1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B
4 December 2025 - Daily Drawing Day 338
My eyelashes are annoyingly long. Whenever I wear glasses I can feel them pressing up against the lenses.
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Watch the time lapse video of this drawing on YouTube Shorts:
See the latest at
The 2025 20-25 Challenge.
This year lets get better at something by finding a little practice time most days, in my case drawing. - Do your activity for at least 25 minutes, at least 25 days per month.
- Use the hashtag on social media etc to track your progress
- Also use the hashtag to cheer on others.
Thats about it!
Have fun with your activities, whatever they may be!
Drawing, programming, dancing, cooking, make up, reading, languages, gardening, mastering high fives, sewing, astrophysics, vcr clock setting ...
...where "always" means "since before there was even Mastodon".
A side-effect of their model, present at least on Hubzilla and Hubzilla's descendants, including still existing (streams) and Forte, is that comments/replies cannot exist in a stream without a) a parent and b) a start post. On all of them, including Friendica, it isn't a post if it replies to something, very much unlike Mastodon where a thread is a bunch of posts.
Depending on whom you ask, a conversation looks either like this:
If you delete a comment or a reply, this won't just remove the comment from the conversation and rip a hole into the branch in the conversation where the comment used to be. Instead, it will delete the comment, all comments on it, all comments on these comments and so far from the conversation because all these comments on comments no longer have a parent, and therefore, they no longer have anywhere to attach in the conversation.
If you delete the post, you delete the whole conversation. The comments on the post will no longer have a parent, and nothing in the conversation will have a post to refer to anymore.
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Just so much, : Most of my Fediverse data and identities are anything but locked to any instance. All my and channels are . I could make more clones, I could declare any clone the new main instance, and no matter which server goes offline, my channels will carry on.
Each of these servers corresponds not to an ATmosphere PDS and not to a full ATmosphere PDS/relay/AppView stack either, but to a Mastodon server, only that these servers use something else than ActivityPub as their primary protocol and ActivityPub only as an optional extra protocol. However, with the creation of Forte in August, 2024, this technology was first implemented entirely with ActivityPub.
This technology is neither new nor experimental in fact, it has been around for longer than Mastodon, much less Bluesky: It was conceived in 2011 and first implemented on a precursor of Hubzilla in mid-2012.
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Title: Chteau Inferno
Episode of 3 main maps + 2 secret levels in an Infernal Castle
Besides, there isn't any image description guide otherwise that takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse in account. I'm going to cover that as well, although I won't add step-by-step guides on how to add an alt-text with this Web frontend or that mobile app. But I'm going to take into consideration that the non-Mastodon Fediverse is never limited to only 500 characters.
In case you're curious:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Well, I'm used to having not only full native data portability, but even live, hot, bidirectional, real-time updates of entire Fediverse identities that contain stuff which 99% of the Fediverse doesn't support. Natively without an external application. Available for longer than Mastodon itself. Between any number of independent servers. So I'm not easily impressed.
I would be kind of impressed if LOLA managed to move a Mastodon account into a brand-new, virgin Hubzilla channel
Even that wouldn't give you a 100% identical copy of your Mastodon account. Hubzilla doesn't support quote-post control the only way to make your posts non-quote-postable is by making them non-public (something that Mastodon can only understand as a DM), and you have no control whatsoever over the permissions of your comments on other people's posts anyway. Also, as I've already mentioned, Hubzilla currently doesn't support summaries (= Mastodon CWs) in comments.
However, vice versa, it'd be even harder to shoehorn Hubzilla's wealth of features into a new Mastodon account.
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While it won't include step-by-step instructions on how to add alt-text on this or that server application's Web frontend or in this or that app (I simply can't know/test them all, and that'd be well over 100 individual guides), it will take particular properties of non-Mastodon Fediverse applications into account, specifically the much higher number of available characters outside Mastodon.
Also, it takes many other guides into account as references to show that I haven't made everything up.
However, it isn't just one page. It's a whole wiki because the topic really is that complex, and because there is so much about image descriptions and alt-text that nobody knows about. Currently, 20 pages are written, and another 24 are planned, but both numbers may increase. And since this is a wiki, existing pages may always change.
Another advantage of having a wiki instead of one page is that I can easily point people at certain aspects of describing images or writing alt-text, e.g. when they use alt-text to write around their 500-character limit, or when they add line breaks or the quotation marks from their keyboard to alt-text, or when they want to know whether and how to describe colours.
The wiki is part of the same Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right now:
By the way, the wiki also contains a list of over 50 alt-text guides:
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The various issues with quote-posts on Mastodon that nobody on Mastodon is aware of CW: long (almost 6,800 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, Mastodon looking bad in comparison with the rest of the Fediverse, quote-post meta
Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about Mastodon's quote-post feature that you know nothing about. Definitely not if all you know is Mastodon. Oh, and by the way, in case you don't know yet in spite of following me: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
Eugen Rochko is bringing quote-posts to Mastodon. But he is not bringing quote-posts to the Fediverse. The Fediverse has had quote-posts for 15 years.
It was Mike Macgirvin who introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse in July, 2010, when he launched something called Mistpark back then and Friendica today (, ). That was five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.
In fact, when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and with Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator which has quote-posts, too. So when Mastodon was launched, it immediately became possible to quote-post Mastodon toots. Not on Mastodon itself, but on Friendica and Hubzilla.
Here are a few (but not even all) Fediverse server applications that already have quote-posts:
And they're all part of the Fediverse which means that they're all connected to Mastodon. People on all of these can theoretically read your Mastodon toots. And people on all of these can theoretically quote-post your Mastodon toots.
So you can choose not to be quote-posted. But you can only choose not to be quote-posted by Mastodon users. This opt-in does not work with the rest of the Fediverse.
First of all, that's because Mastodon's quote-post feature is not compatible with anything else out there. Mastodon's developers have chosen to re-invent the quote-posting wheel from scratch. They've intentionally chosen to do so in a way that's completely incompatible with everything else out there.
Their intention was to reinforce Mastodon's appearance to its own users as the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard and to make Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. look broken. It's part of their plan to keep Mastodon users on Mastodon in the wake of Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse shrinking.
Also, they did not publish any specifications on their quote-post implementation, so even those non-Mastodon developers who are fast enough didn't have a chance to implement support for Mastodon's opt-in.
This means that even if you've set your posts to un-quote-post-able on Mastodon, everything I've listed above can still quote-post you with no resistance.
And don't get your hopes high that the day will come when nobody on the Fediverse will be able to quote-post you, whether they're on Mastodon or not. Such a setting is technologically impossible.
Who says that Mike Macgirvin says that. The guy who launched Friendica and brought quote-posts to the Fediverse 15 years ago, remember This guy has built the Fediverse's most elaborate, most complex, most fine-grained, most advanced permissions system into (streams) and Forte.
These two have reply control, the kind of which you couldn't image in your wildest dreams. I'm serious. They have permissions settings for almost everything on two or three levels, for your whole channel, individually per contact and sometimes even per post or per file or folder in the file storage.
But they don't have quote-post permission settings. Because that's impossible to enforce Fediverse-wide. And even if it was possible, it'd be pointless. If they can't quote-post you, they'll copy-paste you. If they can't copy-paste you either because they're on a phone, they'll post screenshots of your toots.
Mike also says, there is exactly one way to keep people from quote-posting you, and that's by not posting in public. Unfortunately, unlike what he has created, Mastodon has little between "public" and "DM", if anything.
This may be the big surprise: It has recently been discovered by chance that Mastodon's quote-post feature only works with Mastodon toots.
On the one hand, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica, Hubzilla etc. can quote-post just about everything that comes in from Mastodon. But on the other hand, no Mastodon 4.5 user will be able to quote-post anything from either of these. Or from Pixelfed or PeerTube or Loops or Castopod or WriteFreely or whatever.
That's because Mastodon is looking for a quote-post opt-in. But nothing else in the Fediverse supports Mastodon's quote-post opt-in, also seeing as it's still officially in development. And it's highly unlikely that everything in the Fediverse will adopt another piece of non-standard, proprietary Mastodon tech.
Lastly, Mastodon has the audacity to call this feature "quote".
A "quote" is something else. Remember forums Like, bulletin-board forums with subforums and all Where posts are quoted in follow-ups, entirely or only partially That's what a quote is. That has got nothing to do with quote-posts.
Why I say that there's a difference Because I also say that Friendica has had both quotes and quote-posts.
It has had them for 15 years, both quotes (which it calls "quotes", go figure) and quote-posts (which it calls "quoted shares", and which include the original author of the quoted post, complete with their profile picture and a clickable link to them, as well as a clickable link to the original post).
Hubzilla has both. (streams) has both. Forte has both. And I wouldn't be surprised if other Fediverse server software had both, too.
The irony is that Mastodon itself has been able to render actual quotes since version 4.0 from October, 2022. At the same time, it will continue to be unable to render any quote-posts done outside of Mastodon for the foreseeable future.
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Do you have an upper limit on "more"
What if I went and took two full days to describe one image in
I've actually done that, by the way. While I haven't done it on Mastodon, the post came from the same channel that I'm replying to you from right now, so yes, it went out into the Fediverse and to Mastodon. AFAIK, Mastodon only rejects posts when they exceed 100,000 characters.
Here's a justification for this effort:
I've been wondering that myself.
I've made a series of avatar portraits last year which shall showcase their outfits. All the same avatar, all the same posture, all the same neutral, bright white background, outfits often different in only a few details like colour or material. Three or four portraits in each image, three or four images in each post.
Since they're fashion portraits, technically speaking, and since nobody has got even only a rough idea what avatars generally look like in these worlds, the images require full and detailed visual descriptions. This is why I haven't posted them yet: The image descriptions are still far from done.
In many cases, the avatar is wearing a sport jacket with herringbone pattern tweed textures. I'm still not sure whether or not I must give a description what this fabric pattern looks like, even though, admittedly, various actually blind Mastodon users have told me that I can take it as a given. Maybe for them, but for everyone
Likewise, in many cases, the avatar is wearing full brogue leather shoes. Can I assume that it's generally known what full brogue shoes look like Can't I Can I, but will I still have to give a full, detailed description of these shoes because not all full brogue shoes look the same, and/or because I can't assume that anyone (much less everyone) knows what these shoes look like in this virtual world specifically
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# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # For starters, making it a hard technical requirement on the server side would exclude and discriminate against
Besides, what's "the platform" Only Mastodon or the whole Fediverse
Just in case you didn't know: The Fediverse server applications that can send posts with images and other media onto your timeline include, but aren't limited to:
If "the platform" means something with one development team, it's only Mastodon. And everything else I've listed above, and then some, is free to keep alt-text optional.
If "the platform" means the whole Fediverse, this means that well over 100 Fediverse server applications, all being developed independently from another and especially from Mastodon, often working vastly differently from Mastodon, would have to make it impossible to post images without alt-text. This, by the way, is next to impossible to implement on at least some of them due to the way they handle images and therefore alt-text.
And you can be certain about one thing: If the Mastodon developers add something to Mastodon, it's very unlikely that Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, the Hubzilla developers, and Mike Macgirvin, inventor of Friendica and Hubzilla and still developer of (streams) and Forte, will follow suit. Other server applications won't because they're dead in spite of still having running servers (Calckey, Firefish, /kbin etc.), they're in maintenance mode which means they won't get new features (Iceshrimp-JS), or their development is on hold (Plume).
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# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Of course, this means that having any undescribed images on your timeline or stream is a risk, no matter how far back they are.
There could always be someone who discovers you. Who decides to check your timeline or stream in their Mastodon app (as opposed to checking the original in their Web browser). Who stumbles upon an old image post of yours, over three years old, before you've discovered alt-text and its important, especially before you actually started putting some effort into driving your image descriptions to perfection. Who finds that post cute or funny without checking whether the image has an alt-text or not. Or how old it is. Who not only likes (as in faves) it, but boosts it to 5,000 followers, 4,950 of whom are on Mastodon.
And before you know it, thousands of Mastodon users permanently block you for something you haven't done over three years ago because they don't check how old your post is either. All they see is an image without alt-text. Or because they do expect everyone everywhere in the Fediverse to go and add alt-texts to every last image they've ever posted.
This could happen to me.
The obvious remedy would be for me to actually go through my entire backlog of old posts and describe all the images in them. Sounds like a good idea if it takes you two minutes tops to describe one image. But I'm not going to do that for three reasons.
One, it takes me hours to describe one virtual world rendering. Days if it's more complex. It'd take me longer to describe one image than it'd take the average Mastodon user to describe their entire image backlog.
I actually haven't posted a single new in-world image in almost a year and a half because it takes so much time and effort to describe them. I have a bunch of seemingly simple avatar portraits with a feature-less, neutral, bright white background, the descriptions of which I've been working on for about a year now, and they're still far from finished, also because I now have to edit technical terms and jargon out and/or explain more of those technical terms and that jargon. It'd take me forever to describe these old images which I haven't even optimised for "quick" and "easy" describing.
Two, here on , unlike on Mastodon, adding an alt-text means editing the post. Which, in turn, might mean that the edited posts go out anew, being perceived by at least some Fediverse software as brand-new posts. However, at least some of them are very outdated, e.g. announcements for 2022 events.
Three, from the newest image post that got a brand-new description to the oldest image post that already had one and thus didn't need a new one, there'd be a sharp decline in image description quality and level of detail. I'd basically have to go and upgrade all my existing image descriptions because all of them are outdated by my current standards. I'd have to describe them all at the same level of detail. I'd have to upgrade the explanations. I'd have to cut the jargon and explain more. I'd have to change the way I've described colours and dimensions.
In fact, some of the more recent ones contain descriptions of images within the image and, in one case, even what amounts to descriptions of images in images within the image. I've onced used over 4,000 characters to describe an image within one of my images that's only 30 pixels wide and 10 pixels high. However, in my longest image description to date, I decided against describing images within the image because there would have been so many, sometimes four levels deep, that it would have gone completely out of hand: One image within that image contained several dozen images itself which, in turn, contained probably a hundred images or more.
In order for all my image descriptions to be on the same level of quality and detail from the beginning to today, I'd either have to cut the existing descriptions of images within an image although even the three-levels-deep descriptions are actually important. Or I'd have to go and add the missing descriptions of images within the image, no matter how levels deep. This, by the way, isn't even possible. That image with the dozens of images with a hundred images shows a place that no longer exists, so I can't go there and take a closer and better look at what the image within my image shows than if I only looked at that image.
I might need a rule for when to describe images within images and when not to describe them. Something that includes "if they matter within the context of the image" and "not if I have to walk or teleport to the place shown in the image in my image to describe that image" the former might or might not override the latter. Maybe add a three-level limit because I have third-level image descriptions that are important while not being overwhelmingly long.
That is, in some cases, upgrading the image descriptions would be difficult, if not completely impossible, because the places shown in my images don't exist anymore either. I can't go back there and take measurements and take new looks at the colours to and such. Other places may have changed certain details may be different now or gone entirely.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This, by the way, is why I describe my original images, my virtual world renderings, twice. Once in the post text body, once in the alt-text.
There is always a long description that goes into full detail, that includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's any text anywhere within the borders of the image (regardless of whether it can be read in the image, for I can read it in-world), there a verbatim transcript of it. As the long description tends to grow very long, often tens of thousands of characters, it goes into the post text body. (Here on , my "character limit" is over 16.7 million.)
And then there is a shorter, but still long description in the alt-text which leaves some room within the 1,500-character limit for me to tell my readers about the long description in the post text. This description, all by itself, is mostly there because a not-too-lacking image description in the alt-text is a hard requirement if your post goes out to Mastodon. Distilling the short description from the long one may take me another hour or two. In combination ("short" image description + hint at the long image description in the post), my alt-texts tend to end up either exactly 1,500 characters long or only a few characters short.
Having two descriptions for each image was even more justified not too long ago when Mastodon hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images. Since my image posts inevitably have to exceed 500 characters, and since they do so by huge magnitudes, I have to hide them behind a long post CW.
So, back then, people saw the images, but they did not see the post text, so they did not know about the huge image description behind the CW that took me something between five hours and two full days to research for and write. Maybe they stopped reading the CW at the announced length of the post and decided not to bother. They didn't even read the entire CW which, at least in some later cases, also told them that the post behind the CW contained a long image description.
Hadn't I added an extra image description into the alt-text, I would have been mass-blocked by people who simply couldn't see an image description or any hint of an image description right off the bat. In addition to being mass-blocked by people who blocked me because there was no sufficient image description in the alt-text, regardless of the huge one in the post, because, you know, there must be an image description in the alt-text, full stop.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
# # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
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What if the image is the topic at hand What if the post is about the image What if the post is not about one specific element in the image, but about the whole scenery What if everything in the image matters all the same within the context of the post
Also, to quote :
What if, on top of it all, the image shows something that may make people so super curious that they want to know everything about it And what if, at the same time, what the image shows is so super obscure that nobody knows what anything in the image looks like because nobody has ever seen any of it ever before
Because that's pretty much standard for me. For I don't post real-life photos. I post renderings from 3-D virtual worlds that not even one out of 200,000 Fediverse users has heard of.
Here are some examples of images that I've actually posted into the Fediverse from this very channel that I'm replying from right now. These links don't take you to the posts so you don't have to wade through 60,000+ or 70,000+ characters each. They only take you to the image files and where they are stored in my file space.
(Apologies for the lack of image descriptions there. These pages are not meant to be directly presented to an audience besides, unlike posts, they don't federate to other people's timelines. But rest assured, I have described them all, and I've described them at levels of detail that probably even you couldn't possibly imagine. If you want to read the descriptions, ask, and I'll provide you with links to the posts with these images in them. Just be warned: The descriptions of the first three images are very outdated by my current standards, and the description of the fourth image is still somewhat outdated.)
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This is even more remarkable when you consider that she was a commercial merchant who sold most of her creations for money. Even some of the "Never buy in OpenSim" die-hards appear to mourn her. After all, her creations are worth the money, especially the buildings. I doubt that there's anything exclusive to Second Life that comes close to that monumental art dco event location appropriately called (CW for the link: eye contact) "". (Sadly, we'll never get a PBR "Majestic" now, as gorgeous it is with Blinn-Phong textures.)
So I guess (I actually hope) that her passing won't be seen as an opportunity to copybot her creations, rebox them and offer them as freebies somewhere, now that she can't do anything against it anymore. I mean, her content isn't going to go anywhere. has said her sims will stay online. I hope that even the anti-capitalist activists and the freebie store owners who are constantly looking for exclusive, top-notch-quality content won't have the heart to bot or god-mode her stuff, especially seeing as her creations are so unique that nobody can get away with rebranding Luna's works as their own original creations.
# # # # # # # # # #Seriously, never before have I seen as many condolence posts and comments and actions on OpenSimWorld as for . And never before have I seen two independent memorial events being scheduled for one member of the community. (Unfortunately, one will be in the middle of the night for me.)
This is even more remarkable when you consider that she was a commercial merchant who sold most of her creations for money. Even some of the "Never buy in OpenSim" die-hards appear to mourn her. After all, her creations are worth the money, especially the buildings. I doubt that there's anything exclusive to Second Life that comes close to that monumental art dco event location appropriately called (CW for the link: eye contact) "". (Sadly, we'll never get a PBR "Majestic" now, as gorgeous it is with Blinn-Phong textures.)
So I guess (I actually hope) that her passing won't be seen as an opportunity to copybot her creations, rebox them and offer them as freebies somewhere, now that she can't do anything against it anymore. I mean, her content isn't going to go anywhere. has said her sims will stay online. I hope that even the anti-capitalist activists and the freebie store owners who are constantly looking for exclusive, top-notch-quality content won't have the heart to bot or god-mode her stuff, especially seeing as her creations are so unique that nobody can get away with rebranding Luna's works as their own original creations.
# # # # # # # # # # 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 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 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:
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Das geht bei Mastodon grundstzlich nicht, egal mit welchem Frontend. Dafr ist Mastodon zu sehr ein puristischer Twitter-Klon. Da geht nur
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-tailedTit
Entweder Hubzilla > (2018) > Zap > (2020) Osada/Mistpark 2020/Redmatrix 2020 > (2021) Roadhouse > (streams).
Oder Hubzilla > (2018) > Osada > Zap > (2020) Osada/Mistpark 2020/Redmatrix 2020 > (2021) Roadhouse > (streams).
Es ist einfach in einigen Fllen nicht mehr nachzuvollziehen, was wovon geforkt worden ist.
2018 ist hchstwahrscheinlich erst das erste Osada von Hubzilla und dann Zap von Osada geforkt worden. Vielleicht sind aber auch das erste Osada und Zap in dieser Reihenfolge beide direkt von Hubzilla geforkt worden.
2020 entstanden drei bis auf Namen und Branding identische Forks, das dritte Osada, Mistpark 2020 und Redmatrix 2020. Mindestens einer davon ist von Zap geforkt worden. Aber welcher von Zap geforkt worden ist und welcher von welchem der jeweils anderen, ist heute nicht mehr in Erfahrung zu bringen.
Ebensowenig ist in Erfahrung zu bringen, von welchem von den dreien 2021 Roadhouse geforkt worden ist.
Fakt ist aber, da zwischen Hubzilla und (streams) sechs weitere Serveranwendungen lagen, die alle inzwischen eingestellt sind. (streams) ist also alles andere als ein direkter Hubzilla-Fork.
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My eyelashes are annoyingly long. Whenever I wear glasses I can feel them pressing up against the lenses.
#
Watch the time lapse video of this drawing on YouTube Shorts:
See the latest at
The 2025 20-25 Challenge.
This year lets get better at something by finding a little practice time most days, in my case drawing. - Do your activity for at least 25 minutes, at least 25 days per month.
- Use the hashtag on social media etc to track your progress
- Also use the hashtag to cheer on others.
Thats about it!
Have fun with your activities, whatever they may be!
Drawing, programming, dancing, cooking, make up, reading, languages, gardening, mastering high fives, sewing, astrophysics, vcr clock setting ...
...where "always" means "since before there was even Mastodon".
A side-effect of their model, present at least on Hubzilla and Hubzilla's descendants, including still existing (streams) and Forte, is that comments/replies cannot exist in a stream without a) a parent and b) a start post. On all of them, including Friendica, it isn't a post if it replies to something, very much unlike Mastodon where a thread is a bunch of posts.
Depending on whom you ask, a conversation looks either like this:
- Post
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Comment
- Post
- Comment
- Reply
- Reply
- Reply
- Comment
- Reply
- Reply
- Reply
- Comment
If you delete a comment or a reply, this won't just remove the comment from the conversation and rip a hole into the branch in the conversation where the comment used to be. Instead, it will delete the comment, all comments on it, all comments on these comments and so far from the conversation because all these comments on comments no longer have a parent, and therefore, they no longer have anywhere to attach in the conversation.
If you delete the post, you delete the whole conversation. The comments on the post will no longer have a parent, and nothing in the conversation will have a post to refer to anymore.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
#3.7B
Unfortunately, I can't join that discussion for some reason.Just so much, : Most of my Fediverse data and identities are anything but locked to any instance. All my and channels are . I could make more clones, I could declare any clone the new main instance, and no matter which server goes offline, my channels will carry on.
Each of these servers corresponds not to an ATmosphere PDS and not to a full ATmosphere PDS/relay/AppView stack either, but to a Mastodon server, only that these servers use something else than ActivityPub as their primary protocol and ActivityPub only as an optional extra protocol. However, with the creation of Forte in August, 2024, this technology was first implemented entirely with ActivityPub.
This technology is neither new nor experimental in fact, it has been around for longer than Mastodon, much less Bluesky: It was conceived in 2011 and first implemented on a precursor of Hubzilla in mid-2012.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # #Author(s): PatIV
Title: Chteau Inferno
Episode of 3 main maps + 2 secret levels in an Infernal Castle
Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output
-run -term
Can I pay off a loan with home sale proceeds and get capital gains tax exemption
I have taken an education loan against my residential property. If I want to sell the house and
-termcapitalgains
Besides, there isn't any image description guide otherwise that takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse in account. I'm going to cover that as well, although I won't add step-by-step guides on how to add an alt-text with this Web frontend or that mobile app. But I'm going to take into consideration that the non-Mastodon Fediverse is never limited to only 500 characters.
In case you're curious:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Well, I'm used to having not only full native data portability, but even live, hot, bidirectional, real-time updates of entire Fediverse identities that contain stuff which 99% of the Fediverse doesn't support. Natively without an external application. Available for longer than Mastodon itself. Between any number of independent servers. So I'm not easily impressed.
I would be kind of impressed if LOLA managed to move a Mastodon account into a brand-new, virgin Hubzilla channel
- automatically activating all necessary apps from PubCrawl to Privacy Groups to Superblock to NSFW if the Mastodon account has at least one hiding filter
- activating all features that are either hard-coded or switched on on the Mastodon source account, but off by default on new Hubzilla channels
- (optionally) setting the channel role to Custom and configuring it in such a way that Hubzilla behaves as closely to Mastodon as possible, permissions-wise
- translating all followers and followed into Hubzilla's system of Facebook-style mutual-by-default contacts
- reconnecting all followers and followed on their end
- translating each Mastodon list into a Hubzilla privacy group, all members included while keeping the default "Friends" privacy group and adding all contacts to it
- converting followed hashtags into FediBuzz contacts (Hubzilla cannot follow hashtags, but we want the Hubzilla destination channel to be as close to the Mastodon source account as possible)
- translating not only the entire timeline of the Mastodon source account into a Hubzilla stream, but also importing entire threads behind and around each post in the timeline (this is absolutely necessary for the Mastodon user to keep their replies to other people's posts because a Hubzilla comment cannot exist without the start post and the entire branch of the conversation that led to it also, it's a Hubzilla killer feature over Mastodon that you always see entire conversations instead of single-message piecemeal)
- transferring all posts, replies and DMs with all media in them
- converting Mastodon's loosely-tied threads, no matter who has started them, into Hubzilla-style enclosed conversations as per FEP-171b Conversation Containers with unified permissions for all messages within a conversation
- translating mentions and links into Hubzilla-specific markup
- translating faves into thumbs up
- translating Mastodon 4.6-style quotes into Hubzilla-style shares, automatically recognising which Hubzilla version the destination channel is running on and deciding which Hubzilla share format to use
- translating CWs in comments into
summary/summarytags (this would require Hubzilla to actually fully support summaries in comments which it currently doesn't because that doesn't make sense from a Facebook/blogging POV) - translating Mastodon's post visibility settings into Hubzilla's permission system as far as that's possible (only for start posts, that is, because comments always inherit their permissions from the start post also, this will have to be done after taking care of all contacts because "followers only" Mastodon toots will have to be converted into non-public posts which grant permission to see them only to the "Friends" privacy group, and likewise, DMs will have to have the contact(s) to whom they were originally sent assigned as those who are permitted to see them)
- importing all images, videos and other attached files into the Hubzilla channel's file space, including appropriate permission settings and, ideally, sorting them into Hubzilla-style "year-month" folders
- converting all media attachments into embedded links to the locations of the respective media files in the file space, including adding alt-texts to the embedding code
- importing the block list on the Mastodon source account into Superblock (that is, Hubzilla cannot block entire servers, but maybe this could automatically be translated into filter lines)
- converting blocking filters into channel-wide filter lines, converting bare keywords into regular expressions if the whole word option is set for these keywords on Mastodon
- adding the keywords of hiding filters to NSFW, converting bare keywords into regular expressions if the whole word option is set for these keywords on Mastodon
- translating the selected languages on the Mastodon source account into channel-wide filters on Hubzilla (even though this probably won't work exactly identical because Hubzilla neither sets nor knows per-message language settings)
- recognising the contents of Mastodon's free-text profile fields and moving them into the appropriate ones of Hubzilla's several dozen purpose-bound profile fields
- populating Hubzilla's keyword field with all hashtags found in the profile text of the Mastodon source account
- setting your channel language according to the language that most of your posts are in
- bonus points for entering Mastodon's colours into the Redbasic colour settings and changing the PDL layout settings so that the look of the Hubzilla destination channel is closer to that of the Mastodon source account than by default
Even that wouldn't give you a 100% identical copy of your Mastodon account. Hubzilla doesn't support quote-post control the only way to make your posts non-quote-postable is by making them non-public (something that Mastodon can only understand as a DM), and you have no control whatsoever over the permissions of your comments on other people's posts anyway. Also, as I've already mentioned, Hubzilla currently doesn't support summaries (= Mastodon CWs) in comments.
However, vice versa, it'd be even harder to shoehorn Hubzilla's wealth of features into a new Mastodon account.
# # # # # # # # # # # #
Laguna Beach looking to develop long-term outdoor dining program
Laguna Beachs outdoor dining scene could be in for some changes, particularly for
-termoutdoordiningprogram
More to :D
Long-Lasting Organic Friction Material by Performance Clutches
Discover how Performance Clutches delivers -lasting engineered for superior grip, smoother engagement, and extended clutch life. Perfect for drivers who demand reliability, performance, and eco-friendly design all in one powerful upgrade.
While it won't include step-by-step instructions on how to add alt-text on this or that server application's Web frontend or in this or that app (I simply can't know/test them all, and that'd be well over 100 individual guides), it will take particular properties of non-Mastodon Fediverse applications into account, specifically the much higher number of available characters outside Mastodon.
Also, it takes many other guides into account as references to show that I haven't made everything up.
However, it isn't just one page. It's a whole wiki because the topic really is that complex, and because there is so much about image descriptions and alt-text that nobody knows about. Currently, 20 pages are written, and another 24 are planned, but both numbers may increase. And since this is a wiki, existing pages may always change.
Another advantage of having a wiki instead of one page is that I can easily point people at certain aspects of describing images or writing alt-text, e.g. when they use alt-text to write around their 500-character limit, or when they add line breaks or the quotation marks from their keyboard to alt-text, or when they want to know whether and how to describe colours.
The wiki is part of the same Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right now:
By the way, the wiki also contains a list of over 50 alt-text guides:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Long
Tee Higgins talks life off the field, emotions of long-term contract with Bengals
Tee Higgins talks life off the field, emotions of long-term contract with Bengals BENGALS ARE GOING TO BE
'MarrChase -termcontract -termextension
The various issues with quote-posts on Mastodon that nobody on Mastodon is aware of CW: long (almost 6,800 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, Mastodon looking bad in comparison with the rest of the Fediverse, quote-post meta
Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about Mastodon's quote-post feature that you know nothing about. Definitely not if all you know is Mastodon. Oh, and by the way, in case you don't know yet in spite of following me: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around
Eugen Rochko is bringing quote-posts to Mastodon. But he is not bringing quote-posts to the Fediverse. The Fediverse has had quote-posts for 15 years.
It was Mike Macgirvin who introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse in July, 2010, when he launched something called Mistpark back then and Friendica today (, ). That was five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.
In fact, when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and with Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator which has quote-posts, too. So when Mastodon was launched, it immediately became possible to quote-post Mastodon toots. Not on Mastodon itself, but on Friendica and Hubzilla.
Just about everything that isn't Mastodon has already got quote-posts right now
Here are a few (but not even all) Fediverse server applications that already have quote-posts:
And they're all part of the Fediverse which means that they're all connected to Mastodon. People on all of these can theoretically read your Mastodon toots. And people on all of these can theoretically quote-post your Mastodon toots.
Mastodon's quote-post opt-in is not a water-tight defence against being quote-posted
So you can choose not to be quote-posted. But you can only choose not to be quote-posted by Mastodon users. This opt-in does not work with the rest of the Fediverse.
First of all, that's because Mastodon's quote-post feature is not compatible with anything else out there. Mastodon's developers have chosen to re-invent the quote-posting wheel from scratch. They've intentionally chosen to do so in a way that's completely incompatible with everything else out there.
Their intention was to reinforce Mastodon's appearance to its own users as the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard and to make Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. look broken. It's part of their plan to keep Mastodon users on Mastodon in the wake of Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse shrinking.
Also, they did not publish any specifications on their quote-post implementation, so even those non-Mastodon developers who are fast enough didn't have a chance to implement support for Mastodon's opt-in.
This means that even if you've set your posts to un-quote-post-able on Mastodon, everything I've listed above can still quote-post you with no resistance.
Absolute Fediverse-wide protection against being quote-posted is impossible
And don't get your hopes high that the day will come when nobody on the Fediverse will be able to quote-post you, whether they're on Mastodon or not. Such a setting is technologically impossible.
Who says that Mike Macgirvin says that. The guy who launched Friendica and brought quote-posts to the Fediverse 15 years ago, remember This guy has built the Fediverse's most elaborate, most complex, most fine-grained, most advanced permissions system into (streams) and Forte.
These two have reply control, the kind of which you couldn't image in your wildest dreams. I'm serious. They have permissions settings for almost everything on two or three levels, for your whole channel, individually per contact and sometimes even per post or per file or folder in the file storage.
But they don't have quote-post permission settings. Because that's impossible to enforce Fediverse-wide. And even if it was possible, it'd be pointless. If they can't quote-post you, they'll copy-paste you. If they can't copy-paste you either because they're on a phone, they'll post screenshots of your toots.
Mike also says, there is exactly one way to keep people from quote-posting you, and that's by not posting in public. Unfortunately, unlike what he has created, Mastodon has little between "public" and "DM", if anything.
Mastodon cannot quote-post the non-Mastodon Fediverse
This may be the big surprise: It has recently been discovered by chance that Mastodon's quote-post feature only works with Mastodon toots.
On the one hand, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica, Hubzilla etc. can quote-post just about everything that comes in from Mastodon. But on the other hand, no Mastodon 4.5 user will be able to quote-post anything from either of these. Or from Pixelfed or PeerTube or Loops or Castopod or WriteFreely or whatever.
That's because Mastodon is looking for a quote-post opt-in. But nothing else in the Fediverse supports Mastodon's quote-post opt-in, also seeing as it's still officially in development. And it's highly unlikely that everything in the Fediverse will adopt another piece of non-standard, proprietary Mastodon tech.
"Quote" actually means something else
Lastly, Mastodon has the audacity to call this feature "quote".
A "quote" is something else. Remember forums Like, bulletin-board forums with subforums and all Where posts are quoted in follow-ups, entirely or only partially That's what a quote is. That has got nothing to do with quote-posts.
Why I say that there's a difference Because I also say that Friendica has had both quotes and quote-posts.
It has had them for 15 years, both quotes (which it calls "quotes", go figure) and quote-posts (which it calls "quoted shares", and which include the original author of the quoted post, complete with their profile picture and a clickable link to them, as well as a clickable link to the original post).
Hubzilla has both. (streams) has both. Forte has both. And I wouldn't be surprised if other Fediverse server software had both, too.
The irony is that Mastodon itself has been able to render actual quotes since version 4.0 from October, 2022. At the same time, it will continue to be unable to render any quote-posts done outside of Mastodon for the foreseeable future.
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I think more rather than less is always better.
Do you have an upper limit on "more"
What if I went and took two full days to describe one image in
- 1,400+ characters of "short" description in the alt-text
- an additional 60,000+ characters of long description in the post text, including explanations and dozens of individual text transcripts
I've actually done that, by the way. While I haven't done it on Mastodon, the post came from the same channel that I'm replying to you from right now, so yes, it went out into the Fediverse and to Mastodon. AFAIK, Mastodon only rejects posts when they exceed 100,000 characters.
Here's a justification for this effort:
So do blind people know about cornices or herring bone
I've been wondering that myself.
I've made a series of avatar portraits last year which shall showcase their outfits. All the same avatar, all the same posture, all the same neutral, bright white background, outfits often different in only a few details like colour or material. Three or four portraits in each image, three or four images in each post.
Since they're fashion portraits, technically speaking, and since nobody has got even only a rough idea what avatars generally look like in these worlds, the images require full and detailed visual descriptions. This is why I haven't posted them yet: The image descriptions are still far from done.
In many cases, the avatar is wearing a sport jacket with herringbone pattern tweed textures. I'm still not sure whether or not I must give a description what this fabric pattern looks like, even though, admittedly, various actually blind Mastodon users have told me that I can take it as a given. Maybe for them, but for everyone
Likewise, in many cases, the avatar is wearing full brogue leather shoes. Can I assume that it's generally known what full brogue shoes look like Can't I Can I, but will I still have to give a full, detailed description of these shoes because not all full brogue shoes look the same, and/or because I can't assume that anyone (much less everyone) knows what these shoes look like in this virtual world specifically
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # For starters, making it a hard technical requirement on the server side would exclude and discriminate against
- actually blind or visually-impaired people who do post images regardless
- neurodivergent people who, due to their disability, are incapable of turning images into words
Besides, what's "the platform" Only Mastodon or the whole Fediverse
Just in case you didn't know: The Fediverse server applications that can send posts with images and other media onto your timeline include, but aren't limited to:
- Mastodon
- Glitch
- Hometown
- Pleroma
- Akkoma
- Misskey
- Calckey
- Firefish
- Iceshrimp-JS
- Iceshrimp.NET
- CherryPick
- Sharkey
- Meisskey
- GoToSocial
- snac
- Hollo
- Tootik
- Mitra
- micro.blog
- Smithereen
- Socialhome
- Friendica
- Hubzilla (that's what this comment came from)
- (streams)
- Forte
- Pixelfed
- Vernissage
- PeerTube
- Loops
- Plume
- WriteFreely (needs an external image host, but still)
- WordPress
- Ghost
- nodeBB
- Lemmy
- /kbin
- Mbin
- PieFed
If "the platform" means something with one development team, it's only Mastodon. And everything else I've listed above, and then some, is free to keep alt-text optional.
If "the platform" means the whole Fediverse, this means that well over 100 Fediverse server applications, all being developed independently from another and especially from Mastodon, often working vastly differently from Mastodon, would have to make it impossible to post images without alt-text. This, by the way, is next to impossible to implement on at least some of them due to the way they handle images and therefore alt-text.
And you can be certain about one thing: If the Mastodon developers add something to Mastodon, it's very unlikely that Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, the Hubzilla developers, and Mike Macgirvin, inventor of Friendica and Hubzilla and still developer of (streams) and Forte, will follow suit. Other server applications won't because they're dead in spite of still having running servers (Calckey, Firefish, /kbin etc.), they're in maintenance mode which means they won't get new features (Iceshrimp-JS), or their development is on hold (Plume).
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Of course, this means that having any undescribed images on your timeline or stream is a risk, no matter how far back they are.
There could always be someone who discovers you. Who decides to check your timeline or stream in their Mastodon app (as opposed to checking the original in their Web browser). Who stumbles upon an old image post of yours, over three years old, before you've discovered alt-text and its important, especially before you actually started putting some effort into driving your image descriptions to perfection. Who finds that post cute or funny without checking whether the image has an alt-text or not. Or how old it is. Who not only likes (as in faves) it, but boosts it to 5,000 followers, 4,950 of whom are on Mastodon.
And before you know it, thousands of Mastodon users permanently block you for something you haven't done over three years ago because they don't check how old your post is either. All they see is an image without alt-text. Or because they do expect everyone everywhere in the Fediverse to go and add alt-texts to every last image they've ever posted.
This could happen to me.
The obvious remedy would be for me to actually go through my entire backlog of old posts and describe all the images in them. Sounds like a good idea if it takes you two minutes tops to describe one image. But I'm not going to do that for three reasons.
One, it takes me hours to describe one virtual world rendering. Days if it's more complex. It'd take me longer to describe one image than it'd take the average Mastodon user to describe their entire image backlog.
I actually haven't posted a single new in-world image in almost a year and a half because it takes so much time and effort to describe them. I have a bunch of seemingly simple avatar portraits with a feature-less, neutral, bright white background, the descriptions of which I've been working on for about a year now, and they're still far from finished, also because I now have to edit technical terms and jargon out and/or explain more of those technical terms and that jargon. It'd take me forever to describe these old images which I haven't even optimised for "quick" and "easy" describing.
Two, here on , unlike on Mastodon, adding an alt-text means editing the post. Which, in turn, might mean that the edited posts go out anew, being perceived by at least some Fediverse software as brand-new posts. However, at least some of them are very outdated, e.g. announcements for 2022 events.
Three, from the newest image post that got a brand-new description to the oldest image post that already had one and thus didn't need a new one, there'd be a sharp decline in image description quality and level of detail. I'd basically have to go and upgrade all my existing image descriptions because all of them are outdated by my current standards. I'd have to describe them all at the same level of detail. I'd have to upgrade the explanations. I'd have to cut the jargon and explain more. I'd have to change the way I've described colours and dimensions.
In fact, some of the more recent ones contain descriptions of images within the image and, in one case, even what amounts to descriptions of images in images within the image. I've onced used over 4,000 characters to describe an image within one of my images that's only 30 pixels wide and 10 pixels high. However, in my longest image description to date, I decided against describing images within the image because there would have been so many, sometimes four levels deep, that it would have gone completely out of hand: One image within that image contained several dozen images itself which, in turn, contained probably a hundred images or more.
In order for all my image descriptions to be on the same level of quality and detail from the beginning to today, I'd either have to cut the existing descriptions of images within an image although even the three-levels-deep descriptions are actually important. Or I'd have to go and add the missing descriptions of images within the image, no matter how levels deep. This, by the way, isn't even possible. That image with the dozens of images with a hundred images shows a place that no longer exists, so I can't go there and take a closer and better look at what the image within my image shows than if I only looked at that image.
I might need a rule for when to describe images within images and when not to describe them. Something that includes "if they matter within the context of the image" and "not if I have to walk or teleport to the place shown in the image in my image to describe that image" the former might or might not override the latter. Maybe add a three-level limit because I have third-level image descriptions that are important while not being overwhelmingly long.
That is, in some cases, upgrading the image descriptions would be difficult, if not completely impossible, because the places shown in my images don't exist anymore either. I can't go back there and take measurements and take new looks at the colours to and such. Other places may have changed certain details may be different now or gone entirely.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This, by the way, is why I describe my original images, my virtual world renderings, twice. Once in the post text body, once in the alt-text.
There is always a long description that goes into full detail, that includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's any text anywhere within the borders of the image (regardless of whether it can be read in the image, for I can read it in-world), there a verbatim transcript of it. As the long description tends to grow very long, often tens of thousands of characters, it goes into the post text body. (Here on , my "character limit" is over 16.7 million.)
And then there is a shorter, but still long description in the alt-text which leaves some room within the 1,500-character limit for me to tell my readers about the long description in the post text. This description, all by itself, is mostly there because a not-too-lacking image description in the alt-text is a hard requirement if your post goes out to Mastodon. Distilling the short description from the long one may take me another hour or two. In combination ("short" image description + hint at the long image description in the post), my alt-texts tend to end up either exactly 1,500 characters long or only a few characters short.
Having two descriptions for each image was even more justified not too long ago when Mastodon hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images. Since my image posts inevitably have to exceed 500 characters, and since they do so by huge magnitudes, I have to hide them behind a long post CW.
So, back then, people saw the images, but they did not see the post text, so they did not know about the huge image description behind the CW that took me something between five hours and two full days to research for and write. Maybe they stopped reading the CW at the announced length of the post and decided not to bother. They didn't even read the entire CW which, at least in some later cases, also told them that the post behind the CW contained a long image description.
Hadn't I added an extra image description into the alt-text, I would have been mass-blocked by people who simply couldn't see an image description or any hint of an image description right off the bat. In addition to being mass-blocked by people who blocked me because there was no sufficient image description in the alt-text, regardless of the huge one in the post, because, you know, there must be an image description in the alt-text, full stop.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
# # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
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This is very Nice but at the same Time. don't really understand , since the time each Singaporvisitor for each sub-page of this page, don't take longer than 2 minutes and each video have more than 10 minutes. Some of them, 1h long. .. So Long that Look like Dragons! )
Yow in't seen me, roight! -tailedit
You don't have to describe every little detail, just the important ones to the topic at hand.
What if the image is the topic at hand What if the post is about the image What if the post is not about one specific element in the image, but about the whole scenery What if everything in the image matters all the same within the context of the post
Also, to quote :
And, I am imagining what I would like to know about a picture, if I couldn't see it.
What if, on top of it all, the image shows something that may make people so super curious that they want to know everything about it And what if, at the same time, what the image shows is so super obscure that nobody knows what anything in the image looks like because nobody has ever seen any of it ever before
Because that's pretty much standard for me. For I don't post real-life photos. I post renderings from 3-D virtual worlds that not even one out of 200,000 Fediverse users has heard of.
Here are some examples of images that I've actually posted into the Fediverse from this very channel that I'm replying from right now. These links don't take you to the posts so you don't have to wade through 60,000+ or 70,000+ characters each. They only take you to the image files and where they are stored in my file space.
(Apologies for the lack of image descriptions there. These pages are not meant to be directly presented to an audience besides, unlike posts, they don't federate to other people's timelines. But rest assured, I have described them all, and I've described them at levels of detail that probably even you couldn't possibly imagine. If you want to read the descriptions, ask, and I'll provide you with links to the posts with these images in them. Just be warned: The descriptions of the first three images are very outdated by my current standards, and the description of the fourth image is still somewhat outdated.)
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251121 Anything you say, long hair Jeongyeon
Seriously, never before have I seen as many condolence posts and comments and actions on OpenSimWorld as for . And never before have I seen two independent memorial events being scheduled for one member of the community. (Unfortunately, one will be in the middle of the night for me.)This is even more remarkable when you consider that she was a commercial merchant who sold most of her creations for money. Even some of the "Never buy in OpenSim" die-hards appear to mourn her. After all, her creations are worth the money, especially the buildings. I doubt that there's anything exclusive to Second Life that comes close to that monumental art dco event location appropriately called (CW for the link: eye contact) "". (Sadly, we'll never get a PBR "Majestic" now, as gorgeous it is with Blinn-Phong textures.)
So I guess (I actually hope) that her passing won't be seen as an opportunity to copybot her creations, rebox them and offer them as freebies somewhere, now that she can't do anything against it anymore. I mean, her content isn't going to go anywhere. has said her sims will stay online. I hope that even the anti-capitalist activists and the freebie store owners who are constantly looking for exclusive, top-notch-quality content won't have the heart to bot or god-mode her stuff, especially seeing as her creations are so unique that nobody can get away with rebranding Luna's works as their own original creations.
# # # # # # # # # #Seriously, never before have I seen as many condolence posts and comments and actions on OpenSimWorld as for . And never before have I seen two independent memorial events being scheduled for one member of the community. (Unfortunately, one will be in the middle of the night for me.)
This is even more remarkable when you consider that she was a commercial merchant who sold most of her creations for money. Even some of the "Never buy in OpenSim" die-hards appear to mourn her. After all, her creations are worth the money, especially the buildings. I doubt that there's anything exclusive to Second Life that comes close to that monumental art dco event location appropriately called (CW for the link: eye contact) "". (Sadly, we'll never get a PBR "Majestic" now, as gorgeous it is with Blinn-Phong textures.)
So I guess (I actually hope) that her passing won't be seen as an opportunity to copybot her creations, rebox them and offer them as freebies somewhere, now that she can't do anything against it anymore. I mean, her content isn't going to go anywhere. has said her sims will stay online. I hope that even the anti-capitalist activists and the freebie store owners who are constantly looking for exclusive, top-notch-quality content won't have the heart to bot or god-mode her stuff, especially seeing as her creations are so unique that nobody can get away with rebranding Luna's works as their own original creations.
# # # # # # # # # # 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 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 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.
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Ukraine downs Russian Mi-8 helicopter with deep strike drone for first time
forces shot down a Mi-8 with in Oblast with a deep strike , Ukraines Special Operations Forces (SSO) reported on Nov. 22.
The operation marks the first time has used a deep strike drone to down a Russian Mi-8
-Range
Blde Frage: Kann ich Mastodon (bei mir hier aktuell "Fedilab") "zwingen" mir den kompletten Thread anzuzeigen Oder mir zumindest zu verraten, dass ich eine Antwort sehe, ohne die "Frage" gesehen zu haben
Das geht bei Mastodon grundstzlich nicht, egal mit welchem Frontend. Dafr ist Mastodon zu sehr ein puristischer Twitter-Klon. Da geht nur
- feststellen, da da jemand erwhnt wurde, und auf der Basis mutmaen, da es vielleicht eine Antwort sein knnte
- die mutmaliche Antwort auf der Originalinstanz ffnen (drfte den Browser ffnen), um den Zweig des Thread zu sehen, in dem sich dieser Post befindet
- anschlieend den Startpost auf der Originalinstanz ffnen, um den kompletten Thread zu sehen
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Halemejse - Aegithalos caudatus - Long-tailed Tit
-tailedTit
-tailedTit
john
Schei Foto aber wir haben gerade neben dem kleinen Bruder von meinem Lastenrad geparkt
Latest practice update on TE Brenton Strange
Following Thursdays Week 12 practice, here is the latest injury update on Jaguars TE Brenton Str
Archie Ludowyke misses getting his name called out by Adelaide Crows, upstairs in his room crying, video, interview
When newly-minted Adelaide forward Archie Ludowyke had his name called out at Pick 50 on Thursday ni
-timedraftguru
Entweder Hubzilla > (2018) > Zap > (2020) Osada/Mistpark 2020/Redmatrix 2020 > (2021) Roadhouse > (streams).
Oder Hubzilla > (2018) > Osada > Zap > (2020) Osada/Mistpark 2020/Redmatrix 2020 > (2021) Roadhouse > (streams).
Es ist einfach in einigen Fllen nicht mehr nachzuvollziehen, was wovon geforkt worden ist.
2018 ist hchstwahrscheinlich erst das erste Osada von Hubzilla und dann Zap von Osada geforkt worden. Vielleicht sind aber auch das erste Osada und Zap in dieser Reihenfolge beide direkt von Hubzilla geforkt worden.
2020 entstanden drei bis auf Namen und Branding identische Forks, das dritte Osada, Mistpark 2020 und Redmatrix 2020. Mindestens einer davon ist von Zap geforkt worden. Aber welcher von Zap geforkt worden ist und welcher von welchem der jeweils anderen, ist heute nicht mehr in Erfahrung zu bringen.
Ebensowenig ist in Erfahrung zu bringen, von welchem von den dreien 2021 Roadhouse geforkt worden ist.
Fakt ist aber, da zwischen Hubzilla und (streams) sechs weitere Serveranwendungen lagen, die alle inzwischen eingestellt sind. (streams) ist also alles andere als ein direkter Hubzilla-Fork.
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Last updated: 2025-12-04
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