#fedimeta — Public Fediverse posts

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Hirad @Mehrad :kde: :emacs: :rstats: Which is curious, seeing as the GNU FM developer also started GNU social and scooped up StatusNet's abandoned code to merge it into GNU social. The idea was to use GNU social in some way to make GNU FM federate.

GNU social even implemented ActivityPub at some point, but GNU FM never did. Now GNU social is dead anyway.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #GNUFM #GNUsocial

@Chao-c'

The wiki reveals even different timeline:

"The wiki" sounds funny to someone who has three wikis of his own on his Hubzilla channel. Anyway...

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

Gargron simply was lucky.

I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.

Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.

In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.

From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.

I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that? I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010?).

In 2009, there already was StatusNet. Granted, it was so obscure that vastly more people knew the "lighthouse server" Identi.ca than StatusNet itself. StatusNet supported the Twitter client API, but there were vastly more mobile apps that were hard-coded to Identi.ca than such where you could choose a StatusNet server because the huge majority of those who knew Identi.ca didn't even know it was part of a network. Identi.ca held some 90% of all StatusNet users.

By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.

Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.

I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

Well, they say that ActivityPub is glorified RSS with a rubbery spec.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #StatusNet #Identi.ca #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #OStatus #ActivityPump #ActivityPub

@Gerriet Selent

Kann man Hubzilla aif enen Sharing Hosting installieren ?

Sollte wohl gehen. Hubzilla ist genügsam, das braucht nur einen LAMP-Stack.

Das brauchst du aber nicht selbst zu hosten. Hubzilla ist ja Teil des Fediverse; ich schreibe hier gerade von Hubzilla. Du kannst dir also auf einem schon vorhandenen Hubzilla-Hub, z. B. hub.hubzilla.de, ein Konto anlegen und dann einen Kanal, auf dem du dann z. B. Webpages anlegen kannst.

Die offizielle Hubzilla-Website (https://hubzilla.org) läuft ja selbst auch auf einem Hubzilla-Kanal (@Hubzilla Info; @[email protected]), dem man z. B. von Mastodon aus folgen kann.

Hier mal ein paar direkte Links auf mehr Infomaterial:

• Video: Der Einstieg in Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 2)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Der(20)Einstieg(20)in(20)Hubzilla
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 8)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%238/Webseiten-mit-Hubzilla__Workshop_%238_27-Mai-2026.pdf
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Webseiten%20mit%20Hubzilla.pdf
• PDF: Layout-Vorlagen (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Vorlagen-Templates.pdf
• Video: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Workshop(20)(23)9(20)-(20)10.06.2026

Alles zu finden auf Hubzilla selbst: https://hub.hubzilla.hu/channel/hz-workshop alias @Hubzilla Workshop (@[email protected]).

Es geht nicht drum, was eine Webseite kann. Wusste gar nicht, das eine Webseite was können muss *gg

Es geht darum eine ganz normale Webseite zu erstellen, ohne viel Schnörkel,

Na ja, könnte ja sein, daß ich dir etwas empfehle, das nicht über HTML + CSS + Bootstrap + eingebundene dynamische Inhalte hinausgeht und du da aber unbedingt etwas mit JavaScript einbauen willst.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #WordPress #Webpages #Hubzilla

@Roland Häder

So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?

Just like they try to enforce anything everywhere.

• They'll simply tell you to do it.
• They'll lecture you about it.
• They'll call you out if you don't do it.
• Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.
• They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
  If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
  But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.

I've seen all the above actually happen.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Let me give you an example. Something that I've actually posted myself.

Here's the image (CW: eye contact): https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9

Here's the alt-text:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Do you understand the image without explanations?

I guarantee you that there are loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.

So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:

Explanation:

The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).

OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator; https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (https://www.secondlife.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.

Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.

The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.

This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.

Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.

Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.

Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.

Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.

For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp I'm not talking about the visual description in the alt-text.

I'm talking about a wholly separate explanation in the post text body. Like, where you'd write the actual toot. Where you probably only have 500 characters. Where you wrote the above comment. It's there where I want to put the explanation.

The story behind this is as follows:

I keep reading from Mastodon users that alt-texts (yes, actual alt-texts in this case) are useful for sighted people, too, because alt-texts can give them explanations and help them understand what they're looking at. This means that images must not only be described, but also explained if necessary.

On the one hand, I keep telling Mastodon users again and again that explanations do not belong into the alt-text because there are people who can't access and read alt-texts; Mastodon users tend to be very defensive of using alt-texts to extend their 500-character limit by another 1,500 characters per image.

Still, on the other hand, this means that especially Mastodon users want images that they don't understand to come with explanations right away. In particular, neurodivergent people often need explanations, in-depth explanations even. It appears to have gotten to a point where posting an image that needs explanations without explanations is considered just as careless and almost as ableist as posting an image without accurate and sufficiently detailed alt-text.

At the same time, whenever I post an image of any kind, memes included, they're about such obscure topics that they need an explanation. Also, not everyone is always familiar with every meme template, so I have to give an explanation for the meme templates I've used as well. So I always explain whatever might need to be explained.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@DopeGhoti @Andrew How many characters would be sufficient for Mastodon to not count as ableist anymore?

If you say, 1,500, who or what says that 1,500 characters are sufficient to describe any and all images, but a lower limit is not?

For comparison, look at my cover photo. The one with the weird building. I have a post with just about the same image in it; here's the link.

In this post, the image has two separate image descriptions. One is in the alt-text. The alt-text is exactly 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are image description. And that's the short description. It doesn't even have room for any text transcripts. It actually isn't much more than an "alibi description". It's only there because many people on Mastodon demand there be a 100% accurate and sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text of each image in the Fediverse.

Only that "sufficiently detailed" isn't always possible even in 1,500 characters.

That's why there is an additional long description in the post text. It's sufficiently detailed, as in, fully detailed. An image like this requires a fully detailed description. It comes with transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, and it comes with all explanations necessary to understand the image and the description. It's over 60,000 characters long.

Yes, over 60,000 characters in one post. Your character limit is 500. Mine is over 16 million.

Oh, and yes, it's guaranteed to be 100% hand-written. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the long description with literally absolutely no help from any AI whatsoever. In fact, I've described details that no AI on the planet will ever be able to see in the image.

So ideally, all Fediverse server platforms should have two image description fields for each profile image, one being the alt-text behind the image, one being a long description next to the image. The latter should not have an arbitrarily-chosen character limit.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@Richard Lewis You can really put a whole lot of effort into finding the optimal description for each one of your images. You can sit down and educate yourself by reading through dozens upon dozens of webpages and articles and blog posts about alt-texts and image descriptions. You can spend hours or days or more searching for and reading Mastodon posts, about alt-texts and image descriptions from a Mastodon point of view until you hope you're well-educated enough to know how to optimise your image descriptions for the Fediverse.

You can rack your brains about

• what's important in your image in the context of your post and what isn't
• who will or may be in the audience of your post
• what they know about your post/your images and what they don't
• what they may want to know about your post/your images, regardless of whether that's important in the context or not
• whether they're willing to go find the missing information themselves
• whether they could find the missing information themselves if they tried in the first place, or whether they'd have to depend on asking you
• whether having to ask or search for missing information is okay in the culture of your audience, or whether you're required to supply all that information right away

and optimise each one of your image descriptions according to your findings. You don't want to throw anyone in front of a bus by neglect, now, do you? And you don't want to appear like a lazy bum, right?

You can educate yourself about many rules of describing images. Like, how to properly describe colours. Or to always put explanations into the post text body and never into the alt-text. Or when and why an additional image description in the post text body makes sense. You can abide by them all.

You can hone your skills and fine-tune your image descriptions at least to near-perfection. You can spend hours or days describing one image, composing and writing it completely by hand with absolutely zero AI support.

Nobody will honour it. It feels like nobody really appreciates your effort if nobody even likes/faves your image posts.

I've done all of the above. All the way to describing each image twice over. Not often because it takes me very long to describe one measly image. I haven't posted a single fully original image since mid-2024. But whenever I do, practically nobody cares.

Granted, it doesn't help that the two channels on which I post my images nowadays (if at all), @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet and @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams), barely have any reach. And even if they had, most Mastodon users would be scared away by the summary/CW announcing a post that exceeds 500 characters by huge magnitudes. But my original image posts can't do without a long image description in the post text body, and even my meme posts can't do without an appropriate amount of explanations, so they have to be that long. And it feels like I've just wasted the hours or days that I've invested into researching for and writing image descriptions.

If anything at all, someone from the alt-text police will show up and attack you and call you ableist for not describing your images exactly by their personal standards. In fact, you can be called ableist by talking about image descriptions instead of just simply delivering perfect image descriptions right off the bat. By whichever definition of "perfect". But don't you dare deviate from it even only a smidge, for that'd be ableist.

Although, seriously, people getting together and talking about image descriptions and alt-texts and finding a consensus and common definitions for good alt-texts and image descriptions for the whole Fediverse is what we so direly need. But not even the alt-text police coordinate their image description quality standards, nor do they communicate them. You have to know them just like so.

What makes matters worse is that if your alt-text exceeds 512 characters, Misskey will discard it entirely, and accessibility activists on Misskey will think you're too lazy to write an alt-text. This may apply to the various Forkeys as well.

You can't possibly write perfect image descriptions for everyone. But you have to write perfect image descriptions for everyone because everyone demands you write perfect image descriptions for them personally. Or else!

CC: @Nervensäge 💐 @jeSuisatire  neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #A11y #Accessibility #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@「 Jürgen 」:fedi_mastodon:

Irgendwie ist das doch nicht die „übliche“ Verwendung von Hashtags in Beiträgen. Was ist der Hintergrund bei Hubzilla, dass das so gehandhabt wird?

Das hat Hubzilla geerbt von Friendica, weil es umgebaut wurde aus einem Fork eines Forks von Friendica. Und Friendica hat es übernommen von StatusNet, weil es von vornherein mit StatusNet föderieren sollte. Und StatusNet hat es geerbt von Identi.ca.

Sie alle handhab(t)en Hashtags intern als Schlüsselwörter, die keine Raute enthalten. Und sie stellen die Raute außerhalb des Link vor den Link, um zu signalisieren: Das hier ist ein Hashtag. Wenn man einen Post, einen Kommentar oder eine DM verschickt, wird aus dem Hashtag automatisch ein entsprechendes Konstrukt aus ungelinkter Raute plus Link aufs Schlüsselwort generiert.

Das ist wie bei Namen: Auf allen war bzw. ist das @ kein Teil irgendeines Namen, nicht des Kurznamen, nicht des Langnamen. Der Kurzname, der Teil des Profil-Link ist, hat auch kein @. Guck dir mal deine Erwähnung an: Das @ ist nicht Teil des Link, sondern steht vorm Link, und dein Langname ist erwähnt.

Warum "die" das anders gemacht haben als auf Twitter und Mastodon? Ganz einfach: Weil "die" das vor Mastodon gemacht haben. Eigentlich sogar noch vor Twitter.

Identi.ca und StatusNet waren von 2008. Etwa acht Jahre vor Mastodon. Das war der eigentliche Urknall des Fediverse. Und StatusNet hatte meines Wissens damals schon offizielle Unterstützung für Hashtags.

Warum hat es das nun anders gemacht als Twitter? Weil es das vor Twitter gemacht hat.

Es war nämlich erst 2009, daß Chris Messina offiziell Unterstützung für Hashtags bei Twitter eingeführt hat. Evan Prodromou, der Erfinder von Identi.ca, StatusNet und dem Fediverse, konnte unmöglich etwa ein Jahr im voraus ahnen, wie Twitter mal Hashtags implementieren wird. Und die Twitter-Entwickler dürften damals überhaupt nicht gewußt haben, daß auch nur Identi.ca existiert, geschweige denn, wie es Hashtags handhabt.

Friendica ging im Mai 2010 an den Start, etwa fünf Jahre und acht Monate vor Mastodon. Friendica basierte zwar auf einem eigenen Protokoll, war aber von vornherein in der Lage, sich mit StatusNet über dessen eigenes OStatus-Protokoll zu verbinden. Praktischerweise hat der Friendica-Erfinder Mike Macgirvin gleich Identi.cas und StatusNets Handhabung von Hashtags übernommen. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt hatte Twitter Hashtags erst seit gut zehn Monaten.

Ende 2011 hat Mike Macgirvin Friendica geforkt, dann den Fork geforkt und diesen Fork namens Red (später Red Matrix) dann ab 2012 komplett umgeschrieben. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt handhabte alles im Fediverse Hashtags noch auf dieselbe Art.

Um diese Zeit wurde StatusNet nach GNU social hardgeforkt, das wohl versuchte, mehr wie Twitter zu sein. Daher wurden auch die Hashtags wie auf Twitter ausgeführt: mit der Raute als Teil des Schlüsselworts und als Teil des Link. StatusNet verlor dann nach der 2012er Umstellung von Identi.ca auf pump.io seine Entwicklungsgrundlage und wurde 2013 kurzerhand nach GNU social gemerget, ohne aber die Hashtags wieder auf die alte Form umzustellen.

Im März 2015 wurde erstmals Hubzilla veröffentlicht, das entstanden war, indem die Red Matrix umbenannt und massiv erweitert worden war.

Erst im Januar 2016 kam dann Mastodon, Pleroma kurze Zeit später. Weil beide ursprünglich alternative Frontends für GNU social sein sollten, übernahmen sie von GNU social die Twitter-Hashtags.

Zu diesem Zeitpunkt sahen weder die neuen Entwickler, die Friendica seit Ende 2011 hatte, noch Mike Macgirvin es ein, warum sie ihre Software unbedingt an Mastodon anpassen sollten. Mike, der inzwischen zwei Nachfahren von Hubzilla betreut, sieht es bis heute nicht ein. Eher baut er serverseitige Gegenmittel gegen Mastodon in seine Software ein.

Misskey landete meines Wissens erst 2018 im Fediverse, nachdem es ActivityPub adoptiert hatte. Das hatte übrigens Hubzilla als erstes, seit Juli 2017, und Mastodon als zweites, seit September.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta

@Victor You will still lose lots of reach.

People won't see your image posts because they have technical means of hiding or completely removing any and all posts with images without alt-text from all their timelines.

People will block you upon first strike when finding one of your image posts without an alt-text.

Followers will unfollow you.

You will be lectured. You will be scolded. You will be verbally attacked. You will be called an ableist swine. Even more so if you try to defend yourself.

If you want at least some reach on Mastodon, and if you want to be left in peace, your only choice is to add a hand-written, non-AI-generated, accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-text to every single last image that you will ever post. Immediately when posting it.

CC: @🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴  (🌈🦄)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 In general, when it comes to what to include in an image description, the context matters. But so does the target audience (not as in whom you want to receive your content, but who may stumble upon it this or that way), and so does the existing knowledge of the target audience. And, this is pretty much Fediverse-specific, so do the expectations of your target audience.

I've observed and studied alt-text and image descriptions for some three years now, not only by reading dozens upon dozens of guides all over the Web, but especially by examining the attitude towards it in the Fediverse, that is, actually only on Mastodon because alt-text isn't such a hot topic anywhere else. I've mostly done so in order to up my own image-describing game further and further and further, also because no alt-text guide out there covers my situation, so I had to cobble all that information together myself, enough information for me to have started my own wiki on this topic to share my knowledge with others.

One thing I've noticed is that Mastodon loves long and extensive image descriptions in alt-text. There's no "keep it short and concise"; instead, there are users who keep receiving praise for alt-texts of 800 or 1,000 characters or more.

Also, my impression is that Mastodon does not like having to ask for details and/or explanations, nor does it like to look up what it doesn't know enough about to understand it. If you have to ask someone who has posted an image for a description of a certain detail in an image, this means that the image description is lacking, regardless of whether or not that detail matters within the context of the post. Having to ask for a description of a detail is almost as bad as having to ask for the description of the whole image.

In fact, it was just a few months ago that I read a Mastodon toot that said that any element in an image mentioned in the description must also have its own visual description. You can't just say what's in the image. You also have to describe what it looks like.

Likewise, if there's something in an image description that someone doesn't understand, it must be explained right away. This, by the way, ties in with the rule that image descriptions must never use technical language or jargon, and if they absolutely cannot avoid it, it must be explained when it's used first. And it must be explained in a way that requires no prior special knowledge.

So far, so good. But the reason why I've gone all the way to observe and study alt-text and image descriptions, and why I'm so obsessed with it, is because I'm in a special situation.

For one, I'm in the Fediverse which means that certain alt-text rules simply don't apply to me, not only everything that involves captions, but also the brevity-as-a-hard-requirement rule. However, I'm not on Mastodon, so I'm not as much bound to Mastodon's limitations as Mastodon users. In particular, my character limit is over 16 million, so I can do a whole lot more in the post itself.

Besides, my original images are nothing like what almost everyone on Mastodon posts. They aren't real-life photographs, nor are they social media screenshots. Instead, they are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds, even extremely obscure virtual worlds that next to nobody out there has ever even heard of.

At the same time, my image posts might get people curious enough that they want to go explore this new universe that they've just discovered through my post. The only way they can explore it is by looking at my images and taking in all the big and small details. If they're blind, they cannot do that, but accessibility and inclusion demand they have the very same chance to do it as fully sighted people. In order for them to have this chance, I must go and describe all these big and small details to them, regardless of context. Everything else would be ableist, maybe not by some official W3C definition, but at least by Mastodon's definition.

Speaking of context, sometimes my images are the context of the post. There isn't that one element in the image that matters within the context of the post while everything else can be swept under the rug. No, the entire image matters. The entire scenery matters. Everything in the image matters all the same. This means that I have to describe everything. Again, see further above: I can't get away with just mentioning what's there. If I mention it, I have to describe what it looks like.

This is also justified because I can never expect everyone to already know what something in my image looks like. Again, they don't show real life. They show virtual worlds. In virtual worlds, things do not necessarily look like what they look like in real life. And things tend to look different in different virtual worlds, sometimes even within the same virtual world system.

For example, you, as someone born completely blind, may have come across enough image descriptions to have a rough idea of what cats look like in real life. But that does not automatically give you a realistic idea what a particular cat looks like in a specific virtual world, also seeing as there are infinitely more possibilities for what cats may look like. It could be a detailed, life-like representation of a cat with high-resolution materials as textures. It could be a very simplified, low-resolution model with a likewise low-resolution texture. It could be cobbled together from standard shapes because that was all that was possible when that cat was made. Or whatever. You wouldn't know unless I told you. But who am I to judge whether or not you want to know?

It gets even worse with buildings. You probably wouldn't even know what a specific building looks like in real life unless you have a detailed description, so how are you supposed to know what a specific building looks like in a virtual world that you've first read about a few minutes ago? In addition, there are so many ways of creating buildings in virtual worlds, and they've changed over time with new tools and new features becoming available.

I've come to a point at which I usually avoid having buildings in my images because they're too tedious to describe, especially realistic buildings, but not only these. My last original image post but one was in spring, 2024, about one and a half years ago. I decided to show a rather fantasy-like building. This building, however, is so complex that it took me two full days, morning to evening, to write the long image description that I'd put into the post. This image description is over 60,000 characters long, over 40,000 of which describe the building. The description also covers the interior because the outer walls of the building are almost entirely glass. The long description has two levels of headlines of its own. I've needed well over 4,000 characters only to explain to people where that place is that's shown in the image.

And then there was the short description for the alt-text which I needed as well so that nobody could accuse me of not adding a sufficiently detailed alt-text to my image. I was genuinely unable to make it any shorter than 1,400 characters. It actually took up a lot of characters that I needed to point especially Mastodon users at the long description in the post itself. That was when Mastodon only hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images, so that nobody on Mastodon would have known that there's a long description unless I told them in the alt-text.

One reason why the long description grew so long was that I didn't describe the image by looking at the image. I described it by looking at the real deal. All the time while I was working on the long description, I was in-world. I had my avatar in front of the building, walking through the building, walking around the building. I could move the camera very close to a lot of details. Instead of seeing the scenery at the resolution of the image, I saw it at a practically infinite resolution. This also enabled me to transcribe text that's so small in the image that it's unreadable, even text that's so tiny in the image that it's invisible. After all, the rule says that any and all text within the borders of an image must be transcribed. And I've yet to see that rule having any explicit exception for unreadable text.

Sure, I could have written that certain details got lost and cannot be identified at the low resolution of the image. But that may be perceived as me trying to weasel out of the responsibility to describe these details instead. I mean, how many people who were born completely blind have a concept of image resolution and pixels, and how many think that it's possible to zoom into any image infinitely? Besides, I'm not bound to what the image shows at its fairly low resolution anyway, so why should I pretend I am? The only logical reason for that would be because I'm expected to describe the image. And not the scenery in the area within the borders of the image.

And still, I haven't given full visual descriptions of everything in that scene. I decided against fully describing all images within that image at the same level as the image itself. I decided so because it would have gone too far: At least one image, a preview image on a teleporter, technically shows dozens of images itself, preview images on teleporters again. And some of these images show more images yet again. I would have ended up describing several dozens of images, at least four levels deep, in order to fully describe one image. And then the whole image description would have been rather pointless because Mastodon rejects posts with over 100,000 characters, and the post would probably have ended up with several millions of characters.

By the way, even before I wrote that massive image description, I actually showed @Hat.  AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 one of my image posts, the one with my longest description for a single image to that date. It has two images with over 48,000 characters of long description combined, almost 40,000 of which are for the first image. She actually praised this massive image description and told me that this level of detail in both visual description and explanation is exactly what she needs.

The last time I've posted original in-world images was in July, 2024. I took care not to have too many details in the images this time. Still, I ended up with a combined over 25,000 characters of long description for both images, also because they contain an avatar that had to be described in full detail.

I've been working on the image descriptions for a series of avatar portraits for about a year now, on and off, but still. This time, I gave the images a neutral, completely feature-less, bright white background that won't take up much effort to describe. The plan is to have three or four images with three or four portraits of the same avatar each, always in the same post with only slightly different outfits. I'm still describing the first image, and I've only fully covered the first outfit and started with the second one.

The common preamble for all images in one post already exceeds 17,000 characters, including over 2,000 characters explaining OpenSim and over 9,000 characters explaining what OpenSim avatars can be made of and how they work because that's essential for understanding the visual descriptions. I expect the preamble to grow significantly longer before it's ready because I have to get rid of a whole lot of technical language and jargon and/or explain even more of it. The preamble also contains over 5,000 characters of general visual description that applies to all portraits in all images the same. It includes almost 2,000 characters that describe the shoes, men's casual leather shoes, because to my best knowledge, such shoes don't exist in real life.

Other images will show the avatar wearing full brogue leather shoes. I'm still not sure whether I can correctly assume that everyone out there knows what they are and what they look like, or whether I'll have to give the same amount of detail description again, only that full brogue shoes are much more complex than the shoes I've already described. Also, I'm not sure if everyone out there knows what a herringbone fabric pattern looks like, or whether that requires a detail description and an explanation itself, even though several actually blind users have told me that I can assume it to be familiar.

One problem I still haven't solved is that I simply can't fit an appropriately detailed short image description into a maximum of 1,500 characters of alt-text.

Verdict: There are always edge cases in which an image cannot be sufficiently described in only one short and concise image description in the alt-text. My virtual world renderings are such an edge case, also because they're posted into the Fediverse. Another edge case is @Hat.  AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 who, due to a disability, requires hyper-detailed image descriptions that take hours to read to even be able to experience and understand an image properly.

CC: @Carolyn @Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta #VirtualWorlds

@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

erfunden worden. Und alles, was davon abweicht und nicht "offensichtlich (wie PeerTube & Co.) als Extra an Mastodon drangeklebt" worden ist, wird aufgefaßt als lästige Eindringlinge im Mastodon-Fediverse, die sich nicht an die Regeln des Mastodon-Fediverse halten und sich auch nicht an die Kultur des Mastodon-Fediverse anpassen.

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"

Daß Friendica schon seit über 15 Jahren quote-posten kann, weiß zum Glück beinahe niemand auf Mastodon.

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

@jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ @Lioh Den kann ich sogar noch über.

Jupiter Rowland wrote the following post Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:56:16 +0100

Yes, it's that bad

I've read an interesting comparison the other day: Mastodon is the Internet Explorer 6 of the Fediverse.

It's underwhelming. It's underequipped. It lacks features that are standard just about everywhere else. It's actually hopelessly outdated. In fact, it's even insecure, also due to how it lacks security features that competitors have readily available. And it ignores officially defined standards and tries hard to force the whole {Fediverse|Web} to adopt its own non-standard solutions instead.

At the same time, however, for many many users, it is the {Fediverse|Internet}, full stop.

For the vast majority of {Fediverse|Internet} users, it was the first {Fediverse project|Web browser} they came across because that's what they were mouth-fed when they started with the {Fediverse|Internet}. For quite a long time, it was the only {Fediverse project|Web browser} they even knew existed, and for many, it still is. Alternatives are only known to and used by the tech-savvy, and they're also the only ones who are aware of how dangerously lacking it is.

Thus, it has vastly more users than all its alternatives combined. Its market share is such that its developers don't even have to care for standards compatibility or what advantages the competition has. They can force their way upon everyone and everything.

Even many websites are built hard against only {Mastodon|the Internet Explorer} and malfunction or completely refuse to work with any of its alternatives, not seldomly because their developers don't even know that alternatives exist. And few developers dare to build {websites|Fediverse projects} only according to {HTML|ActivityPub} standards, even if that means breaking compatibility with {Mastodon|the IE6}.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Comparison #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediverseIsNotMastodon #InternetExplorer #InternetExplorer6 #IE6

(Selbst-Quote-Posten FTW! Man ist ja schreibfaul.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuoteTweet #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #InternetExplorer #InternetExplorer6 #IE6