es.
Bei meinen eigenen Bildern ist meine Strategie, für jedes Bild zwei Beschreibungen zu schreiben. Die eine ist die kurze Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Alt-Text. Die werde ich in Zukunft auf maximal 512 Zeichen beschränken, weil Misskey und seine Forks Alt-Texte, die länger als 512 Zeichen sind, löschen. Die andere ist die lange Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Post-Text. Die lange Bildbeschreibung ist volldetailliert, sie enthält alle Erklärungen, die zum Verständnis des Bildes und seiner Beschreibungen nötig sind, und sie enthält Transkripte von jedem einzelnen Stück Text, das es irgendwo innerhalb der Grenzen des Bildes gibt, egal, ob auf dem Bild lesbar oder nicht.
Memes zu posten, ist ein Stück weit einfacher. Es gibt nur eine Bildbeschreibung, die hoffentlich kurz genug für den Alt-Text ist. Aber trotzdem habe ich einen ganzen Haufen Sachen zu erklären, und weil ich mich nicht immer auf Links wie nach KnowYourMeme verlassen kann, muß ich oft selbst eine ganze Menge Erklärungen in den Post schreiben.
Idealerweise ist das Schlimmste, was mir passieren kann, daß ich dafür kritisiert werde, daß mein Alt-Text die 200-Zeichen-Marke oder mein Post die 500-Zeichen-Marke überschreitet, oder daß ich für das Letztere blockiert werde. Das Risiko, daß das passiert, reduziere ich mit einer Zusammenfassung, die eine Langer-Post-Inhaltswarnung mit der ungefähren Länge des Post enthält, und den Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong, #CWLongPost, #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost, die dann gefiltert werden können.
Aber ich hoffe, daß keiner sagen kann, ich hätte mich nicht genug angestrengt.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #500Zeichen #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta -
CW: Gute Bildbeschreibungen bringen einen sehr viel größeren Aufwand mit sich, als ihr vielleicht glaubt; CW: lang (über 6.000 Zeichen), Fediverse-Meta, Fediverse-über-Mastodon-hinaus-Meta, Zeichenlimit-Meta, Inhaltswarnungen-Meta/Content-Warning-Meta, Hashtag-Meta, Alt-Text-Meta, Bildbeschreibungen-Meta, KI erwähnt (KI-)
(Ausnahmsweise auch mal auf Deutsch. Die englische Version ist hier.)
Bildbeschreibungen sind wichtig im Fediverse, zumindest wenn eure Posts möglicherweise auf Mastodon landen werden. Aber geht es nur um Bildbeschreibungen ganz allgemein? Geht es nur darum, überhaupt Bildbeschreibungen zu haben? Oder geht es auch um die Qualität der Bildbeschreibungen?
Blinde oder sehbehinderte Nutzer sagen, daß alles besser ist als nichts. Aber seien wir mal ehrlich, der Dateiname der Bilddatei als Alt-Text ist nutzlos. Eine Kopie des Post-Texts im Alt-Text auch; mindestens eine Handy-App für Mastodon macht das scheinbar automatisch. Irgendwelcher Kauderwelsch, der in den Alt-Text reingeschrieben wird, damit da irgendein Alt-Text steht, ist auch nutzlos.
Also schreibt ihr eine kurze Bildbeschreibung für euren Alt-Text. Das sollte viel besser sein als nichts.
Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung nicht detailliert genug ist.
Weil ihr eine längere Bildbeschreibung nicht schreiben könnt oder wollt, überlaßt ihr das einer KI.
Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung offensichtlicher KI-Slop ist. Die KI ist ungenau, sie halluziniert, sie identifizert Sachen falsch, und sie läßt immer noch Details aus.
Okay, also setzt ihr euch hin und steckt einen Haufen Zeit und Aufwand in eine handgeschriebene Bildbeschreibung, die gleichermaßen akkurat und detailliert ist. Zumindest glaubt ihr das.
Und es könnte immer noch jemand kommen und euch kritisieren und/oder sanktionieren, weil ihr bestimmte Details ausgelassen habt.
Wenn ihr eure Bildbeschreibung nicht zu deren Zufriedenheit in Ordnung bringt, dann werdet ihr als ableistisch beschimpft und blockiert mit öffentlichem Trara, damit möglichst viele andere Nutzer euch auch blockieren mögen.
Nun entwickeln sich die Mindestanforderungen für Bildbeschreibungen über die Jahre immer weiter. Was heute wichtig ist, war vor zwei Jahren nicht unbedingt wichtig. Was heute unwichtig ist, kann in zwei oder fünf Jahren durchaus auf einmal wichtig sein. Heute schon kritisieren Alt-Text-Aktivisten Bildposts, die schon etliche Jahre alt sind, aufgrund von deren Bildbeschreibungen, die sie als suboptimal ansehen. Das bedeutet, daß die Bildbeschreibungen, die ihr heute schreibt, noch so lange gut genug bleiben müssen, wie eure Bilderposts verfügbar bleiben. Falls nicht, viel Spaß dabei, durch alle eure alten Bilderposts zu gehen, sie alle zu editieren und bei allen die Bildbeschreibungen an die aktuellen Mindestanforderungen anzupassen.
Es gibt nur eine Möglichkeit, langfristig vor Mastodons Alt-Text-Polizei sicher zu sein: Als allererstes müßt ihr euch aufschlauen über die vielen Regeln und Richtlinien für Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen, und darüber gibt's dutzendweise englischsprachige Websites. Man kann unmöglich im voraus wissen, welche dieser Regeln von irgendjemandem bei der Alt-Text-Polizei irgendwann in der Zukunft für zwingend erforderlich erklärt werden, also solltet ihr sie jetzt schon bis aufs i-Tüpfelchen einhalten. Wenn zwei davon sich gegenseitig widersprechen, müßt ihr natürlich wissen, welche davon ihr einzuhalten habt.
Ihr müßt auch wissen, daß die Anforderungen und Qualitätsstandards für gute Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen auf Mastodon ganz andere sind als im ganzen Rest des Web. Was fürs Web gut genug ist, ist nicht zwingend auch gut genug für Mastodon.
Zu guter Letzt müßt ihr euer Publikum kennen. Und normalerweise kann jeder irgendwo im Fediverse oder sogar im Web euer Publikum sein. Es gibt nur ganz wenige Orte im Fediverse, wo ihr steuern könnt, wer in der Lage sein wird, euer Zeugs zu lesen, und Mastodon gehört nicht dazu. Ihr müßt euer Publikum kennen, und ihr müßt zumindest einschätzen können, was euer Publikum über den Inhalt eures Bildes weiß, was es nicht weiß und was es wissen muß. Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, was etwas ist, erklärt es, aber bitte im Post-Text und nicht im Alt-Text! Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, wie etwas aussieht, das aber vielleicht wissen will, dann beschreibt es.
Bei meinen eigenen Bildern ist meine Strategie, für jedes Bild zwei Beschreibungen zu schreiben. Die eine ist die kurze Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Alt-Text. Die werde ich in Zukunft auf maximal 512 Zeichen beschränken, weil Misskey und seine Forks Alt-Texte, die länger als 512 Zeichen sind, löschen. Die andere ist die lange Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Post-Text. Die lange Bildbeschreibung ist volldetailliert, sie enthält alle Erklärungen, die zum Verständnis des Bildes und seiner Beschreibungen nötig sind, und sie enthält Transkripte von jedem einzelnen Stück Text, das es irgendwo innerhalb der Grenzen des Bildes gibt, egal, ob auf dem Bild lesbar oder nicht.
Memes zu posten, ist ein Stück weit einfacher. Es gibt nur eine Bildbeschreibung, die hoffentlich kurz genug für den Alt-Text ist. Aber trotzdem habe ich einen ganzen Haufen Sachen zu erklären, und weil ich mich nicht immer auf Links wie nach KnowYourMeme verlassen kann, muß ich oft selbst eine ganze Menge Erklärungen in den Post schreiben.
Idealerweise ist das Schlimmste, was mir passieren kann, daß ich dafür kritisiert werde, daß mein Alt-Text die 200-Zeichen-Marke oder mein Post die 500-Zeichen-Marke überschreitet, oder daß ich für das Letztere blockiert werde. Das Risiko, daß das passiert, reduziere ich mit einer Zusammenfassung, die eine Langer-Post-Inhaltswarnung mit der ungefähren Länge des Post enthält, und den Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong, #CWLongPost, #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost, die dann gefiltert werden können.
Aber ich hoffe, daß keiner sagen kann, ich hätte mich nicht genug angestrengt.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #500Zeichen #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta -
CW: Good image descriptions require a much bigger effort than you may think; CW: long (over 5,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, character limit meta, content warning meta, hashtag meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, AI mentioned (AI-)
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 -
CW: Good image descriptions require a much bigger effort than you may think; CW: long (over 5,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, character limit meta, content warning meta, hashtag meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, AI mentioned (AI-)
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 -
@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.
Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).
Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.
If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.
Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.
The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)
If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.
Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.
The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.
Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla -
@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.
Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).
Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.
If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.
Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.
The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)
If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.
Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.
The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.
Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla -
@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.
In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.
I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.
But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.
RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700
Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.
Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).
This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).
But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.
When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.
It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.
Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility -
@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.
In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.
I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.
But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.
RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700
Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.
Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).
This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).
But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.
When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.
It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.
Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility -
CW: When eye contact is eye contact, and what you have to do; CW: long post (over 2,500 characters), Fediverse meta, content warning meta, hashtag meta, eye contact mentioned
Eye contact is not limited to full facial portraits of people looking directly into the camera.
Eye contact is not even limited to looking directly into the camera at all.
Eye contact is whenever there is at least one eye anywhere in the image. No matter where it is. No matter how small the eye and how big the image is.
Ask autistic people, and they'll likely confirm. And they'll also likely confirm that it triggers them.
In fact, eye contact is even when you, as a neurotypical person, cannot even see the eye because it's less then a pixel.
Imagine an image of 20 megapixels. Now imagine there's a person somewhere in the image, only four pixels high and about one pixel wide. This means the head is half a pixel high and a third of a pixel wide.
Even if the person is looking directly at the camera, this still means that each individual eye is 1/15 of a pixel wide and maybe 1/30 of a pixel high. That's 1/450 or a bit over 0.2% of a pixel. That's about 1/9,000,000,000 or a bit over 0.000,000,01% of the whole image. If the person is looking directly at the camera.
Nonetheless, this may trigger some autistic people even if the person is not even looking into the general direction of the camera.
It doesn't even have to be a person. It may just as well be an animal or a fantasy creature or a robot or a sculpture or a stylised face or even only a single stylised eye.
I've actually had all this confirmed by @Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 who knows enough actually diagnosed autistic people to know.
So it doesn't matter how big or infinitely small the eye is. It doesn't matter where it's looking. If there's at least one eye in your image, it counts as eye contact.
If you, as the user who posts the image, know for certain that there is at least one eye in the image, you're obliged to- have the image automatically blanked or blurred
- make sure that Mastodon will blank the image, too
- add the content warning "CW: eye contact" to your post
- add the hashtags #EyeContact and #CWEyeContact to your post, especially the former which some people out there may have filtered
You're only excused not to do so if you yourself honestly don't know that there is at least one eye in the image.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility -
CW: When eye contact is eye contact, and what you have to do; CW: long post (over 2,500 characters), Fediverse meta, content warning meta, hashtag meta, eye contact mentioned
Eye contact is not limited to full facial portraits of people looking directly into the camera.
Eye contact is not even limited to looking directly into the camera at all.
Eye contact is whenever there is at least one eye anywhere in the image. No matter where it is. No matter how small the eye and how big the image is.
Ask autistic people, and they'll likely confirm. And they'll also likely confirm that it triggers them.
In fact, eye contact is even when you, as a neurotypical person, cannot even see the eye because it's less then a pixel.
Imagine an image of 20 megapixels. Now imagine there's a person somewhere in the image, only four pixels high and about one pixel wide. This means the head is half a pixel high and a third of a pixel wide.
Even if the person is looking directly at the camera, this still means that each individual eye is 1/15 of a pixel wide and maybe 1/30 of a pixel high. That's 1/450 or a bit over 0.2% of a pixel. That's about 1/9,000,000,000 or a bit over 0.000,000,01% of the whole image. If the person is looking directly at the camera.
Nonetheless, this may trigger some autistic people even if the person is not even looking into the general direction of the camera.
It doesn't even have to be a person. It may just as well be an animal or a fantasy creature or a robot or a sculpture or a stylised face or even only a single stylised eye.
I've actually had all this confirmed by @Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 who knows enough actually diagnosed autistic people to know.
So it doesn't matter how big or infinitely small the eye is. It doesn't matter where it's looking. If there's at least one eye in your image, it counts as eye contact.
If you, as the user who posts the image, know for certain that there is at least one eye in the image, you're obliged to- have the image automatically blanked or blurred
- make sure that Mastodon will blank the image, too
- add the content warning "CW: eye contact" to your post
- add the hashtags #EyeContact and #CWEyeContact to your post, especially the former which some people out there may have filtered
You're only excused not to do so if you yourself honestly don't know that there is at least one eye in the image.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility -
@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.
Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.
We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.
Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?
No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)
When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.
It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.
This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".
Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.
So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.
Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.
I think I ended up Superblocking them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture -
@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.
Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.
The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.
This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.
I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.
In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta -
@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.
Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.
The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.
This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.
I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.
In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta -
CW: Long posts vs insufficiently described images: I can't win either way; CW: long (over 3,500 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, content warning meta, character limit meta
On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image descriptions for each one of my original images. One is short and goes into the alt-text, and I'm going to limit all my future alt-text to a maximum of 512 characters (otherwise users on Misskey, Sharkey etc. will believe I haven't written any alt-text because they won't receive any due to a bug).
The other one is enormous degrees of magnitudes longer than anything most Fediverse users have ever read in the Fediverse. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not, it contains verbatim transcripts of said text.
The nature of my original images requires such long descriptions. Besides, the only way to really be safe from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA is to overcomply with whatever minimum standards for good image descriptions anyone of them may have.
On the other hand, the self-same Mastodon HOA is likely to sanction me for the self-same posts. The reason: The posts are way too long. They exceed the limit of 500 characters that's so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that many Mastodonians are eager to defend it. Even if I hide them behind a summary with a content warning about the post being long. If I were to appease these Mastodonians, I'd have to underdescribe my images, and I wouldn't be able to explain them at all.
Speaking of underdescribing, I think at least some members of the alt-text police actually don't let image descriptions in the post count. What counts is only the image description in the alt-text. It must be accurate, it must be sufficiently detailed, and it must contain all the text transcripts. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they demanded sufficient explanations in the alt-text, not knowing that explanations in alt-text are actually a big no-no.
Even if all requirements of a good alt-text by alt-text police standards are met or even exceeded by the image description in the post, chances are the alt-text police will still sanction me if the alt-text doesn't meet these criteria.
When it comes to my original images, even squeezing all that into the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts imposed by Mastodon is pretty much impossible. Squeezing it into the 512-character limit for alt-text imposed by Misskey and its forks is even more impossible.
The only winning move is to not play at all. Curiously, some people are even upset about me rarely posting any images. Although they don't follow me. Although the channel that I use for original images (@Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet) has next to no reach, so even if I were to post images again, practically nobody would notice. Although it doesn't even seem that there's much interest in that kind of images in the first place.
But apparently, according to some, posting images with only rudimentary alt-text whipped up in a minute, no long description and no explanations is always so much better than not posting images because it takes so much time and effort to describe them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #MastodonHOA #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CWContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #MastodonCulture -
CW: Long posts vs insufficiently described images: I can't win either way; CW: long (over 3,500 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, content warning meta, character limit meta
On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image descriptions for each one of my original images. One is short and goes into the alt-text, and I'm going to limit all my future alt-text to a maximum of 512 characters (otherwise users on Misskey, Sharkey etc. will believe I haven't written any alt-text because they won't receive any due to a bug).
The other one is enormous degrees of magnitudes longer than anything most Fediverse users have ever read in the Fediverse. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not, it contains verbatim transcripts of said text.
The nature of my original images requires such long descriptions. Besides, the only way to really be safe from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA is to overcomply with whatever minimum standards for good image descriptions anyone of them may have.
On the other hand, the self-same Mastodon HOA is likely to sanction me for the self-same posts. The reason: The posts are way too long. They exceed the limit of 500 characters that's so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that many Mastodonians are eager to defend it. Even if I hide them behind a summary with a content warning about the post being long. If I were to appease these Mastodonians, I'd have to underdescribe my images, and I wouldn't be able to explain them at all.
Speaking of underdescribing, I think at least some members of the alt-text police actually don't let image descriptions in the post count. What counts is only the image description in the alt-text. It must be accurate, it must be sufficiently detailed, and it must contain all the text transcripts. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they demanded sufficient explanations in the alt-text, not knowing that explanations in alt-text are actually a big no-no.
Even if all requirements of a good alt-text by alt-text police standards are met or even exceeded by the image description in the post, chances are the alt-text police will still sanction me if the alt-text doesn't meet these criteria.
When it comes to my original images, even squeezing all that into the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts imposed by Mastodon is pretty much impossible. Squeezing it into the 512-character limit for alt-text imposed by Misskey and its forks is even more impossible.
The only winning move is to not play at all. Curiously, some people are even upset about me rarely posting any images. Although they don't follow me. Although the channel that I use for original images (@Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet) has next to no reach, so even if I were to post images again, practically nobody would notice. Although it doesn't even seem that there's much interest in that kind of images in the first place.
But apparently, according to some, posting images with only rudimentary alt-text whipped up in a minute, no long description and no explanations is always so much better than not posting images because it takes so much time and effort to describe them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #MastodonHOA #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CWContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #MastodonCulture -
@Mrs. McGibbons 🧚♀️ This may be true for real-life cat photos. Just about the most simple images imaginable in the Fediverse.
But what if I don't just post real-life cat photos in which I don't have to describe much more than the cat? Because I don't post real-life cat photos. I don't post real-life photos at all unless they're meme templates.
My own original images are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. This means:- I can't forgo detail descriptions under the assumption that people know what stuff looks like anyway. I can't assume that anyone already knows what anything in my images looks like.
- Every other time, there's nothing particular in the image that matters more within the context of the post than everything else. Instead, the whole image with everything in it matters all the same.
- The other half of times, what matters within the context is irrelevant because the existence of 3-D virtual worlds is so intriguing to someone out there that they demand a full, detailed image description.
As for the actual alt-texts, I'll try to keep them at 512 characters or fewer, difficult as that will be. But I'll do that for technical reasons: While Misskey and its forks are supposed to truncate longer alt-texts at the 512-character mark, they actually delete them due to a bug. If I make them longer, users on Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc. will believe that I haven't written any alt-text in the first place.
But I will keep adding long, fully detailed image descriptions to the post text where I have much more room. I need room for sufficiently detailed descriptions, I need room for all the explanations necessary for people to understand the post and the images and the descriptions, and I often need room for all the text transcripts.
For example, do you know what the main building on Nebadon Izumi's Universal Campus looks like? Would it be sufficient for you if I just name-dropped it? Or must I describe what it looks like?
If so, well, that's 40,000 characters of description only for that building and what's visible inside it because the building mostly has glass panes for walls. 7,800 characters only for the front of a building that's five times as long as it's wide. 500 characters only for that one piece of structure around the main entrance doors. In fact, over 1,600 characters for the doors. Also, 3,200 characters for a teleport panel, including transcripts of 13 bits of text. Been there, done that, got the figures from there.
Don't worry, I will always hide long posts behind a summary with content warnings, including a warning about the post being tens of thousands of characters long due to the long image descriptions.
In fact, my meme posts will continue to be very long themselves, although not quite as long as posts with original pictures. Describing the visuals is easy most of the time, and it can be done in 512 characters or fewer. But they still need explanations. Otherwise, nobody will understand anything. All my meme posts are about obscure topics, too.
Now I'm wondering what's more likely to upset people and make them sanction me in some way, including blocking me without saying a word. Insufficient image descriptions? Insufficient alt-text in particular? Not putting all the text transcripts into the alt-text where many insist that they belong? Or posts behind summaries and CWs that indicate that these posts are 25,000, 40,000, 60,000 characters long?
But seriously, even if I cut down visual descriptions to a more normal level, which would come with its own nasty side-effects, I would still need to explain everything. So no, I can't keep image posts at 500 characters or fewer.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta -
@Mrs. McGibbons 🧚♀️ This may be true for real-life cat photos. Just about the most simple images imaginable in the Fediverse.
But what if I don't just post real-life cat photos in which I don't have to describe much more than the cat? Because I don't post real-life cat photos. I don't post real-life photos at all unless they're meme templates.
My own original images are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. This means:- I can't forgo detail descriptions under the assumption that people know what stuff looks like anyway. I can't assume that anyone already knows what anything in my images looks like.
- Every other time, there's nothing particular in the image that matters more within the context of the post than everything else. Instead, the whole image with everything in it matters all the same.
- The other half of times, what matters within the context is irrelevant because the existence of 3-D virtual worlds is so intriguing to someone out there that they demand a full, detailed image description.
As for the actual alt-texts, I'll try to keep them at 512 characters or fewer, difficult as that will be. But I'll do that for technical reasons: While Misskey and its forks are supposed to truncate longer alt-texts at the 512-character mark, they actually delete them due to a bug. If I make them longer, users on Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc. will believe that I haven't written any alt-text in the first place.
But I will keep adding long, fully detailed image descriptions to the post text where I have much more room. I need room for sufficiently detailed descriptions, I need room for all the explanations necessary for people to understand the post and the images and the descriptions, and I often need room for all the text transcripts.
For example, do you know what the main building on Nebadon Izumi's Universal Campus looks like? Would it be sufficient for you if I just name-dropped it? Or must I describe what it looks like?
If so, well, that's 40,000 characters of description only for that building and what's visible inside it because the building mostly has glass panes for walls. 7,800 characters only for the front of a building that's five times as long as it's wide. 500 characters only for that one piece of structure around the main entrance doors. In fact, over 1,600 characters for the doors. Also, 3,200 characters for a teleport panel, including transcripts of 13 bits of text. Been there, done that, got the figures from there.
Don't worry, I will always hide long posts behind a summary with content warnings, including a warning about the post being tens of thousands of characters long due to the long image descriptions.
In fact, my meme posts will continue to be very long themselves, although not quite as long as posts with original pictures. Describing the visuals is easy most of the time, and it can be done in 512 characters or fewer. But they still need explanations. Otherwise, nobody will understand anything. All my meme posts are about obscure topics, too.
Now I'm wondering what's more likely to upset people and make them sanction me in some way, including blocking me without saying a word. Insufficient image descriptions? Insufficient alt-text in particular? Not putting all the text transcripts into the alt-text where many insist that they belong? Or posts behind summaries and CWs that indicate that these posts are 25,000, 40,000, 60,000 characters long?
But seriously, even if I cut down visual descriptions to a more normal level, which would come with its own nasty side-effects, I would still need to explain everything. So no, I can't keep image posts at 500 characters or fewer.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta -
On the topic of filters, re-sharing a recent article, which I think some might find useful.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-fediverse-content-warnings-and-filters/
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On the topic of filters, re-sharing a recent article, which I think some might find useful.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/on-fediverse-content-warnings-and-filters/
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@Justin Crozer @Stefan Bohacek @Lentävä Kalakukko @Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Whenever I see Mastodon users talk about "culture" in a Fediverse context, I have to wonder: What exactly do they refer to when they talk about "culture"?
Is it Fediverse culture? As in, overarching, software-independent Fediverse culture?
As in, taking into consideration that Fediverse server applications that aren't Mastodon, e.g. Misskey or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla, have different cultures than Mastodon?
Recognising a post or a comment from one of these applications, acknowledging that it comes from a place with a different history, a different set of features and thus a different culture than Mastodon and refraining from enforcing Mastodon's unwritten rules against it?
Or does "culture" only refer to Mastodon's culture? Does it reject or completely disregard all cultures in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon's and demand the whole Fediverse adopt Mastodon's culture and only Mastodon's culture?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who post more than 500 characters at once (which, by the way, is perfectly normal everywhere outside of Mastodon)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who reply to people who haven't mentioned them first, and whom they aren't mutually following either (which, by the way, is perfectly normal in large parts of the non-Mastodon Fediverse, too)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who quote-post Mastodon toots that must not be quote-posted (because they've had quote-posts for much longer than Mastodon, but without a no-quote flag so they can't see Mastodon's no-quote flag)?
Do these "bad eggs" incllude users who "misuse" Mastodon's CW field for summaries (because they have literally had the exact same text field as a summary field for seven years longer than Mastodon has had it as a CW field, and because having a summary field makes a whole lot of sense if your character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who use more than four hashtags in one post (because, unlike Mastodon, the places where they are have filtering as well as automatically having messages hidden behind CW buttons deeply engrained into their cultures, but this requires the appropriate keywords to be present)?
If so, then this explains why only Mastodon users can enjoy significant reach on Mastodon: Everyone else is mass-blocked for misbehaving by Mastodon's standards.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@Justin Crozer @Stefan Bohacek @Lentävä Kalakukko @Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Whenever I see Mastodon users talk about "culture" in a Fediverse context, I have to wonder: What exactly do they refer to when they talk about "culture"?
Is it Fediverse culture? As in, overarching, software-independent Fediverse culture?
As in, taking into consideration that Fediverse server applications that aren't Mastodon, e.g. Misskey or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla, have different cultures than Mastodon?
Recognising a post or a comment from one of these applications, acknowledging that it comes from a place with a different history, a different set of features and thus a different culture than Mastodon and refraining from enforcing Mastodon's unwritten rules against it?
Or does "culture" only refer to Mastodon's culture? Does it reject or completely disregard all cultures in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon's and demand the whole Fediverse adopt Mastodon's culture and only Mastodon's culture?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who post more than 500 characters at once (which, by the way, is perfectly normal everywhere outside of Mastodon)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who reply to people who haven't mentioned them first, and whom they aren't mutually following either (which, by the way, is perfectly normal in large parts of the non-Mastodon Fediverse, too)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who quote-post Mastodon toots that must not be quote-posted (because they've had quote-posts for much longer than Mastodon, but without a no-quote flag so they can't see Mastodon's no-quote flag)?
Do these "bad eggs" incllude users who "misuse" Mastodon's CW field for summaries (because they have literally had the exact same text field as a summary field for seven years longer than Mastodon has had it as a CW field, and because having a summary field makes a whole lot of sense if your character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million)?
Do these "bad eggs" include users who use more than four hashtags in one post (because, unlike Mastodon, the places where they are have filtering as well as automatically having messages hidden behind CW buttons deeply engrained into their cultures, but this requires the appropriate keywords to be present)?
If so, then this explains why only Mastodon users can enjoy significant reach on Mastodon: Everyone else is mass-blocked for misbehaving by Mastodon's standards.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity -
@Mark Whybird The whole alt-text would be a bad idea. Especially if showing the whole alt-text under each image is set to on by default or even hard-coded for everyone's "convenience".
Some of us write or have written extremely long alt-texts. All of my most recent alt-texts are either precisely 1,500 characters or only a very few characters short of it. I'll have to limit my future alt-texts to only 512 characters, but I won't shorten my existing ones. And in the rare case that someone decided to boost one of my image posts to your timeline, you'd have a massive block of 1,500 characters of alt-text underneath each image. On a comparatively small iPhone display even (desktop user here).
Do you really want that?
By the way: How does @Mona app handle images in posts with CWs? Does it hide them behind the CW like Mastodon's Web interface since 4.4.0? Or does it keep them visible underneath the CW'd post like Mastodon's Web interface before 4.4.0? Because in the latter case, I couldn't possibly CW long alt-texts away (while I already CW my long posts away whenever I can, namely whenever they aren't replies).
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta -
@Der böse Hexe Njähähä 🧙♀️🪄⚡️ @Mina Es ist eben eine auf Mastodon weitverbreitete Fehlannahme, daß Mastodons Kultur die Kultur des ganzen Fediverse ist. Und daß Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln im ganzen Fediverse gelten. Und falls nicht, dann hat dieser Zustand aber schnellstmöglich hergestellt zu werden.
Das liegt auch daran, daß auf Mastodon kaum jemand weiß, inwiefern das Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse anders ist und anders funktioniert als Mastodon. Oder auch, daß es einige Sachen schon deutlich länger im Fediverse gibt als Mastodon. Daß das Fediverse eben nicht mit Mastodon anfing und auch nicht alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, als Extra nachträglich an Mastodon drangeklebt worden ist.
Im Grunde sind sich nur diejenigen dessen bewußt, die schon lange hauptsächlich oder ausschließlich etwas anderes benutzen als Mastodon. Vor allem die, die eben nicht von Twitter über Mastodon ins Fediverse gekommen sind.Mastodon vs. Friendica
Das läßt sich sehr gut illustrieren im Vergleich zwischen Mastodon und Friendica. Mastodon ist eine puristische, spartanische Microblogging-Anwendung und versucht, ein Twitter-Klon zu sein. Friendica ist eine Social-Networking-Anwendung und Facebook-Alternative und gleichzeitig eine vollwertige Blogginganwendung mit allen Schikanen.
Mastodon ist von 2016. Friendica ist von 2010, gut fünfeinhalb Jahre älter als Mastodon. Als Mastodon startete, hat es sich mit Friendica verbunden und nicht umgekehrt.
Friendicas Kultur ist ungefähr so alt wie Friendica selbst. Mastodons Kultur, wie sie heute existiert, wurde dagegen geprägt Mitte 2022 von denjenigen, die im Februar und März von Twitter abgehauen sind, nachdem Elon Musk angekündigt hatte, es zu übernehmen.Wagenburgmentalität vs. totale Föderation
Ein Killerfeature von Friendica war immer, daß es sich mit allen möglichen und unmöglichen Sachen verbinden kann. Mit dem ganzen Fediverse sowieso. Aber auch mit diaspora*, mit Tumblr, mit Libertree, theoretisch sogar mit Twitter, früher tatsächlich sogar mit Facebook, per E-Mail, crossposten nach WordPress geht auch und so weiter und so fort. Damit wirbt Friendica ja auch, daß das geht.
So war es schon immer ein bombenfester Teil von Friendicas Kultur, daß man Kontakte überall hat. Im ganzen Fediverse und über das Fediverse hinaus.
Im krassen Gegensatz dazu steht Mastodon, wo buchstäblich jeder, aber auch wirklich jeder Neuling lernt, daß es nur mit sich selbst verbunden ist. Es gibt Mastodon-Nutzer, die erst nach Jahren erfahren, daß das Fediverse nicht nur Mastodon ist und Mastodon mit noch ganz anderen Sachen verbunden ist.
Je länger es aber dauert, bis man das weiß, desto mehr gewöhnt man sich an ein reines Mastodon-Fediverse. Desto schwerer fällt es, sich an ein Nicht-nur-Mastodon-Fediverse zu gewöhnen. Desto eher will man sogar wirklich ein reines Mastodon-Fediverse haben.
Blöderweise wurde Mastodons aktuelle Kultur aufgebaut von Leuten, die selbst zu der Zeit glaubten, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon. Sonst wäre Mastodons Kultur nämlich für den Rest des Fediverse offener. Und so ist in Mastodons Kultur quasi eingebrannt, daß alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, ein ungewollter Eindringling ist.Wir waren zuerst da vs. wir waren wirklich zuerst da
Der Großteil der Mastodon-Nutzer glaubt, das Fediverse fing mit Mastodon an. Und so verhalten sie sich auch. Wir waren zuerst da, Mastodon war zuerst da, also ist Mastodon der Standard.
Die Friendica-Nutzer dagegen wissen, daß Friendica schon lange vor Mastodon da war. Viele Friendica-Nutzer sind ja selbst schon seit Zeiten dabei, als es Mastodon noch gar nicht gab. Folglich weigern sie sich, Mastodon als Ursprung des Fediverse anzuerkennen. Die meisten dürften nämlich wissen, daß der Ursprung des Fediverse StatusNet von 2008 war. Damit war Friendica übrigens auch verbunden.500 Zeichen vs. gar kein Limit
Anderes Beispiel: Mastodon hat ein festgelegtes Zeichenlimit von 500. Jeder Mastodon-Neuling gewöhnt sich da erstmal dran. Wenn man dann erstmals über einen Beitrag stolpert, der länger ist, dann ist das zutiefst (ver)störend, vor allem, wenn man die offizielle Mastodon-Smartphone-App benutzt, die lange Beiträge nicht einklappen kann.
Folglich ist es auf Mastodon in die Kultur eingebrannt, daß Beiträge mit über 500 Zeichen schlecht sind. Und es ist eine ungeschriebene Regel auf Mastodon, Beiträge, die über 500 Zeichen lang sind, in Threads zu zerschneiden. Zugegeben, die meisten Mastodon-Nutzer haben eh keine andere Wahl.
Auf Friendica ist das ganz anders. Da gab es nie ein definiertes Zeichenlimit. Da sind die Leute es seit jeher gewohnt, soviel auf einmal zu posten, wie sie wollen und müssen. Folglich gehen einigen die zerschnipselten Beiträge von Mastodon gehörig auf die Nerven, weil das den Lesefluß stört.
Und so stehen auf der einen Seite Mastodon-Nutzer, die Friendica-Nutzer dazu zwingen wollen, Beiträge, die länger als 500 Zeichen sind, zu zerschneiden. Auf der anderen Seite stehen Friendica-Nutzer, die zum einen genau das eben nicht nötig haben und zum anderen Mastodon-Nutzern empfehlen, wenn sie öfters mal etwas Langes zu posten haben, an einen Ort im Fediverse umzuziehen, wo sie mehr als nur 500 Zeichen haben. Aber sie sollen um Gottes Willen aufhören mit dieser Schnipselei.CWs vs. Zusammenfassungen plus NSFW
Noch ein Beispiel: das CW-Feld. Allgemeine Annahme auf Mastodon ist, daß es das so im ganzen Fediverse gibt und es somit auch Teil der Kultur im ganzen Fediverse ist, da vor potentiell verstörenden Inhalten zu warnen. Und das Feld im übrigen auch nur dafür zu nutzen.
Mastodon hat dieses Feld seit 2017.
Friendica hat dieses Feld seit 2010, seit es an den Start ging.
Aber: Auf Friendica war das nie ein CW-Feld. Auf Friendica war es schon immer und ist es heute noch ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen. Warum Zusammenfassungen? Weil es ziemlich viel Sinn ergibt, ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen zu haben, wenn man über 16 Millionen Zeichen auf einmal posten kann.
Und so ist in Friendicas Kultur eingebrannt, daß dieses Feld für Zusammenfassungen genutzt wird. Und nur für Zusammenfassungen.
Auf Mastodon ist genau dieser Sachverhalt derweil total unbekannt, auch weil kaum jemand auf Mastodon überhaupt weiß, daß Friendica existiert, und von denen, die das wissen, die meisten sich nicht vorstellen können, daß Friendica mit Mastodon verbunden ist. Also glaubt man, das Feld sei von Mastodon erfunden worden.
Aber wieso nur für Zusammenfassungen? Gibt's auf Friendica keine Inhaltswarnungen?
Doch. Aber die funktionieren völlig anders. Die werden nicht vom Autor eines Beitrags ausgestellt, sondern beim Leser vollautomatisch per Textfilter erzeugt. Auch das ist bombenfest in Friendicas Kultur eingebrannt, ebenso, daß man dann auch im Beitrag entsprechende Schlüsselwörter einbauen muß, damit das bei entsprechend sensiblen Lesern auch funktioniert.
Übrigens: Das kann auch Mastodon. Aber erst seit Oktober 2022, als Mastodons Kultur und Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln schon in Stein gemeißelt waren. Und im übrigen wissen 99% von Mastodons Nutzern nicht, daß Mastodon das kann, und mindestens 80% nicht, daß Mastodon überhaupt Filter hat.
Folge:- Mastodon-Nutzer werfen Friendica-Nutzern vor, keine CWs zu setzen und das CW-Feld zu mißbrauchen (weil die Friendica-Nutzer das CW-Feld entweder für Zusammenfassungen oder gar nicht benutzen).
- Friendica-Nutzer werfen Mastodon-Nutzern vor, das Zusammenfassungsfeld für irgendwelchen Blödsinn zu mißbrauchen (weil die Mastodon-Nutzer ihre kryptischen Inhaltswarnungen ins Zusammenfassungsfeld packen).
- Mastodon-Nutzer werfen Friendica-Nutzern vor, unsinnige und/oder zuviele Hashtags zu verwenden (weil die Friendica-Nutzer genau das als Hashtags eintragen, was sie eigentlich ins CW-Feld eintragen sollen).
- Friendica-Nutzer werfen Mastodon-Nutzern vor, keine Schlüsselwörter zum Auslösen von NSFW in ihre Beiträge einzubauen (weil die Mastodon-Nutzer gar nicht wissen, daß sowas irgendwo im Fediverse existiert).
Solange es Mastodon-Nutzer gibt, die das Fediverse für nur Mastodon halten, solange es Mastodon-Nutzer gibt, die Mastodon als alleiniges Maß aller Dinge ansehen, solange Mastodon-Nutzern beim Onboarding nichts vom übrigen Fediverse erzählt wird (der Einfachheit halber, oder weil diejenigen, die sie einladen, es auch nicht besser wissen), solange Mastodon-Nutzer Nicht-Mastodon-Nutzer systematisch diskriminieren und gleichzeitig vehement abstreiten, irgendjemanden zu diskriminieren, solange wird der Frust nicht abklingen.
Jetzt kann man natürlich als reiner Mastodon-Nutzer, basiert und mastodongepillt, ankommen und sagen: "Die Lösung liegt doch auf der Hand! Friendica muß mehr wie Mastodon werden. Nur 500 Zeichen, Zusammenfassungsfeld in CW-Feld umbenennen, dieses blöde NSFW abschaffen, alle Protokolle außer ActivityPub rausschmeißen, und alles wird gut!"
Tja, dann kommen aber die Friendica-Veteranen. Qua "wir waren schon gut fünfeinhalb Jahre vor euch hier" und qua "Friendica ist objektiv die bessere und leistungsfähigere Software und Mastodon eine künstlich funktionsreduzierte Krücke, die sich nur durch Propaganda, sektenmäßige Gehirnwäsche ihrer Nutzer und vorsätzliche Inkompatibilität mit dem übrigen Fediverse halten kann". Und sie sagen: "Mastodon sollte viel eher sein blödes Zeichenlimit abschaffen, das CW-Feld in das umbenennen, was es schon auf Identi.ca war, Unterstützung für in sich geschlossene Konversationen einführen, Gruppen nach etablierten Fediverse-Standards einführen, volles HTML-Rendering zulassen bis hin zu beliebig vielen eingebetteten Bildern mitten im Beitrag und auch dieses bräsige Folgen-und-Gefolgtwerden durch standardmäßig gegenseitige Verbindungen ersetzen. Dann wäre das ein Gewinn für das ganze Fediverse!"
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonKultur #MastodonZentrizität #MastodonNormativität -
@Der böse Hexe Njähähä 🧙♀️🪄⚡️ @Mina Es ist eben eine auf Mastodon weitverbreitete Fehlannahme, daß Mastodons Kultur die Kultur des ganzen Fediverse ist. Und daß Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln im ganzen Fediverse gelten. Und falls nicht, dann hat dieser Zustand aber schnellstmöglich hergestellt zu werden.
Das liegt auch daran, daß auf Mastodon kaum jemand weiß, inwiefern das Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse anders ist und anders funktioniert als Mastodon. Oder auch, daß es einige Sachen schon deutlich länger im Fediverse gibt als Mastodon. Daß das Fediverse eben nicht mit Mastodon anfing und auch nicht alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, als Extra nachträglich an Mastodon drangeklebt worden ist.
Im Grunde sind sich nur diejenigen dessen bewußt, die schon lange hauptsächlich oder ausschließlich etwas anderes benutzen als Mastodon. Vor allem die, die eben nicht von Twitter über Mastodon ins Fediverse gekommen sind.Mastodon vs. Friendica
Das läßt sich sehr gut illustrieren im Vergleich zwischen Mastodon und Friendica. Mastodon ist eine puristische, spartanische Microblogging-Anwendung und versucht, ein Twitter-Klon zu sein. Friendica ist eine Social-Networking-Anwendung und Facebook-Alternative und gleichzeitig eine vollwertige Blogginganwendung mit allen Schikanen.
Mastodon ist von 2016. Friendica ist von 2010, gut fünfeinhalb Jahre älter als Mastodon. Als Mastodon startete, hat es sich mit Friendica verbunden und nicht umgekehrt.
Friendicas Kultur ist ungefähr so alt wie Friendica selbst. Mastodons Kultur, wie sie heute existiert, wurde dagegen geprägt Mitte 2022 von denjenigen, die im Februar und März von Twitter abgehauen sind, nachdem Elon Musk angekündigt hatte, es zu übernehmen.Wagenburgmentalität vs. totale Föderation
Ein Killerfeature von Friendica war immer, daß es sich mit allen möglichen und unmöglichen Sachen verbinden kann. Mit dem ganzen Fediverse sowieso. Aber auch mit diaspora*, mit Tumblr, mit Libertree, theoretisch sogar mit Twitter, früher tatsächlich sogar mit Facebook, per E-Mail, crossposten nach WordPress geht auch und so weiter und so fort. Damit wirbt Friendica ja auch, daß das geht.
So war es schon immer ein bombenfester Teil von Friendicas Kultur, daß man Kontakte überall hat. Im ganzen Fediverse und über das Fediverse hinaus.
Im krassen Gegensatz dazu steht Mastodon, wo buchstäblich jeder, aber auch wirklich jeder Neuling lernt, daß es nur mit sich selbst verbunden ist. Es gibt Mastodon-Nutzer, die erst nach Jahren erfahren, daß das Fediverse nicht nur Mastodon ist und Mastodon mit noch ganz anderen Sachen verbunden ist.
Je länger es aber dauert, bis man das weiß, desto mehr gewöhnt man sich an ein reines Mastodon-Fediverse. Desto schwerer fällt es, sich an ein Nicht-nur-Mastodon-Fediverse zu gewöhnen. Desto eher will man sogar wirklich ein reines Mastodon-Fediverse haben.
Blöderweise wurde Mastodons aktuelle Kultur aufgebaut von Leuten, die selbst zu der Zeit glaubten, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon. Sonst wäre Mastodons Kultur nämlich für den Rest des Fediverse offener. Und so ist in Mastodons Kultur quasi eingebrannt, daß alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, ein ungewollter Eindringling ist.Wir waren zuerst da vs. wir waren wirklich zuerst da
Der Großteil der Mastodon-Nutzer glaubt, das Fediverse fing mit Mastodon an. Und so verhalten sie sich auch. Wir waren zuerst da, Mastodon war zuerst da, also ist Mastodon der Standard.
Die Friendica-Nutzer dagegen wissen, daß Friendica schon lange vor Mastodon da war. Viele Friendica-Nutzer sind ja selbst schon seit Zeiten dabei, als es Mastodon noch gar nicht gab. Folglich weigern sie sich, Mastodon als Ursprung des Fediverse anzuerkennen. Die meisten dürften nämlich wissen, daß der Ursprung des Fediverse StatusNet von 2008 war. Damit war Friendica übrigens auch verbunden.500 Zeichen vs. gar kein Limit
Anderes Beispiel: Mastodon hat ein festgelegtes Zeichenlimit von 500. Jeder Mastodon-Neuling gewöhnt sich da erstmal dran. Wenn man dann erstmals über einen Beitrag stolpert, der länger ist, dann ist das zutiefst (ver)störend, vor allem, wenn man die offizielle Mastodon-Smartphone-App benutzt, die lange Beiträge nicht einklappen kann.
Folglich ist es auf Mastodon in die Kultur eingebrannt, daß Beiträge mit über 500 Zeichen schlecht sind. Und es ist eine ungeschriebene Regel auf Mastodon, Beiträge, die über 500 Zeichen lang sind, in Threads zu zerschneiden. Zugegeben, die meisten Mastodon-Nutzer haben eh keine andere Wahl.
Auf Friendica ist das ganz anders. Da gab es nie ein definiertes Zeichenlimit. Da sind die Leute es seit jeher gewohnt, soviel auf einmal zu posten, wie sie wollen und müssen. Folglich gehen einigen die zerschnipselten Beiträge von Mastodon gehörig auf die Nerven, weil das den Lesefluß stört.
Und so stehen auf der einen Seite Mastodon-Nutzer, die Friendica-Nutzer dazu zwingen wollen, Beiträge, die länger als 500 Zeichen sind, zu zerschneiden. Auf der anderen Seite stehen Friendica-Nutzer, die zum einen genau das eben nicht nötig haben und zum anderen Mastodon-Nutzern empfehlen, wenn sie öfters mal etwas Langes zu posten haben, an einen Ort im Fediverse umzuziehen, wo sie mehr als nur 500 Zeichen haben. Aber sie sollen um Gottes Willen aufhören mit dieser Schnipselei.CWs vs. Zusammenfassungen plus NSFW
Noch ein Beispiel: das CW-Feld. Allgemeine Annahme auf Mastodon ist, daß es das so im ganzen Fediverse gibt und es somit auch Teil der Kultur im ganzen Fediverse ist, da vor potentiell verstörenden Inhalten zu warnen. Und das Feld im übrigen auch nur dafür zu nutzen.
Mastodon hat dieses Feld seit 2017.
Friendica hat dieses Feld seit 2010, seit es an den Start ging.
Aber: Auf Friendica war das nie ein CW-Feld. Auf Friendica war es schon immer und ist es heute noch ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen. Warum Zusammenfassungen? Weil es ziemlich viel Sinn ergibt, ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen zu haben, wenn man über 16 Millionen Zeichen auf einmal posten kann.
Und so ist in Friendicas Kultur eingebrannt, daß dieses Feld für Zusammenfassungen genutzt wird. Und nur für Zusammenfassungen.
Auf Mastodon ist genau dieser Sachverhalt derweil total unbekannt, auch weil kaum jemand auf Mastodon überhaupt weiß, daß Friendica existiert, und von denen, die das wissen, die meisten sich nicht vorstellen können, daß Friendica mit Mastodon verbunden ist. Also glaubt man, das Feld sei von Mastodon erfunden worden.
Aber wieso nur für Zusammenfassungen? Gibt's auf Friendica keine Inhaltswarnungen?
Doch. Aber die funktionieren völlig anders. Die werden nicht vom Autor eines Beitrags ausgestellt, sondern beim Leser vollautomatisch per Textfilter erzeugt. Auch das ist bombenfest in Friendicas Kultur eingebrannt, ebenso, daß man dann auch im Beitrag entsprechende Schlüsselwörter einbauen muß, damit das bei entsprechend sensiblen Lesern auch funktioniert.
Übrigens: Das kann auch Mastodon. Aber erst seit Oktober 2022, als Mastodons Kultur und Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln schon in Stein gemeißelt waren. Und im übrigen wissen 99% von Mastodons Nutzern nicht, daß Mastodon das kann, und mindestens 80% nicht, daß Mastodon überhaupt Filter hat.
Folge:- Mastodon-Nutzer werfen Friendica-Nutzern vor, keine CWs zu setzen und das CW-Feld zu mißbrauchen (weil die Friendica-Nutzer das CW-Feld entweder für Zusammenfassungen oder gar nicht benutzen).
- Friendica-Nutzer werfen Mastodon-Nutzern vor, das Zusammenfassungsfeld für irgendwelchen Blödsinn zu mißbrauchen (weil die Mastodon-Nutzer ihre kryptischen Inhaltswarnungen ins Zusammenfassungsfeld packen).
- Mastodon-Nutzer werfen Friendica-Nutzern vor, unsinnige und/oder zuviele Hashtags zu verwenden (weil die Friendica-Nutzer genau das als Hashtags eintragen, was sie eigentlich ins CW-Feld eintragen sollen).
- Friendica-Nutzer werfen Mastodon-Nutzern vor, keine Schlüsselwörter zum Auslösen von NSFW in ihre Beiträge einzubauen (weil die Mastodon-Nutzer gar nicht wissen, daß sowas irgendwo im Fediverse existiert).
Solange es Mastodon-Nutzer gibt, die das Fediverse für nur Mastodon halten, solange es Mastodon-Nutzer gibt, die Mastodon als alleiniges Maß aller Dinge ansehen, solange Mastodon-Nutzern beim Onboarding nichts vom übrigen Fediverse erzählt wird (der Einfachheit halber, oder weil diejenigen, die sie einladen, es auch nicht besser wissen), solange Mastodon-Nutzer Nicht-Mastodon-Nutzer systematisch diskriminieren und gleichzeitig vehement abstreiten, irgendjemanden zu diskriminieren, solange wird der Frust nicht abklingen.
Jetzt kann man natürlich als reiner Mastodon-Nutzer, basiert und mastodongepillt, ankommen und sagen: "Die Lösung liegt doch auf der Hand! Friendica muß mehr wie Mastodon werden. Nur 500 Zeichen, Zusammenfassungsfeld in CW-Feld umbenennen, dieses blöde NSFW abschaffen, alle Protokolle außer ActivityPub rausschmeißen, und alles wird gut!"
Tja, dann kommen aber die Friendica-Veteranen. Qua "wir waren schon gut fünfeinhalb Jahre vor euch hier" und qua "Friendica ist objektiv die bessere und leistungsfähigere Software und Mastodon eine künstlich funktionsreduzierte Krücke, die sich nur durch Propaganda, sektenmäßige Gehirnwäsche ihrer Nutzer und vorsätzliche Inkompatibilität mit dem übrigen Fediverse halten kann". Und sie sagen: "Mastodon sollte viel eher sein blödes Zeichenlimit abschaffen, das CW-Feld in das umbenennen, was es schon auf Identi.ca war, Unterstützung für in sich geschlossene Konversationen einführen, Gruppen nach etablierten Fediverse-Standards einführen, volles HTML-Rendering zulassen bis hin zu beliebig vielen eingebetteten Bildern mitten im Beitrag und auch dieses bräsige Folgen-und-Gefolgtwerden durch standardmäßig gegenseitige Verbindungen ersetzen. Dann wäre das ein Gewinn für das ganze Fediverse!"
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonKultur #MastodonZentrizität #MastodonNormativität -
@Mina
Ich meine: So kompliziert ist das mit den Bildbeschreibungen auf Friendica ja auch nicht.
Ganz so straight-forward wie auf Mastodon ist es aber auch nicht. Und Friendica hat auch keine so vorbildlich detaillierte Dokumentation wie Hubzilla (wo das noch schwieriger ist).
Dazu kommt, daß Friendica immer noch zu einer gewissen Isolation von Mastodon neigt. Das wiederum kommt auch daher, daß ständig Mastodon-Nutzer Friendica-Nutzer dazu zwingen wollen, Friendicas Kultur über Bord zu werfen und statt dessen Mastodons Kultur anzunehmen. Wohlgemerkt, Friendicas Kultur ist mehr als ein Jahrzehnt älter als Mastodons Kultur und sehr viel besser an Friendicas Features angepaßt als Mastodons Kultur.
Wenn jetzt also ein Mastodon-Nutzer ankommt und von einem Friendica-Nutzer z. B. verlangt...- seine "Tröts" auf maximal 500 Zeichen zu beschränken und längere "Tröts" in Threads zu zerschneiden
- das Abstraktfeld (das auf Friendica schon sieben Jahre länger ein Abstraktfeld ist als auf Mastodon ein CW-Feld) für CWs zu nutzen und nur für CWs und nicht für Zusammenfassungen
- gleichzeitig mit Extra-Hashtags nicht mehr dafür zu sorgen, daß Beiträge automatisch hinter leserseitig individuell generierten CWs versteckt werden (was auf Friendica schon zwölf Jahre länger geht als auf Mastodon und wovon auf Mastodon niemand weiß, daß es überhaupt geht)
- oder gar das Aussehen der Erwähnungen und Hashtags an den Mastodon-"Standard" anzupassen (was gar nicht geht, weil das auf Friendica hartgecodet ist)
Folglich wird der Friendica-Nutzer noch weniger davon mitbekommen, was auf Mastodon abgeht.Weil es aber praktisch kein Zeichenlimit auf Friendica gibt, gibt es natürlich auch die super-simple Variante, die Beschreibung einfach in den Text des Posts zu setzen.
Kann man machen. Dann riskiert man aber, auf den Deckel zu kriegen, weil es im Alt-Text keine adäquate (= garantiert handgeschriebene, 100% akkurate und hinreichend detaillierte) Bildbeschreibung gibt.
Früher war es ja auch noch so, daß Mastodon hinter CWs nur den Post-Text verbarg, nicht aber das Bild. Wenn man ein Bild gepostet hat mit CW, dann konnten Mastodon-Nutzer nicht auf den ersten Blick sehen, daß im Post eine Bildbeschreibung ist. Damit gerechnet haben sie auch nicht, weil sie sich nicht vorstellen konnten, daß jemand eher die 500 Zeichen im "Tröt" für die Bildbeschreibung nimmt als die 1500 im Alt-Text, und auch nicht gesehen haben, daß der Post von Friendica kam und eben nicht von Mastodon. Also gingen sie davon aus: Wenn im Alt-Text keine Bildbeschreibung ist, dann ist da gar keine.
Inzwischen hat Mastodon das für sein Web-Frontend geändert. Ich glaube aber, es dürfte immer noch etliche Smartphone-Apps geben, die Bilder nicht hinter CWs verstecken.
Genau deswegen beschreibe ich meine eigenen Bilder auch immer zweimal: einmal sehr umfangreich im Post selbst und dann noch einmal zusätzlich im Alt-Text. Dabei reize ich im Alt-Text die 1500 Zeichen aus, die Mastodon bietet (weil Mastodon längere Alt-Texte abschneidet), auch wenn ich selbst im Grunde auch für Alt-Texte kein Zeichenlimit habe (ich selbst bin auf Hubzilla und poste meine Bilder auf (streams)). Im Post brauche ich mir über Zeichenlimits keinen Kopf zu machen.
Gut, eigentlich müßte ich die Alt-Texte auf 512 Zeichen beschränken, weil Misskey und die Forkeys längere Alt-Texte gänzlich löschen. Aber zumindest Misskey schneidet lange Posts bei ca. 8000 Zeichen ab, und die Forkeys werden ähnlich funktionieren. Das heißt, *key-Nutzer werden so oder so meine Posts an der Quelle lesen, denn 8000 Zeichen reichen mir nicht für einen Bildpost (außer vielleicht, wenn es ein Meme ist).
CC: @Der böse Hexe Njähähä 🧙♀️🪄⚡️
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #FediverseKultur #MastodonKultur #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) -
Your own posts aren't any better anyway; CW: long (over 1,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta, hashtag meta View article View summary
@David Mitchell :CApride: On the other hand, when I look at your personal timeline, it's obvious that you've never really arrived on Mastodon. You break all kinds of rules. You break alt-text and image-describing rules, and you break Mastodon's cultural rules.
You write alt-texts in multiple paragraphs. You almost never use CWs, not for posts over 500 characters, not for US or Canadian politics, not for wars, never. You rarely use hashtags, and when you do, you sometimes put them in-line instead of all into the bottom line. In-line hashtags are inconvenient for screen reader users.
You boost image posts without checking whether the images have alt-texts, much less whether the alt-texts are accurate, sufficiently detailed and in line with the existing alt-text and image description rules. You boost posts about potentially disturbing topics that have no CWs.
So don't come lecturing me if your own doings are likely to get you silently muted and blocked by other Mastodon users left and right.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #MastodonCulture -
Your own posts aren't any better anyway; CW: long (over 1,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta, hashtag meta View article View summary
@David Mitchell :CApride: On the other hand, when I look at your personal timeline, it's obvious that you've never really arrived on Mastodon. You break all kinds of rules. You break alt-text and image-describing rules, and you break Mastodon's cultural rules.
You write alt-texts in multiple paragraphs. You almost never use CWs, not for posts over 500 characters, not for US or Canadian politics, not for wars, never. You rarely use hashtags, and when you do, you sometimes put them in-line instead of all into the bottom line. In-line hashtags are inconvenient for screen reader users.
You boost image posts without checking whether the images have alt-texts, much less whether the alt-texts are accurate, sufficiently detailed and in line with the existing alt-text and image description rules. You boost posts about potentially disturbing topics that have no CWs.
So don't come lecturing me if your own doings are likely to get you silently muted and blocked by other Mastodon users left and right.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #MastodonCulture -
I've described all my images since I've learned about alt-texts, and I put more effort and knowledge into them than anyone on Mastodon; CW: long (almost 8,700 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta Artikel ansehen Zusammenfassung ansehen
@David Mitchell :CApride: Now listen here.
Ever since I've learned about alt-texts and image descriptions, I've described all my images. And unlike most Mastodon users, I've improved my image-describing further and further.
Whenever I learned something new about image descriptions, be it a rule, a guideline, a good practice or a Mastodon preference, I used this new knowledge in new image descriptions and declared all my previous image descriptions obsolete. And I've learned a lot over the years.
I've learned from Mastodon that if explanations are necessary to understand an image, they must be delivered immediately with the image post. Ever since, I've explained everything in my images that needs explaining. And since all my image posts are about extremely obscure niche topics, they need a whole lot of explanations.
I've learned from a physically disabled Mastodon user that not everyone can access alt-texts. She, for example, can't. Thus, explanations in the alt-text are lost to her. I've learned from her that explanations go into the post text. I've put all my explanations into the post text ever since.
I've learned from Mastodon that Mastodon tends to love long, detailed image descriptions. Considering how obscure the contents of my original images are and how nobody knows what anything in them looks like if they don't see it, I came to the conclusion that someone somewhere out there might need full, detailed descriptions. I've given my original images full, detailed descriptions ever since.
I've learned from various sources that alt-text must only describe what's important within the context of a post. But judging from my observations of Mastodon, its culture and its love for long alt-texts override this rule. If someone wants to know about all the small details in your images, the context doesn't matter. Thus, how detailed my image descriptions are depends on whether or not I have to expect someone being curious about the details.
I've learned by experimentation that Mastodon truncates long external alt-texts from outside at the 1,500-character mark. Also, Hubzilla (where I am) can only display so many characters of alt-text, and alt-text cannot be scrolled. Since the audience of my alt-texts is pretty much exclusively on Mastodon, I've put the full, long, detailed image descriptions into the post text.
I've learned from a blog post that alt-texts must never contain line breaks. Line breaks in alt-texts have a nasty side-effect for screen reader users: After each line break, screen readers assume that they're reading a new alt-text for a new image. And they start whatever they consider an individual image alt-text with something like, "Graphic." Thus, I write all my alt-texts as one single paragraph.
I've learned from another blog post, as well as personal experience with various Fediverse server applications, that alt-texts must never contain the double quotes commonly found on keyboards. Different frontends may misbehave in different ways, some fail very ungracefully. Thus, I no longer use these quotes in my alt-texts.
I've learned from Mastodon that even if there is an image description in the post text, there must always be an accurate and sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text regardless. Otherwise you risk being sanctioned. I have described all my original images twice ever since: with a long and fully detailed description in the post text and a shorter description in the alt-text.
I've learned from blog posts and websites about alt-texts that text in images must be transcribed verbatim. However, nowhere that I've seen this rule written down, I've seen it mention text that's unreadable in the image while the author knows what's written there. My conclusion is that there is no exception for these texts. I tend to have many such texts. Thus, I transcribe all bits and pieces of text within the borders of my images if I have a way to read them. And I usually have.
I've learned from other blog posts about alt-texts that colours must not only be mentioned in image descriptions, but they must also be described. After all, blind people cannot be expected to know what e.g. Burgundy red is. Also, dimensions must be given not simply in absolute measures, but relatively to what else is in the image or to something that everyone is familiar with, namely the human body. Unfortunately, I've learned that so recently that I only have one original image post in which I make use of these techniques; hence, all my older original image posts count as obsolete.
I've learned from yet elsewhere that races must not be mentioned, and genders must not be assumed. I abide by both when describing meme images. My original images, on the other hand, never contain actual human beings. Whenever I show an avatar, it's always one of my avatars whose gender I have personally defined, and these avatars can't really emulate real-life human phenotypes.
Most of the above has never been taken into consideration by anyone on Mastodon. I'm literally the only one in the Fediverse who takes describing images to such levels.
But I go beyond alt-texts and image descriptions.
I've learned from Mastodon that if there's something, anything in a post of yours that might disturb anyone in some way, the post requires a Mastodon-style content warning that mentions in which way the post is disturbing. Here on Hubzilla, that's a summary. It's the same thing, and Hubzilla had summaries before Mastodon had CWs.
From observing both Mastodon and the Web outside the Fediverse, I've compiled a list of potentially triggering topics. Even excluding national/state/provincial/regional politics, I've gathered 111 of these so far. I do my best to include each one whenever necessary. On top of that, I add CWs for many things I post about because I guess I go onto people's nerves when I post about them (the Fediverse, alt-text, image descriptions, hashtags, character limits, quote-posts, actual quote-posting etc.).
However, Hubzilla is not a Twitter wannabe. It's more like Facebook or blogging software. It only offers a summary (Mastodon: CW) field for posts and DMs, but not for comments (it has two different editors for when you reply and when you don't). I could try to add a summary (Mastodon: CW) using a pair of BBcode tags, and I've done so here, but I know from personal experience that the summary tags do not translate to a Mastodon CW in comments. I'd add an individual CW to each one of my comments, but Mastodon users will neither get an actual CW nor understand that I've tried.
So I double almost all my CW'd topics up with an appropriate set of hashtags. This is in line with the culture where I am: Here on Hubzilla and in its whole software family, we don't force poster-side CWs upon each other. Instead, we have them automatically generated for ourselves, reader-side, tailored to our individual needs. But this requires keywords to trigger the automated hiding of content behind CWs.
Also, I know just what may disturb people. The best example is eye contact. You think that eye contact can only be triggering in full-face portraits of a person looking directly at the viewer? Wrong! It's triggering if there's at least one eye in the image. I've been told that some people in the autistic spectrum can detect an eye in an image if it's only a tiny fraction of a pixel. I have to expect this to extend to other potentially triggering things as well.
Thus, if it's potentially triggering and somewhere within the borders of one of my images, even if it's hardly discernible or completely invisible to the neurotypical, I still consider the whole image potentially triggering, and I treat the image and the whole post as such.
In fact, I've stopped posting potentially triggering images here on Hubzilla altogether. That's because Hubzilla has no way of making Mastodon blank an image out. And not long ago, Mastodon's CWs only hid the post text, but not the images belonging to a post. I can't rule out that certain Mastodon apps still behave this way. So I can't even use CWs to hide a triggering image. This is why I only ever post images on (streams) now: (streams) makes Mastodon blank images out when a post contains one or two certain hashtags.
Again, nobody on Mastodon goes even only nearly that far.
Please tell me in which ways exactly this is still insufficient.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta -
I've described all my images since I've learned about alt-texts, and I put more effort and knowledge into them than anyone on Mastodon; CW: long (almost 8,700 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta Artikel ansehen Zusammenfassung ansehen
@David Mitchell :CApride: Now listen here.
Ever since I've learned about alt-texts and image descriptions, I've described all my images. And unlike most Mastodon users, I've improved my image-describing further and further.
Whenever I learned something new about image descriptions, be it a rule, a guideline, a good practice or a Mastodon preference, I used this new knowledge in new image descriptions and declared all my previous image descriptions obsolete. And I've learned a lot over the years.
I've learned from Mastodon that if explanations are necessary to understand an image, they must be delivered immediately with the image post. Ever since, I've explained everything in my images that needs explaining. And since all my image posts are about extremely obscure niche topics, they need a whole lot of explanations.
I've learned from a physically disabled Mastodon user that not everyone can access alt-texts. She, for example, can't. Thus, explanations in the alt-text are lost to her. I've learned from her that explanations go into the post text. I've put all my explanations into the post text ever since.
I've learned from Mastodon that Mastodon tends to love long, detailed image descriptions. Considering how obscure the contents of my original images are and how nobody knows what anything in them looks like if they don't see it, I came to the conclusion that someone somewhere out there might need full, detailed descriptions. I've given my original images full, detailed descriptions ever since.
I've learned from various sources that alt-text must only describe what's important within the context of a post. But judging from my observations of Mastodon, its culture and its love for long alt-texts override this rule. If someone wants to know about all the small details in your images, the context doesn't matter. Thus, how detailed my image descriptions are depends on whether or not I have to expect someone being curious about the details.
I've learned by experimentation that Mastodon truncates long external alt-texts from outside at the 1,500-character mark. Also, Hubzilla (where I am) can only display so many characters of alt-text, and alt-text cannot be scrolled. Since the audience of my alt-texts is pretty much exclusively on Mastodon, I've put the full, long, detailed image descriptions into the post text.
I've learned from a blog post that alt-texts must never contain line breaks. Line breaks in alt-texts have a nasty side-effect for screen reader users: After each line break, screen readers assume that they're reading a new alt-text for a new image. And they start whatever they consider an individual image alt-text with something like, "Graphic." Thus, I write all my alt-texts as one single paragraph.
I've learned from another blog post, as well as personal experience with various Fediverse server applications, that alt-texts must never contain the double quotes commonly found on keyboards. Different frontends may misbehave in different ways, some fail very ungracefully. Thus, I no longer use these quotes in my alt-texts.
I've learned from Mastodon that even if there is an image description in the post text, there must always be an accurate and sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text regardless. Otherwise you risk being sanctioned. I have described all my original images twice ever since: with a long and fully detailed description in the post text and a shorter description in the alt-text.
I've learned from blog posts and websites about alt-texts that text in images must be transcribed verbatim. However, nowhere that I've seen this rule written down, I've seen it mention text that's unreadable in the image while the author knows what's written there. My conclusion is that there is no exception for these texts. I tend to have many such texts. Thus, I transcribe all bits and pieces of text within the borders of my images if I have a way to read them. And I usually have.
I've learned from other blog posts about alt-texts that colours must not only be mentioned in image descriptions, but they must also be described. After all, blind people cannot be expected to know what e.g. Burgundy red is. Also, dimensions must be given not simply in absolute measures, but relatively to what else is in the image or to something that everyone is familiar with, namely the human body. Unfortunately, I've learned that so recently that I only have one original image post in which I make use of these techniques; hence, all my older original image posts count as obsolete.
I've learned from yet elsewhere that races must not be mentioned, and genders must not be assumed. I abide by both when describing meme images. My original images, on the other hand, never contain actual human beings. Whenever I show an avatar, it's always one of my avatars whose gender I have personally defined, and these avatars can't really emulate real-life human phenotypes.
Most of the above has never been taken into consideration by anyone on Mastodon. I'm literally the only one in the Fediverse who takes describing images to such levels.
But I go beyond alt-texts and image descriptions.
I've learned from Mastodon that if there's something, anything in a post of yours that might disturb anyone in some way, the post requires a Mastodon-style content warning that mentions in which way the post is disturbing. Here on Hubzilla, that's a summary. It's the same thing, and Hubzilla had summaries before Mastodon had CWs.
From observing both Mastodon and the Web outside the Fediverse, I've compiled a list of potentially triggering topics. Even excluding national/state/provincial/regional politics, I've gathered 111 of these so far. I do my best to include each one whenever necessary. On top of that, I add CWs for many things I post about because I guess I go onto people's nerves when I post about them (the Fediverse, alt-text, image descriptions, hashtags, character limits, quote-posts, actual quote-posting etc.).
However, Hubzilla is not a Twitter wannabe. It's more like Facebook or blogging software. It only offers a summary (Mastodon: CW) field for posts and DMs, but not for comments (it has two different editors for when you reply and when you don't). I could try to add a summary (Mastodon: CW) using a pair of BBcode tags, and I've done so here, but I know from personal experience that the summary tags do not translate to a Mastodon CW in comments. I'd add an individual CW to each one of my comments, but Mastodon users will neither get an actual CW nor understand that I've tried.
So I double almost all my CW'd topics up with an appropriate set of hashtags. This is in line with the culture where I am: Here on Hubzilla and in its whole software family, we don't force poster-side CWs upon each other. Instead, we have them automatically generated for ourselves, reader-side, tailored to our individual needs. But this requires keywords to trigger the automated hiding of content behind CWs.
Also, I know just what may disturb people. The best example is eye contact. You think that eye contact can only be triggering in full-face portraits of a person looking directly at the viewer? Wrong! It's triggering if there's at least one eye in the image. I've been told that some people in the autistic spectrum can detect an eye in an image if it's only a tiny fraction of a pixel. I have to expect this to extend to other potentially triggering things as well.
Thus, if it's potentially triggering and somewhere within the borders of one of my images, even if it's hardly discernible or completely invisible to the neurotypical, I still consider the whole image potentially triggering, and I treat the image and the whole post as such.
In fact, I've stopped posting potentially triggering images here on Hubzilla altogether. That's because Hubzilla has no way of making Mastodon blank an image out. And not long ago, Mastodon's CWs only hid the post text, but not the images belonging to a post. I can't rule out that certain Mastodon apps still behave this way. So I can't even use CWs to hide a triggering image. This is why I only ever post images on (streams) now: (streams) makes Mastodon blank images out when a post contains one or two certain hashtags.
Again, nobody on Mastodon goes even only nearly that far.
Please tell me in which ways exactly this is still insufficient.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta -
@afreytes, 👁️🗨️of🇵🇷 @Author-ized L.J. I always use a lot of hashtags. I have to. But many of my hashtags are not to increase discoverability. They're to trigger filtering, including filters that hide my content behind CW buttons. Such filters have been available on Mastodon since October, 2022 and here on Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) since its inception before Mastodon was even made.
This, by the way, is why some of my hashtags start with "CW": They're only there as content warning triggers/content warning substitutes, also because I have no means to add Mastodon-style content warnings to replies. Otherwise this comment would show the following CW on Mastodon:CW: long (over 4,700 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, hashtag meta, content warning meta, character limit meta
However, unless I explicitly talk about certain hashtags, they all always go into the last line. And I think that even 20 hashtags in the last line of one of my posts or comments make people less uncomfortable than the post or comment exceeding 500 characters or myself talking about the Fediverse, especially talking about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon.
This comment, for example, would get the following hashtags (normally in the last line, but this time I'm talking about them):- Hashtags for content over 500 characters:
- #Long (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #LongPost (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- #CWLong (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: long")
- #CWLongPost (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: long"; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about the Fediverse:
- #FediMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #FediverseMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- #CWFediMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: Fediverse meta")
- #CWFediverseMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: Fediverse meta"; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about hashtags:
- #Hashtag (= I'm talking about hashtags; also for discovery)
- #Hashtags (= I'm talking about hashtags; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for the singular and who follows/searches for the plural)
- #HashtagMeta (= I'm talking about hashtags and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #CWHashtagMeta (= I'm talking about hashtags and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: hashtag meta")
- Hashtags for when I talk about content warnings:
- #CW (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery)
- #CWs (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters the singular and who follows/searches for/filters the plural)
- #ContentWarning (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters what)
- #ContentWarnings (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters what)
- #CWMeta (= I'm talking about content warnings and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #ContentWarningMeta (= I'm talking about content warnings and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about character limits:
- #CharacterLimit (= I'm talking about character limits; also for discovery)
- #CharacterLimits (= I'm talking about character limits; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for the singular and who follows/searches for the plural)
- #CharacterLimitMeta (= I'm talking about character limits and what I, as someone with over 16.7 million characters, think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #CWCharacterLimitMeta (= I'm talking about character limits and what I, as someone with over 16.7 million characters, think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: character limit meta")
- Hashtags for content over 500 characters:
-
@afreytes, 👁️🗨️of🇵🇷 @Author-ized L.J. I always use a lot of hashtags. I have to. But many of my hashtags are not to increase discoverability. They're to trigger filtering, including filters that hide my content behind CW buttons. Such filters have been available on Mastodon since October, 2022 and here on Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) since its inception before Mastodon was even made.
This, by the way, is why some of my hashtags start with "CW": They're only there as content warning triggers/content warning substitutes, also because I have no means to add Mastodon-style content warnings to replies. Otherwise this comment would show the following CW on Mastodon:CW: long (over 4,700 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, hashtag meta, content warning meta, character limit meta
However, unless I explicitly talk about certain hashtags, they all always go into the last line. And I think that even 20 hashtags in the last line of one of my posts or comments make people less uncomfortable than the post or comment exceeding 500 characters or myself talking about the Fediverse, especially talking about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon.
This comment, for example, would get the following hashtags (normally in the last line, but this time I'm talking about them):- Hashtags for content over 500 characters:
- #Long (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #LongPost (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- #CWLong (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: long")
- #CWLongPost (= this message is over 500 characters long which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: long"; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about the Fediverse:
- #FediMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #FediverseMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- #CWFediMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: Fediverse meta")
- #CWFediverseMeta (= I'm talking about the Fediverse which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: Fediverse meta"; two hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about hashtags:
- #Hashtag (= I'm talking about hashtags; also for discovery)
- #Hashtags (= I'm talking about hashtags; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for the singular and who follows/searches for the plural)
- #HashtagMeta (= I'm talking about hashtags and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #CWHashtagMeta (= I'm talking about hashtags and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: hashtag meta")
- Hashtags for when I talk about content warnings:
- #CW (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery)
- #CWs (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters the singular and who follows/searches for/filters the plural)
- #ContentWarning (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters what)
- #ContentWarnings (= I'm talking about content warnings; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for/filters what)
- #CWMeta (= I'm talking about content warnings and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #ContentWarningMeta (= I'm talking about content warnings and what I think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; also for discovery; multiple hashtags because I can't know who filters what)
- Hashtags for when I talk about character limits:
- #CharacterLimit (= I'm talking about character limits; also for discovery)
- #CharacterLimits (= I'm talking about character limits; also for discovery; two hashtags because I can't know who follows/searches for the singular and who follows/searches for the plural)
- #CharacterLimitMeta (= I'm talking about character limits and what I, as someone with over 16.7 million characters, think about them which makes some people uncomfortable)
- #CWCharacterLimitMeta (= I'm talking about character limits and what I, as someone with over 16.7 million characters, think about them which makes some people uncomfortable; hashtag version of "CW: character limit meta")
- Hashtags for content over 500 characters:
-
CW: Misskey only allows for 512 characters of alt-text which is bad for my image posts; CW: long (over 8,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, character limit meta, content warning meta
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 -
CW: Misskey only allows for 512 characters of alt-text which is bad for my image posts; CW: long (over 8,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, character limit meta, content warning meta
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 -
@tux0r :openbsd:
Wer glaubt, es gebe eine Mastodonkultur, beweist damit vor allem eine gewisse Neigung zu Fehlschlüssen.
Es gibt eine Mastodon-Kultur. Und die definiert sich ganz besonders durch eine ganze Anzahl oftmals ungeschriebener Regeln. Ein Auszug:- Mastodon ist das beste und sicherste soziale Medium und das beste und sicherste soziale Netzwerk, das es überhaupt gibt.
- Mastodon ist absolut alternativlos.
- Es ist scheißegal, ob man "Fediverse" oder "Mastodon" sagt. Das meint im Grunde dasselbe.
- Das Fediverse fing mit Mastodon an und wurde von Gargron erfunden.
- Die einzigen Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse-Anwendungen, die erwähnt werden dürfen, sind Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flohmarkt und vielleicht Loops und WordPress.
- Tröte nie mehr als 500 Zeichen auf einmal. Wenn, dann teile deinen Tröt in einen Thread aus Tröts von jeweils nicht mehr als 500 Zeichen auf, die aufeinander antworten und mit x/y durchnumeriert sind.
- Wenn du über sensible, potentiell triggernde oder anderweitig unangenehme Dinge schreibst, mußt du unbedingt eine entsprechende CW ins CW-Feld eintragen.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du das CW-Feld für etwas anderes als CWs benutzen.
- CWs, die automatisch auf deinem Konto nur für dich erzeugt werden, gibt's nicht.
- Du darfst pro Tröt nicht mehr als vier Hashtags verwenden, und die müssen alle hintereinander in der letzten Zeile stehen.
- Du mußt immer korrekt gendern.
- Alle deine Tröts müssen immer maximal barrierefrei sein.
- Wenn du Bilder in irgendeiner Art trötest, mußt du jedes Bild unbedingt mit einem 100% handgeschriebenen, akkuraten, hinreichend detaillierten Alt-Text beschreiben. Wenn das Bild und/oder die Beschreibung nicht für jeden verständlich ist, dann mußt du auch eine Erklärung mitliefern, die für jeden verständlich ist.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du jemandem antworten, wenn du weder demjenigen gegenseitig folgst noch derjenige dich vorher in dem Post, auf den du antworten willst, erwähnt hat. Denn das wäre Reply-Guying und übergriffig.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du jemandem etwas erklären, wenn du von demjenigen nicht vorher explizit um genau diese Erklärung gebeten worden bist. Denn das wäre Mansplaining und übergriffig.
- Volltextsuche ist böse. Gargron hätte sie nie im Fediverse einführen dürfen.
- Quote-Tröts sind böse. Gargron hätte sie nie im Fediverse einführen dürfen. Sorge dafür, daß niemand deine Tröts quote-tröten kann.
- Auf Mastodon genießt jeder größtmöglichen Schutz und hat jeder das Recht auf größtmögliche Unterstützung. Außer denen, die weder im Real Life einer schutzbedürftigen Minderheit angehören noch sich an die Mastodon-Kultur und Mastodon-Regeln halten. Die sind rechtlos und vogelfrei und dürfen beliebig attackiert, beleidigt, blockiert und/oder dem eigenen Admin oder dem dieser Nutzer gemeldet werden.
- Wer in einem Tröt schreibt, nicht auf Mastodon zu sein, ist ein rechtloser, vogelfreier Eindringling.
- Jeder Mastodon-Nutzer darf die obigen Regeln gegenüber jedem anderen im Fediverse auf beliebige Art und Weise durchsetzen.
Das ist doch keine Religion hier, ey.
Richtig. Mastodon kommt mir mehr wie eine Sekte vor. So oder so werden Glauben und "Alternativfakten" über tatsächliche Tatsachen gestellt.
CC: @crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts @die_Ergo 🤍🏳️🌈 @noble feu @Jörg 🇩🇪🇬🇧🇪🇺
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #MastodonKultur #MastodonRegeln -
@tux0r :openbsd:
Wer glaubt, es gebe eine Mastodonkultur, beweist damit vor allem eine gewisse Neigung zu Fehlschlüssen.
Es gibt eine Mastodon-Kultur. Und die definiert sich ganz besonders durch eine ganze Anzahl oftmals ungeschriebener Regeln. Ein Auszug:- Mastodon ist das beste und sicherste soziale Medium und das beste und sicherste soziale Netzwerk, das es überhaupt gibt.
- Mastodon ist absolut alternativlos.
- Es ist scheißegal, ob man "Fediverse" oder "Mastodon" sagt. Das meint im Grunde dasselbe.
- Das Fediverse fing mit Mastodon an und wurde von Gargron erfunden.
- Die einzigen Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse-Anwendungen, die erwähnt werden dürfen, sind Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flohmarkt und vielleicht Loops und WordPress.
- Tröte nie mehr als 500 Zeichen auf einmal. Wenn, dann teile deinen Tröt in einen Thread aus Tröts von jeweils nicht mehr als 500 Zeichen auf, die aufeinander antworten und mit x/y durchnumeriert sind.
- Wenn du über sensible, potentiell triggernde oder anderweitig unangenehme Dinge schreibst, mußt du unbedingt eine entsprechende CW ins CW-Feld eintragen.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du das CW-Feld für etwas anderes als CWs benutzen.
- CWs, die automatisch auf deinem Konto nur für dich erzeugt werden, gibt's nicht.
- Du darfst pro Tröt nicht mehr als vier Hashtags verwenden, und die müssen alle hintereinander in der letzten Zeile stehen.
- Du mußt immer korrekt gendern.
- Alle deine Tröts müssen immer maximal barrierefrei sein.
- Wenn du Bilder in irgendeiner Art trötest, mußt du jedes Bild unbedingt mit einem 100% handgeschriebenen, akkuraten, hinreichend detaillierten Alt-Text beschreiben. Wenn das Bild und/oder die Beschreibung nicht für jeden verständlich ist, dann mußt du auch eine Erklärung mitliefern, die für jeden verständlich ist.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du jemandem antworten, wenn du weder demjenigen gegenseitig folgst noch derjenige dich vorher in dem Post, auf den du antworten willst, erwähnt hat. Denn das wäre Reply-Guying und übergriffig.
- Auf gar keinen Fall darfst du jemandem etwas erklären, wenn du von demjenigen nicht vorher explizit um genau diese Erklärung gebeten worden bist. Denn das wäre Mansplaining und übergriffig.
- Volltextsuche ist böse. Gargron hätte sie nie im Fediverse einführen dürfen.
- Quote-Tröts sind böse. Gargron hätte sie nie im Fediverse einführen dürfen. Sorge dafür, daß niemand deine Tröts quote-tröten kann.
- Auf Mastodon genießt jeder größtmöglichen Schutz und hat jeder das Recht auf größtmögliche Unterstützung. Außer denen, die weder im Real Life einer schutzbedürftigen Minderheit angehören noch sich an die Mastodon-Kultur und Mastodon-Regeln halten. Die sind rechtlos und vogelfrei und dürfen beliebig attackiert, beleidigt, blockiert und/oder dem eigenen Admin oder dem dieser Nutzer gemeldet werden.
- Wer in einem Tröt schreibt, nicht auf Mastodon zu sein, ist ein rechtloser, vogelfreier Eindringling.
- Jeder Mastodon-Nutzer darf die obigen Regeln gegenüber jedem anderen im Fediverse auf beliebige Art und Weise durchsetzen.
Das ist doch keine Religion hier, ey.
Richtig. Mastodon kommt mir mehr wie eine Sekte vor. So oder so werden Glauben und "Alternativfakten" über tatsächliche Tatsachen gestellt.
CC: @crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts @die_Ergo 🤍🏳️🌈 @noble feu @Jörg 🇩🇪🇬🇧🇪🇺
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #MastodonKultur #MastodonRegeln -
@David Tanner 🏴 @Stefan Bohacek You don't. You don't apply them to stuff that you send to others. You apply them to stuff that you receive in your timeline. Not for others, but for yourself.
I think the issue here is that it's often hard-wired in Mastodon users' heads that "CW" equals "poster-side" equals "provided by the poster for all readers all the same".
In this case, it's different. It's all happening on the reader's side. Like, the filter generates a CW for the reader who sets up the filter, depending on what keywords the filter contains, depending on what keywords are in a post.
You, as the reader, define what you want to have hidden behind CWs for yourself. If something disturbs you just enough to have it hidden, but not enough to have it purged from your timeline entirely, you set up a filter with the corresponding keywords. And that filter will hide content with at least one of these keywords in it behind a CW. Automatically generated only for you, personally, individually.
The next user does not want the same content hidden. They do not set up such a filter. And they see the very same post without a CW without having to do anything themselves.
I mean, I guess you know what filters do on Mastodon. Normally, they remove stuff from your timeline. But with this setting, they hide that content behind a button for you instead of completely removing it.
Maybe it's easier to understand for us Hubzilla users because we've had something similar since before Mastodon was even made, much less since before Mastodon started repurposing our summary field for poster-issued CWs. So automatically generated, individual, reader-side CWs are the default for us and part of our culture whereas they came to Mastodon too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #Hubzilla -
@zotheca @Stefan Bohacek It isn't the title field. It's the summary field. It has been the summary field since Evan Prodromou added it to Identi.ca in 2008. And it only became a CW field when a Mastodon user for the demo scene submitted a merge request to Mastodon's GitHub repository in 2017 which repurposed this summary field, unused by Mastodon at this point, as a CW field.
My own POV on this is a whole lot different from typical Mastodon POVs. I've joined the Fediverse on Friendica in the early 2010s as opposed to on Mastodon in the 2020s before I moved on to fledgling Hubzilla.
Now, both Friendica and Hubzilla as well as the whole rest of the family (of which (streams) of 2021 and Forte of 2024 still exist) have a nifty optional feature called "NSFW": It's a list of keywords which, if detected in a message, hide the entire message behind a button. Much like the hiding feature in Mastodon's filters, only not built into the actual filters, much more simple and over 12 years older than Mastodon's solution.
In this software family, the NSFW feature is not perceived as a filter, even though it's very similar to the actual channel-wide filters (which, by the way, are among the few things which are more simple even on Hubzilla than on Mastodon because they've only got two keyword lists, an allowlist and a blocklist).
Rather, it's seen as an automated, individual, reader-side CW generator. It's deeply engrained into the culture of these Fediverse server applications which is a great deal different from Mastodon's culture. And it's seen as vastly superior to poster-side CWs that are forced upon all readers all the same.
A takeaway from this software family: If you write a potentially sensitive post, and you have no way of artificially weaving NSFW-triggering keywords into the actual post text, add them to the bottom line as hashtags. I do that all the time, hence the hashtags that start with "CW" to make clear that they're supposed to trigger reader-side CW generators.
By the way, the Friendica and Hubzilla inventor and (streams) developer Mike Macgirvin proposed two catch-all hashtags for sensitive posts to the (streams) users (that was before he forked Forte off the streams repository). One is#sensitivewhich also has the side-effect that (streams) and potentially also Forte make Mastodon blank out all images in the post. The other one is#⚠️. Or, if your post is really disturbing,#⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️. However, this has yet to find its way into Hubzilla, not to mention Friendica or even Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.
As for the summary field, if Mastodon actually managed to push its entire community away from fixed poster-side CWs towards automated reader-side CWs, the whole field would be useless. I mean, Mastodon didn't support it at all before it had a CW field because, frankly, you don't need summaries for 500 characters.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
@zotheca @Stefan Bohacek It isn't the title field. It's the summary field. It has been the summary field since Evan Prodromou added it to Identi.ca in 2008. And it only became a CW field when a Mastodon user for the demo scene submitted a merge request to Mastodon's GitHub repository in 2017 which repurposed this summary field, unused by Mastodon at this point, as a CW field.
My own POV on this is a whole lot different from typical Mastodon POVs. I've joined the Fediverse on Friendica in the early 2010s as opposed to on Mastodon in the 2020s before I moved on to fledgling Hubzilla.
Now, both Friendica and Hubzilla as well as the whole rest of the family (of which (streams) of 2021 and Forte of 2024 still exist) have a nifty optional feature called "NSFW": It's a list of keywords which, if detected in a message, hide the entire message behind a button. Much like the hiding feature in Mastodon's filters, only not built into the actual filters, much more simple and over 12 years older than Mastodon's solution.
In this software family, the NSFW feature is not perceived as a filter, even though it's very similar to the actual channel-wide filters (which, by the way, are among the few things which are more simple even on Hubzilla than on Mastodon because they've only got two keyword lists, an allowlist and a blocklist).
Rather, it's seen as an automated, individual, reader-side CW generator. It's deeply engrained into the culture of these Fediverse server applications which is a great deal different from Mastodon's culture. And it's seen as vastly superior to poster-side CWs that are forced upon all readers all the same.
A takeaway from this software family: If you write a potentially sensitive post, and you have no way of artificially weaving NSFW-triggering keywords into the actual post text, add them to the bottom line as hashtags. I do that all the time, hence the hashtags that start with "CW" to make clear that they're supposed to trigger reader-side CW generators.
By the way, the Friendica and Hubzilla inventor and (streams) developer Mike Macgirvin proposed two catch-all hashtags for sensitive posts to the (streams) users (that was before he forked Forte off the streams repository). One is#sensitivewhich also has the side-effect that (streams) and potentially also Forte make Mastodon blank out all images in the post. The other one is#⚠️. Or, if your post is really disturbing,#⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️. However, this has yet to find its way into Hubzilla, not to mention Friendica or even Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.
As for the summary field, if Mastodon actually managed to push its entire community away from fixed poster-side CWs towards automated reader-side CWs, the whole field would be useless. I mean, Mastodon didn't support it at all before it had a CW field because, frankly, you don't need summaries for 500 characters.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
@Stefan Bohacek This is the case for three reasons.
One, Twitter has never had this feature. And if Twitter doesn't have a feature, it's hard for many to imagine that Mastodon has it.
Two, there is no dedicated button for it up-front in the timeline view, neither on Mastodon's Web interface nor in any mobile app.
Three, it came too late. Mastodon's culture as we know it now was coined in spring 2022 by those who had escaped from Twitter after Elon Musk had announced he wanted to buy it. However, this filter feature was introduced to Mastodon with version 4.0 in October when Mastodon's culture was already set in stone for all eternity.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture -
@Stefan Bohacek This is the case for three reasons.
One, Twitter has never had this feature. And if Twitter doesn't have a feature, it's hard for many to imagine that Mastodon has it.
Two, there is no dedicated button for it up-front in the timeline view, neither on Mastodon's Web interface nor in any mobile app.
Three, it came too late. Mastodon's culture as we know it now was coined in spring 2022 by those who had escaped from Twitter after Elon Musk had announced he wanted to buy it. However, this filter feature was introduced to Mastodon with version 4.0 in October when Mastodon's culture was already set in stone for all eternity.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture -
@⚝ Mirko ⚝
die Adminbubble dort ist sehr viel ausgeglichener und lässt vor allem andere Plattformen in Ruhe.
Mindestens die Hälfte von denen weiß doch gar nicht, daß es auch noch andere Fediverse-Serveranwendungen gibt. Für die ist das Fediverse gleich Mastodon. Und von denen, die das wissen, wissen die allermeisten nicht, was die anderen Anwendungen können.
Warum hat die "Mastodon-Community" beispielsweise nie gefordert, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, die Forkeys, Friendica, Hubzilla usw. zu deföderieren, weil die alle in der Lage sind, jeden öffentlichen Mastodon-Tröt widerstandslos zu quote-posten? Weil auf Mastodon praktisch niemand weiß, daß die dazu in der Lage sind. Wüßten die das, hätten sie längst die Messer gewetzt und die totale Deföderation gefordert.
Außerdem wird man auf diesen Serveranwendungen immer wieder von Mastodon-Nutzern diskriminiert oder gar attackiert. Man soll sich gefälligst an die "Fediverse-Kultur", will sagen, Mastodon-Kultur halten (was impliziert, daß man die eigene Kultur über Bord werfen soll). Man soll niemals mehr als 500 Zeichen posten. Man soll "alle notwendigen" CWs ins CW-Feld eintragen (also Friendicas Abstrakt-Feld bzw. Hubzillas Zusammenfassungsfeld) und es gar keinen Fall für irgendetwas anderes benutzen. Und so weiter.
Derweil beharren praktisch alle Mastodon-Nutzer darauf, daß das nie passiert. Weil sie nie mitbekommen, daß das passiert. Ihnen selbst passiert es ja nicht, weil sie sich als Mastodon-Nutzer eh an die Mastodon-Kultur halten, eh nicht mehr als 500 Zeichen haben, das CW-Feld nur als CW-Feld kennen usw. Und wenn es ihnen nicht passiert, dann sind sie der felsenfesten Überzeugung, daß es gar nicht passiert.
Das Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse widersetzt sich ständig Mastodons Kultur und bricht ständig Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln. Die allermeisten Mastodon-Nutzer wissen aber nicht, daß das passiert, ganz einfach, weil sie davon nichts mitbekommen. Dasselbe gilt auch für die allermeisten Mastodon-Admins.
Mastodon stellt im Fediverse irgendwo zwischen 60 und 70% der monatlich aktiven Nutzer. Aus irgendwelchen Gründen aber kommen gefühlt über 98% des Post-Aufkommens auf Mastodon von Mastodon selbst. Du kannst 4 Jahre auf Mastodon sein, 1000 Konten folgen und dich trotzdem in einer reinen Vanilla-Mastodon-Blase bewegen und erst nach diesen 4 Jahren deinen allerersten Beitrag mit über 500 Zeichen zu Gesicht bekommen. Wenn überhaupt.
Mastodon-Admins sind gegenüber dem Rest des Fediverse nicht deshalb so entspannt, weil das, was Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica usw. nach Mastodon schicken, für sie okay ist. Sondern, weil sie gar nicht wissen, was Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica usw. nach Mastodon schicken und viele von denen nie auch nur irgendwas von diesen anderen Anwendungen gehört haben. Sonst wären tausende von denen an vorderster Front mit dabei, wenn es darum geht, alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, auf Mastodon zu blockieren, das kannst du mir mal glauben.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteTröt #QuoteTröts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebatte #QuoteTrötDebatte #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #ZeichenLimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #FediverseKultur #MastodonKultur #MastodonRegeln -
@6L6GC
People, especially those in recovery, need to have safe spaces and CWs allow for self moderation (giving the person on the receiving end control over what they allow into their space).
Ironically, Mastodon isn't even particularly good at that. Not by overall Fediverse standards.How Mastodon does it
Mastodon handles CWs by having them put into a text field that was invented on identi.ca in 2008 as a summary field. Thus, CWs have to come from the poster. And the poster has no other choice but to force the same CWs upon absolutely everyone else, regardless of whether they need that particular CW or not, regardless of what other CWs someone may need. Your posts will be over-CW'd for some and under-CW'd for others.
What's even worse is that this and only this is deeply engrained in Mastodon's culture. From a Mastodon POV, it's completely unimaginable that it could possibly be any different. It's actually being enforced upon the whole Fediverse by Mastodon users.
CWs would be better if they didn't come from the poster. If they were automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader and their needs, based on text filtering.
Mastodon can do that actually. But it's cumbersome. It's as cumbersome as Mastodon's filters altogether: Each keyword needs its own filter defined and adjusted. Next to no-one knows that Mastodon can do that, also because Twitter can't, and who expects Mastodon to have features that Twitter doesn't? Lastly, it was introduced in October, 2022, with Mastodon 4.0, too late for it to become part of Mastodon's culture.How Hubzilla does it: Filters
Now let's look at Hubzilla. (Friendica, which Hubzilla was indirectly derived from by its own creator, may be similar, but not quite as advanced; @Hella can probably say more about it as a part-time Friendica user.)
For what Mastodon's filters could do before 4.0, Hubzilla only needs one blocklist. Adding a new keyword is as easy as adding a new line to the blocklist. For reader-side CW generation which Mastodon's filters learned in October, 2022, Hubzilla has an optional extra filter list named "NSFW". It has had it from its very beginnings, and it has inherited it from Friendica. Just about everyone in the whole software family agrees: Having your own CWs generated only for you is better than having the same CWs forced upon you as upon everyone else while misusing the summary/abstract field for it.
Hubzilla also has an allowlist for the whole channel. It optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per contact so you can filter certain things coming from certain contacts and not coming from all the others. It supports regular expressions. And it has a very advanced filter syntax for the blocklists and allowlists that, for example, allows you to filter by whether a message is a repeat (Mastodon: boost), whether it's public or restricted, whether it's a top post or a comment, from whom it came etc. etc.How Hubzilla does it: Permissions
But self-moderation doesn't stop at filters on Hubzilla. There's also the permissions system, the second-most advanced one in the Fediverse, second only to Hubzilla's own descendants, (streams) and Forte, again created by the same developer. Hubzilla's permissions system works on up to three levels: for the whole channel (Mastodon: account), for each individual contact (Mastodon: follower/followed) and often also for individual content (posts/threads, images/media/other files etc.).
Some examples of you can do with the permissions system:- You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts to see your public profile. (In fact, you can make additional profiles and assign them to certain contacts. But both only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
- You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts to see what other contacts you have. (Again, this only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
- You can allow only your contacts or only certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to see your previous posts. (Again, this only works with contacts on certain server applications and not with Mastodon contacts.)
- You can only allow posts from certain ones of your contacts onto your stream. (This does not affect comments and DMs.)
- You can allow only your contacts or certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to like, dislike and comment on your posts.
- You can completely disallow comments on certain posts of yours.
- You can only allow your contacts or certain ones of your contacts or nobody at all to send you DMs.
- You can only allow
- your contacts
- certain ones of your contacts
- the members of one of your privacy groups (Mastodon: lists on steroids)
- a custom combination of privacy groups and certain contacts minus certain other contacts and privacy groups
- only yourself
There's even more: You don't only own your own posts. You also own all comments on your posts. You and not whoever wrote them. This means you can moderate your own conversations by deleting comments from it. (That is, if someone on Mastodon comments on your post, and you remove it, you do not delete their Mastodon toot from their Mastodon account. You only remove it from your conversation.)
This is real serious self-moderation power.
Hubzilla is entirely built around moderating your own channel and your own stream yourself and, if it is activated, the public stream (Mastodon: local or federated timeline, depending on the admin configuration) along with it. Mastodon's filters work by deleting stuff from your inbox, but letting it onto and keeping it on the local or federated timeline regardless. Hubzilla's filters and permissions work by rejecting it altogether. Content that you reject, and that nobody else on your hub allows in, doesn't enter the hub at all and thus doesn't show up on the pubstream either.
By the way, this also works with forums (groups): You can make a forum private by only allowing its contacts to see its profile. You can make its membership private by only allowing its contacts to see its other contacts. You can hide it from directories. You can make its conversations private by limiting reading permission to only contacts.How (streams) and Forte do it
As I've said, (streams) and Forte go another bit further.
They don't rely mostly on templates called "roles" to define the permissions of your channel and of your contacts. You can switch individual permissions on and off anytime.
They have an extra switch to let repeats in or not. Hubzilla needs a filter syntax line for that.
And they have the option to make reply control even more advanced: Next to entirely allowing and entirely disallowing comments, you can allow only your own contacts to comment on a certain post. You can generally allow comments on your posts for a certain period of time. And you can allow comments on a certain post only until a certain point in the future.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Filter #Filters #Permission #Permissions #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
@crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts
Die Regeln sind nicht bei den Diensten anders, sondern generell bei jeder Instanz (unabhängig was darauf für eine Software läuft, das hat damit nichts zu tun).
Sowohl als auch.
Auf der einen Seite hat natürlich jeder Server seine eigenen Regeln.
Auf der anderen Seite ist aber z. B. Friendica oder Hubzilla technologisch und konzeptionell völlig anders als Mastodon. Daher haben die beiden eine völlig andere Kultur als Mastodon. Daher wiederum haben sie auf ihren Servern völlig andere Regeln als Mastodon.
Auf vielen Mastodon-Server besteht z. B. Alt-Text-Pflicht. Wenn man nicht alle seine Bilder mit hinreichend guten Alt-Texten versieht, wird man dafür sanktioniert.
Auf Hubzilla wird dir das nicht passieren. Allein deshalb schon nicht, weil Hubzilla keine schicken Eingabefelder für Alt-Texte hat, sondern man Alt-Texte händisch in den Einbettungs-Markup-Code für die Bilder "reinprogrammieren" muß. Bis letztes Jahr gab es nicht mal irgendeine Dokumentation, wie das geht.
Oder CWs. Auf vielen Mastodon-Servern sind die auch Pflicht.
Auf Hubzilla ist Mastodons CW-Feld immer noch ein Zusammenfassungsfeld. Das ist es schon länger, als es Mastodon überhaupt gibt. Und wenn man nicht nur 500 Zeichen hat, sondern über 16,7 Millionen, dann ergibt ein Zusammenfassungsfeld auch einen Sinn.
CWs handhabt Hubzilla statt dessen, wie sein Vorfahr Friendica es schon seit 2010 tut: Man kann sich optional einen Textfilter aktivieren, der einem ganz individuell vollautomatisch genau die CWs erzeugt, die man selbst braucht.
Zum einen ist man damit nicht davon abhängig, daß alle immer schön brav die richtigen CWs eintragen. Sie müssen nur irgendwo im Post die richtigen Schlüsselwörter haben, was sehr viel wahrscheinlicher ist. Zum anderen bekommt man auch keine CWs aufgezwungen, die man gar nicht braucht, und zwingt anderen auch keine CWs auf, die sie gar nicht brauchen.
Das geht auch auf Mastodon, aber erst seit Oktober 2022, und von 𝕏 kennt man das auch nicht, also ist es nie in Mastodons Kultur angekommen. Außerdem gehört das zu den Sachen, die auf Friendica und Hubzilla sehr einfach gehen, wo man sich aber auf Mastodon dabei einen abbricht. Wie übrigens Filter im allgemeinen.
Gerade Hubzilla hat es generell nicht so mit Regeln. Auf Mastodon hast du eigentlich nur "stummschalten", "blockieren" und "melden". Hubzilla hat ein sehr mächtiges, feingliedriges Berechtigungssystem und ist darauf ausgelegt, daß man seinen Stream selbst moderiert (und damit, falls vorhanden, den Public Stream gleich mit). Die mächtigen, aber einfach zu handhabenden Filter helfen auch mit.
CC: @Robert Frank @Jeder :mastodon: :nonazis: @Halbtassentrinker
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla -
@Rob Ricci @caterpillar @Stefan Bohacek @Ericka Simone This is exactly the problem.
I'm on both Hubzilla and (streams) with multiple channels, and I've been on Hubzilla under various guises for longer than the vast majority of Mastodon users have been on Mastodon. I guess you can say that I know both very well.
I can tell you that the possibilities of Hubzilla's permissions system are staggering. It works on up to three levels: for the entire channel (that's "account" in Mastospeak), for individual connections (that's "followers and followed" in Mastospeak), for individual content (posts and and entire conversations, but also images and other uploaded files and documents).
For example, you can grant or deny permission to- see your public profile (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- see your connections (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- see your public posts in your stream (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- send you their posts (this means public posts that aren't replies because replies are not posts on Hubzilla)
- like (that's "fave" in Mastospeak; you know, the star), dislike and comment on your posts
- send you DMs
- see your uploaded files (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected, but this also extends to images and other media embedded into posts, comments and DMs)
All in all, Hubzilla has 18 such permissions, but these are the ones that matter from a Mastodon point of view. They can be granted or denied for your entire channel at seven or eight levels, and if they're denied at channel level, they can be granted for individual connections. Imagine that, on Mastodon, you could allow only certain followers to see your profile and your toots. Or you could only allow certain followed accounts to send you their toots. All of this is reality on Hubzilla right now.
Better yet: You know that you can send toots only to mentioned accounts on Mastodon. Hubzilla exceeds and improves upon this in three ways. First of all, you can send posts to individual connections. Or to a certain privacy group (from a Mastodon POV, that's a list on steroids). Or to a custom selection of individual connections and privacy groups while even being able to exclude certain other connections or privacy groups. This goes way beyond Mastodon's "mentioned = allowed to see".
But this doesn't only define who will receive your post. It also defines who is permitted to see your post.
And: The permissions of a post are inherited by the entire conversation. Comments always have the same permissions as the top post. There's no restricting the permissions in a comment, and there's no relaxing the limitations of a comment. It's impossible to pull other Fediverse users into a private conversation by mentioning them if the top post wasn't targetted at them.
Even better yet: You can allow or disallow comments on individual posts (remember that a post on Hubzilla is only a post if it starts a conversation, not if it's a reply).
On top of all this, Hubzilla's filters are both vastly more powerful than Mastodon's filters and easier to use. Mastodon requires you to set up one new filter for each word that you want filtered. It's always blocklisting. And it's always account-wide.
Hubzilla covers Mastodon's entire filter functionality with one or two text fields. You have one blocklist for the whole channel. And you have an optional extra feature named "NSFW" with its own filter list that generated individual, reader-side content warnings for you. The equivalent of defining a new filter on Mastodon is to add a new line to one of these filter lists. Want to back them up? Just copy-paste them into a text file.
But wait, there's more: Hubzilla also has a channel-wide allowlist. If you only want to see certain content in your stream, you can allowlist certain keywords.
Hubzilla even optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per connection. Imagine you could filter individual followed accounts on Mastodon.
Hubzilla's filter lists support regular expressions. There is also a "filter syntax" that lets you filter by whether a message is a top post or not, whether a message is public or private, whether it's a repeat (that's "boost" in Mastospeak or "retoot" for those of you who still have Twitter on the brain). The filter syntax even lets you use Boolean operators.
(streams) and Forte are similar. Their permissions are somewhat different (you don't need permissions for wikis and websites if you don't have wikis and websites). The permissions system is vastly easier to use because it's no longer template-based. You can simply switch permissions on and off for your channel as well as for connections. And you can choose to have even more options for reply control.
Again, all this exists in the Fediverse right now. And most of it has existed for longer than Mastodon. Some of this dates back to the earliest days of Friendica in May, 2010.
Unfortunately, next to nobody knows.
For most Mastodon features, the features that Mastodon has are the features that the Fediverse has. If Mastodon doesn't have it, the Fediverse doesn't. Not only is Mastodon the default, but there's nothing that strays from this default. That's why Mastodon users keep wishing for "the Fediverse" to introduce features which Friendica has had for almost 16 years already. Or which Hubzilla has had for over a decade.
In addition, probably not even 10% of all Mastodon users have ever heard of Hubzilla. Probably not even 1% of all Mastodon users know what Hubzilla can do. And even only the existence of (streams) and Forte is almost entirely unknown outside of (streams) and Forte themselves and Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Permission #Permissions #ReplyControl #ReplyControls #Filter #Filters #MastodonCentricism #MastodonNormativity -
@Rob Ricci @caterpillar @Stefan Bohacek @Ericka Simone This is exactly the problem.
I'm on both Hubzilla and (streams) with multiple channels, and I've been on Hubzilla under various guises for longer than the vast majority of Mastodon users have been on Mastodon. I guess you can say that I know both very well.
I can tell you that the possibilities of Hubzilla's permissions system are staggering. It works on up to three levels: for the entire channel (that's "account" in Mastospeak), for individual connections (that's "followers and followed" in Mastospeak), for individual content (posts and and entire conversations, but also images and other uploaded files and documents).
For example, you can grant or deny permission to- see your public profile (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- see your connections (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- see your public posts in your stream (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
- send you their posts (this means public posts that aren't replies because replies are not posts on Hubzilla)
- like (that's "fave" in Mastospeak; you know, the star), dislike and comment on your posts
- send you DMs
- see your uploaded files (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected, but this also extends to images and other media embedded into posts, comments and DMs)
All in all, Hubzilla has 18 such permissions, but these are the ones that matter from a Mastodon point of view. They can be granted or denied for your entire channel at seven or eight levels, and if they're denied at channel level, they can be granted for individual connections. Imagine that, on Mastodon, you could allow only certain followers to see your profile and your toots. Or you could only allow certain followed accounts to send you their toots. All of this is reality on Hubzilla right now.
Better yet: You know that you can send toots only to mentioned accounts on Mastodon. Hubzilla exceeds and improves upon this in three ways. First of all, you can send posts to individual connections. Or to a certain privacy group (from a Mastodon POV, that's a list on steroids). Or to a custom selection of individual connections and privacy groups while even being able to exclude certain other connections or privacy groups. This goes way beyond Mastodon's "mentioned = allowed to see".
But this doesn't only define who will receive your post. It also defines who is permitted to see your post.
And: The permissions of a post are inherited by the entire conversation. Comments always have the same permissions as the top post. There's no restricting the permissions in a comment, and there's no relaxing the limitations of a comment. It's impossible to pull other Fediverse users into a private conversation by mentioning them if the top post wasn't targetted at them.
Even better yet: You can allow or disallow comments on individual posts (remember that a post on Hubzilla is only a post if it starts a conversation, not if it's a reply).
On top of all this, Hubzilla's filters are both vastly more powerful than Mastodon's filters and easier to use. Mastodon requires you to set up one new filter for each word that you want filtered. It's always blocklisting. And it's always account-wide.
Hubzilla covers Mastodon's entire filter functionality with one or two text fields. You have one blocklist for the whole channel. And you have an optional extra feature named "NSFW" with its own filter list that generated individual, reader-side content warnings for you. The equivalent of defining a new filter on Mastodon is to add a new line to one of these filter lists. Want to back them up? Just copy-paste them into a text file.
But wait, there's more: Hubzilla also has a channel-wide allowlist. If you only want to see certain content in your stream, you can allowlist certain keywords.
Hubzilla even optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per connection. Imagine you could filter individual followed accounts on Mastodon.
Hubzilla's filter lists support regular expressions. There is also a "filter syntax" that lets you filter by whether a message is a top post or not, whether a message is public or private, whether it's a repeat (that's "boost" in Mastospeak or "retoot" for those of you who still have Twitter on the brain). The filter syntax even lets you use Boolean operators.
(streams) and Forte are similar. Their permissions are somewhat different (you don't need permissions for wikis and websites if you don't have wikis and websites). The permissions system is vastly easier to use because it's no longer template-based. You can simply switch permissions on and off for your channel as well as for connections. And you can choose to have even more options for reply control.
Again, all this exists in the Fediverse right now. And most of it has existed for longer than Mastodon. Some of this dates back to the earliest days of Friendica in May, 2010.
Unfortunately, next to nobody knows.
For most Mastodon features, the features that Mastodon has are the features that the Fediverse has. If Mastodon doesn't have it, the Fediverse doesn't. Not only is Mastodon the default, but there's nothing that strays from this default. That's why Mastodon users keep wishing for "the Fediverse" to introduce features which Friendica has had for almost 16 years already. Or which Hubzilla has had for over a decade.
In addition, probably not even 10% of all Mastodon users have ever heard of Hubzilla. Probably not even 1% of all Mastodon users know what Hubzilla can do. And even only the existence of (streams) and Forte is almost entirely unknown outside of (streams) and Forte themselves and Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Permission #Permissions #ReplyControl #ReplyControls #Filter #Filters #MastodonCentricism #MastodonNormativity -
@Lena Riess 📚💚🤍 @tinderness Und da wundern sich dann die Leute, warum ich teilweise 10, 15, 20 Hashtags oder mehr unter einem einzelnen Beitrag habe.
Die dienen mindestens zur Hälfte dazu, meine Beiträge zu filtern. Ich schreibe ja sehr viel Zeugs, was vielleicht nicht unbedingt jeder lesen will.
Beispielsweise schreibe ich häufig übers Fediverse, das heißt dann aber nicht, daß ich nur über Mastodon und dann auch noch positiv darüber schreibe. Wenn, dann schreibe ich entweder über Sachen, die nicht Mastodon und deshalb ziemlich obskur sind, oder über Mastodon eher negativ oder beides.
Generell schreibe ich häufig sehr lang. Da, wo ich bin (Hubzilla), gibt es weder ein 500-Zeichen-Limit noch irgendein definiertes Zeichenlimit noch eine Kultur, alles schön kurz zu halten. Das stößt aber vielen Mastodon-Nutzern sauer auf, die der felsenfesten Überzeugung sind, Eugen Rochko habe das Fediverse als Mikrobloggingdienst erfunden (hat er nicht). Also gibt's auch hier wieder Hashtags zum Filtern.
Was hier aber schon sehr viel länger Teil der Kultur ist, als es Mastodon überhaupt gibt, ist, sich individuelle CWs mittels Wortfilter vollautomatisch generieren zu lassen, statt daß sie im Zusammenfassungsfeld allen gleichermaßen aufgezwungen werden. Deswegen dopple ich viele Hashtags mit "CW" am Anfang, um klarzumachen, daß sie genau dafür sind. Diejenigen, die sich ihre eigenen CWs generieren lassen, können dann meine Hashtags dafür nehmen.
Dann kommt noch dazu, daß es für viele Sachverhalte einfach irre viele Hashtags gibt und ich nicht vorher wissen kann, wer jetzt welches dieser Hashtags filtert. Das führt zu noch mehr Hashtags zum Auslösen von Filtern.
Alleine, um einen Beitrag mit mehr als 500 Zeichen zu markieren, brauche ich vier Hashtags und noch einmal zwei dazu, wenn er auf Deutsch ist. Wenn ich generell über das Fediverse schreibe, brauche ich noch einmal vier. Und so weiter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta -
@cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️⚧️ @Claire, The Ultimate Worrier @Null Pointer Exception However, alt-texts and the content warning field aren't a Fediverse thing. They're a Mastodon thing.
Yes, that's actually a big difference. And I can say this because, for one, I've been in the Fediverse since before there was Mastodon, and besides, I'm on something that not only isn't Mastodon, it's very much not Mastodon.
Outside of Mastodon and the usual Mastodon satellites like Pixelfed, alt-texts are only catching up very slowly. Even then, most people don't do more than the required minimum while some Mastodon users go out of their way and write very detailed descriptions.
Especially on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a software family that started as early as 2010, alt-texts are largely seen as just another Mastodon fad in the same vein as cutting long posts up into threads. And the communities on these four are quite opposed to Mastodon fads and, in fact, to everything Mastodon-related.
You will never see anyone on any of these ostracise or sanction or even block someone who doesn't add alt-texts to images.
The difference in behaviour when it comes to content warnings is even more extreme.
On Mastodon, it's part of the culture and an only partially written rule to add content warnings to the content warning field whenever you post sensitive content. It's "only partially written" because not all servers have made it a steadfast rule, and because it is not being enforced beyond the boundaries of servers. Still, the Mastodon community is trying hard to force that rule upon the whole Fediverse.
What next to nobody on Mastodon knows: The CW field was not invented by Gargron, and especially, it was not invented from scratch.
The CW field is actually a repurposed summary field from StatusNet from 2008. It was added to Mastodon by a user in 2017. And Mastodon started as an alternative frontend for the StatusNet successor GNU social on which that field still is a summary field.
On Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte (as well as all dedicated blogging server applications in the Fediverse like WriteFreely, Plume, Ghost and WordPress), the summary field still is a summary field. And that makes a whole lot of sense to have if you have an eight-digit "character limit" (Friendica, Hubzilla: over 16.7 million; (streams), Forte: over 24 million).
Both technologically and culturally, these four have a different way of handling content warnings, namely by having them automatically generated for you as a reader and only for you, i.e. without forcing the same CW upon everyone else.
Let's say you don't want to read about US politics. On Mastodon, you "shout into the ether", asking everyone to add "USpol" as a CW. And then you have to deal with those who want the CW field to be limited to what it's actually for, namely porn and gore.
On these four, you open your NSFW. You add "uspol" to the filter list. Done. From then on, all posts that have "uspol" (case-insensitive and even as a substring) anywhere in them will be hidden by a button that reads, "uspol". But they'll only be hidden for you individually.
Friendica has had this technology since its inception in 2010, five and a half years before Mastodon's launch. Hubzilla has inherited it from Friendica, and Hubzilla predates Mastodon by ten months (and at its core by almost four years). (streams) has inherited it from Hubzilla, Forte has inherited it from (streams).
On all four, it's part of their culture. And it's considered good manners to add something to your posts and comments that has these content warnings generated.
Ironically, Mastodon itself has introduced this very principle with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just before the first huge Twitter migration wave. But Mastodon's entire culture, which it tries so hard to force upon the whole Fediverse (also because Mastodon users cannot see whether a post is from Mastodon or Akkoma or Misskey or Friendica or Hubzilla, so they tend to assume it's all Mastodon), is based on version 3.x as of mid-2022.
CC: @love
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricism #MastodonNormativity #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits -
@Maxi 11x 💉
Das Fediverse wird immer mehr zu Facebook und ich hab da wenig Lust drauf.
Das Fediverse war Facebook, bevor es von Millionen von ahnungslosen Mastodon-Newbies zu Twitter gemacht wurde.
Mehr als die Hälfte der Mastodon-Nutzer glaubt, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon. Der weit überwiegende Teil derer, die eines Besseren belehrt wurden, glauben immer noch, das Fediverse sei- (frühestens) 2016
- von Eugen Rochko
- als reine Microblogging-Plattform und Twitter-Klon
- mit einem Zeichenlimit von 500 Zeichen
Um das mal zurechtzurücken:
Im Januar 2016 ging Mastodon an den Start.
Im Juli 2010, fünfeinhalb Jahre vor Mastodon, startete Friendica (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://friendi.ca) als Facebook-Alternative.- Ohne Zeichenbegrenzung (tatsächlich 16.777.215 Zeichen).
- Mit allem, was eine gute Bloggingplattform an Textformatierung hergibt.
- Mit Inhaltswarnungen, die jeder für sich selbst automatisch generieren lassen kann mittels einer Liste von Schlüsselwörtern.
- Mit Titeln und Zusammenfassungen, und die Zusammenfassungen waren schon immer in dem Datenfeld, das Mastodon seit 2017 für CWs verwendet.
- Mit der Fähigkeit, andere Posts als Komplettzitate zu teilen. Und nicht ein einziges Mal ist das mißbräuchlich verwendet worden.
Jetzt regen sich Mastodon-Nutzer darüber auf, daß Friendica auf so infame und rücksichtslose Art und Weise ins Mastodon-Fediverse eingedrungen ist und seine Nutzer- sich nicht ans 500-Zeichen-Limit halten
- alle mit ihren Textformatierungen nerven
- keine CWs schreiben
- dafür das CW-Feld mißbrauchen mit "Titeln oder was weiß ich, was das ist"
Fakt ist aber: Friendica gab es nicht nur schon fünfeinhalb Jahre, als Mastodon startete, sondern es war auch schon fünfeinhalb Jahre im Fediverse, als Mastodon startete. Und es hatte auch schon gut fünf Jahre lang seine eigene Kultur, als Mastodon startete.
In dem Augenblick, wo Mastodon startete, verband es sich sofort mit StatusNet (von 2008, wofür Mastodon ursprünglich nur eine Alternativoberfläche war; heute GNU social, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Social, https://gnusocial.rocks/), Friendica und Hubzilla (von 2015, basiert auf einem Fork eines Forks von Friendica von 2012; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://hubzilla.org). Und nicht umgekehrt.
Wir waren zuerst hier. Findet euch damit ab.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonZentrizität #MastodonNormativität #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #500Zeichen #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteTröt #QuoteTröts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebatte #QuoteTrötDebatte -
@mradcliffe The danger in this, however, is that another Fediverse feature that's way older than Mastodon and at the same time absent from Mastodon would be reappropriated as something else, making Mastodon even more incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse.
In 2017, Mastodon introduced its content warning field. Ever since, almost everyone on Mastodon has been fully convinced that Eugen Rochko had invented that field from scratch. (Be honest, how about you?)
However, Mastodon's content warning field is actually a summary field that has been used by StatusNet, Friendica and Hubzilla as such since 2008, 2010 and 2012 respectively. Mastodon hadn't had any support for that summary field at first, for you don't need a summary for 500 characters. And I guess that coder from the demo scene who submitted the merge request that reappropriated the summary field as a content warning field was blissfully unaware that Mastodon was actually connected to something that did use the summary field as such.
And now you have Mastodon users scolding Friendica users because the latter allegedly misuse the CW field for "like a subject or smth idk", unaware that the self-same field has been the abstract field on Friendica for five and a half years longer than Mastodon has even existed and some seven years longer than Mastodon had its CW field.
Today, in 2025, next to nobody on Mastodon knows that the Fediverse already has group actors, and probably neither do many on the *keys. Neither Mastodon nor Misskey nor their respective forks have or support groups in any way.
If they go and reappropriate group actors as starter packs, this will break compatibility with Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, Lemmy communities, /kbin magazines, Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, NodeBB forums etc., all of which can be and often already are being followed by Mastodon and *key users right now. And again, they've all had group actors since their respective inception.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #NodeBB #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Group #Groups #GroupActor #GroupActors #FediGroups #FediverseGroups -
@Ainsley If you really want to be on the safe side, hide the post behind a long post content warning.
In fact, I think you should do that with all your posts that exceed 500 characters even only a smidge. My experience is that other Mastodon users will mute or block you left and right otherwise. Or maybe it's just me.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #LongPostMeta #CWLongPostMeta -
@julian
Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
Mastodon has misused summaries for content warnings since someone from the demo scene sent in a PR for Mastodon to do so in 2017.
So this means that Mastodon stopped doing so on Article-type objects and actually regards summaries as summaries and handles them accordingly instead?
And when and with which version was this rolled out?
Or did Mastodon insist in the creation of yet another text field which has to be rolled out to all macroblogging and long-form blogging server applications? Even though ActivityPub does have a perfectly good summary field, only that Mastodon uses it for CWs?
Although I must say that the step from displaying Article-type objects as title (if there is any) + link to displaying them as title (if there is any) + summary (if there is any) + link is not that big. Mobile users who see their Web browsers popping up as a nuisance will still ignore your content.
On the other hand, this does not only appease Eugen Rochko, the Lord and Creator of the Fediverse and all of its technology (according to the Gospel of Mastodon, anyway), but also those Mastodonians who demand there must not be any posts with over 500 characters in the Fediverse, and who immediately block everyone who exceeds 500 characters even only once even on the federated timeline.
Besides, there is still "long-form", multiple-paragraph content going out as Note-type objects. In general, I guess that comments always go out as Note-type objects.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Summary #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #ArticleType #LongFormContent -
@Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥ I can't really go with that proposal.
First of all, if you turn the automatic generation of alt-text on by default, then fully-abled people with tons of spoons who could write their own alt-texts with no problems will use that automatic alt-text-generating AI, too. Especially newbies who'll keep everything at default settings for quite a while. This would make alt-text quality and especially accuracy plummet.
Trust me. I've pitted LLaVA against my own hand-written image descriptions twice. In both cases, the images were renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds with a resolution of only 800x533. The results were utterly devastating by my standards. Granted, the AI only had the images whereas I described the images while looking around in-world, being able to move the camera and zoom in on things and such.
So instead of turning AI-generated alt-text on by default, people should be educated about alt-text and told to write them themselves. Only if they can't, they should be told about the alt-text generator switch.
Besides, having this established on Mastodon is one thing. Trying to force the whole Fediverse to implement an image-describing AI is something else. And: It will never come to pass.
The Fediverse is far from being only Mastodon. The Fediverse is not even a) Mastodon, b) Mastodon forks and c) stuff (actually or seemingly) glued onto Mastodon as add-ons after the fact. There's stuff in the Fediverse that's vastly different from Mastodon while at the same time being in direct competition against Mastodon.
For example, you have rather minimalist stuff like snac2 or GoToSocial. I'm not sure if their devs are too keen on including an AI-based automatic alt-text generator even if the AI is external.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. These four are vastly more powerful than Hubzilla by various degrees. And they're so modular that, in theory, it'd be possible to build an add-on that uses an AI to automatically describe images.
Now, the first issue is that neither of these four strives to be more like Mastodon. In fact, they've got their own cultures that date back to times when Mastodon wasn't even an idea. After all, Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon, and the others are part of the same big family tree of forks and forks of forks. And, unlike Mastodon, they're Facebook alternatives with a side of fully-featured long-form blogging and not minimalist Twitter alternatives (and Hubzilla is much much more than that even).
Their cultures are vastly different from Mastodon's and will always be. They don't aim for brevity, what with "character limits" with eight digits. They don't ask for CWs in a dedicated CW field. What's the CW field on Mastodon has been the abstract field on Friendica for almost seven years longer and on StatusNet for some nine years longer, and like Friendica, the other three use it for summaries. All four have always been able to automatically generate CWs individually for each reader, depending on a) the presence of keywords in a message and b) the keywords in that reader's "NSFW" keyword list. Something that Mastodon didn't have until October, 2022 when Mastodon 4 came out, and that is not part of Mastodon's culture because it came that late.
As for alt-text, users on all four are completely unaware of its existence at best. That's because they're completely out of touch with Mastodon and its culture. In fact, some Hubzilla users chose to leave ActivityPub switched off, and some (streams) users decided to turn it off themselves, in both cases with the explicit intent of locking Mastodon out. Of those few who have heard about alt-text in the Fediverse, most see it as just another stupid Mastodon fad that Mastodon is trying hard to force upon the rest of the Fediverse. Like that 500-character limit.
Also, especially the Hubzilla devs and the (streams) and Forte dev are not too keen on implementing Mastodon features to say the least. For now, they only do what's absolutely necessary to federate with Mastodon, but not much beyond that. These three will not make an image-describing AI add-on a priority task. Or a task at all. And don't ask for building that image-describing feature into the core. This will happen even less. Also, don't expect either of them to hard-code a connection to a power-hungry corporation like Alphabet (Google) or OpenAI into an add-on, much less into the core. Despite the fact that Hubzilla still has its old (optional, off-by-default for both hubs and channels) Twitter connector.
By the way: (streams) and Forte are the only server applications in the Fediverse with a server-wide user agent filter that's not only capable of blocking Mastodon in its entirety, but that was actually announced and advertised as having that capability while having actually been designed to keep Threads out. This should give you to think.
There's another obstacle: Where would the alt-text be stored? After all, the handling of images is, again, vastly different on these four than on Mastodon. On Mastodon, images are files attached to posts with their own alt-text data fields. And upon uploading the images, they end up in some data nirvana.
In stark contrast, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte all have a cloud file storage built into each account (Friendica)/channel (Hubzilla, (streams), Forte), complete with its own simple file manager and, except for Friendica, even WebDAV connectivity. It's there where image files are uploaded. And then they aren't attached to posts as files. Rather, they're embedded into posts just like into webpages or blog posts. You can have text, then an image, then more text, than another image, then more text. These four can generate something that Mastodon still staunchly refuses to even display.
Now, I know that (streams) and Forte do have a field for an image description. It can be filled out during upload or in the image editor after the upload. I'm not sure if Friendica has at least got a data field for alt-text. But I know for a fact from daily-driving it that Hubzilla does not have any data field for alt-text, not in the UI and most likely not in the database either.
In the posts, the alt-text is not added to the images by referencing that data field. The posts don't work on some murky hocus-pocus in the background. By default, they're composed in a markdown language in plain sight. Friendica uses expanded BBcode or optionally Markdown. Hubzilla uses even more expanded BBcode. (streams) and Forte can use the same expanded BBcode as Hubzilla and Markdown and HTML within the same post. And the alt-text is always part of the image-embedding code.
And this is also the only place on Hubzilla where alt-text can come into play. This means that if Hubzilla wanted to include automatic alt-text generation, the alt-text would have to a) be generated whenever an image is embedded into a post while composing the post (= you embed the same image file a hundred times, and a hundred times will the AI generate a new alt-text for it from scratch) and then b) be woven into the image-embedding BBcode.
Speaking of image storage, WriteFreely, a specialised long-form blogging server application and basically a Medium alternative, doesn't even have that. You can embed images into posts on WriteFreely, but only as long as you can store them someplace that allows for hotlinking because you will have to hotlink your images from there. But if WriteFreely doesn't handle images itself at all, if images in WriteFreely posts don't actually go through WriteFreely until after the post is sent (namely when someone views the post for the first time), it can't use an AI to automatically describe them either.
Unlike WriteFreely, Plume does have its own dedicated image storage. However, while Plume is not dead, its development has come to a complete halt for the foreseeable future because its devs don't have any time to work on it. And even if they got back to it, they'd probably have more important things to work on after several years of neglect.
And then there is software that is actually dead, that was officially pronounced dead by its own last maintainers, but that still has running servers. Calckey. Firefish. /kbin. But if it's dead, it won't even get security patches anymore, much less new features such as automatic AI-driven alt-text generation.
CC: @James Edwards @Danny Boling ☮️
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #snac #snac2 #GoToSocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Plume #WriteFreely #Calckey #Firefish #/kbin