Find the latitude of any place.  

*7 Cat Breeds with the Longest

Die Regeln sind nicht bei den Diensten anders, sondern generell bei jeder Instanz (unabhngig was darauf fr eine Software luft, das hat damit nichts zu tun).

Sowohl als auch.
Auf der einen Seite hat natrlich jeder Server seine eigenen Regeln.
Auf der anderen Seite ist aber z. B. Friendica oder Hubzilla technologisch und konzeptionell vllig anders als Mastodon. Daher haben die beiden eine vllig andere Kultur als Mastodon. Daher wiederum haben sie auf ihren Servern vllig andere Regeln als Mastodon.
Auf vielen Mastodon-Server besteht z. B. Alt-Text-Pflicht. Wenn man nicht alle seine Bilder mit hinreichend guten Alt-Texten versieht, wird man dafr sanktioniert.
Auf Hubzilla wird dir das nicht passieren. Allein deshalb schon nicht, weil Hubzilla keine schicken Eingabefelder fr Alt-Texte hat, sondern man Alt-Texte hndisch in den Einbettungs-Markup-Code fr die Bilder "reinprogrammieren" mu. Bis letztes Jahr gab es nicht mal irgendeine Dokumentation, wie das geht.
Oder CWs. Auf vielen Mastodon-Servern sind die auch Pflicht.
Auf Hubzilla ist Mastodons CW-Feld immer noch ein Zusammenfassungsfeld. Das ist es schon lnger, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt. Und wenn man nicht nur 500 Zeichen hat, sondern ber 16,7 Millionen, dann ergibt ein Zusammenfassungsfeld auch einen Sinn.
CWs handhabt Hubzilla statt dessen, wie sein Vorfahr Friendica es schon seit 2010 tut: Man kann sich optional einen Textfilter aktivieren, der einem ganz individuell vollautomatisch genau die CWs erzeugt, die man selbst braucht.
Zum einen ist man damit nicht davon abhngig, da alle immer schn brav die richtigen CWs eintragen. Sie mssen nur irgendwo im Post die richtigen Schlsselwrter haben, was sehr viel wahrscheinlicher ist. Zum anderen bekommt man auch keine CWs aufgezwungen, die man gar nicht braucht, und zwingt anderen auch keine CWs auf, die sie gar nicht brauchen.
Das geht auch auf Mastodon, aber erst seit Oktober 2022, und von kennt man das auch nicht, also ist es nie in Mastodons Kultur angekommen. Auerdem gehrt das zu den Sachen, die auf Friendica und Hubzilla sehr einfach gehen, wo man sich aber auf Mastodon dabei einen abbricht. Wie brigens Filter im allgemeinen.
Gerade Hubzilla hat es generell nicht so mit Regeln. Auf Mastodon hast du eigentlich nur "stummschalten", "blockieren" und "melden". Hubzilla hat ein sehr mchtiges, feingliedriges Berechtigungssystem und ist darauf ausgelegt, da man seinen Stream selbst moderiert (und damit, falls vorhanden, den Public Stream gleich mit). Die mchtigen, aber einfach zu handhabenden Filter helfen auch mit.
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# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Wenn man selbst nur Mastodon nutzt, fhlt es sich piepschnurzegal an. Dann nimmt man eh das ganze Fediverse als nur Mastodon wahr und die Unterschiede zwischen Mastodon und Nicht-Mastodon fast berhaupt nicht.
Wenn man selbst aber etwas ganz anderes im Fediverse nutzt als Mastodon, dann ist es immens wichtig.
Ich selbst bin nicht auf Mastodon. Ich bin auf Hubzilla (, , ). Das funktioniert vllig anders als Mastodon, das hat ein vllig anderes Konzept als Mastodon, das wird von Mastodon vllig unabhngig entwickelt. Es hat Features, die auf Mastodon unvorstellbar sind. Noch dazu ist es zehn Monate lter als Mastodon. Es geht sogar zurck auf Friendica, das mehr als fnfeinhalb Jahre lter ist als Mastodon.
Aber wie du mit eigenen Augen sehen kannst, kann ich Mastodon-Trts nicht nur empfangen, sondern auch von Hubzilla aus kommentieren.
Wenn jemand das komplette Fediverse meint, es aber "Mastodon" nennt, dann meint er mich zwar damit, spricht mich aber nicht an. Ich bin ja nicht auf Mastodon.
Wenn jemand einen meiner Posts oder Kommentare als "Trt" bezeichnet in der Annahme, ich sei auch auf Mastodon, dann ist beides sachlich falsch.
Wenn jemand sich wnscht, "das Fediverse" mge endlich ein bestimmtes Feature einfhren, nur weil Mastodon es nicht hat, dann kann ich mir nur vor den Kopf schlagen. In den allermeisten Fllen hat Hubzilla genau dieses Feature schon zehn Monate lnger, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt. Sehr hufig hat Friendica dieses Feature schon etliche Jahre lnger, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt. Das Fediverse hat dieses Feature also. Mastodon hat es nicht, aber das Fediverse hat es.
Wenn jemand dagegen ist, da "das Fediverse" ein bestimmtes Feature einfhrt, dem sei gesagt: Hchstwahrscheinlich hat das Fediverse dieses Feature schon. Mastodon nicht, aber das Fediverse. Denn hchstwahrscheinlich hatten Friendica und Hubzilla es schon immer, also auch wieder lnger, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt.
Am besten war noch der Widerstand gegen Quote-Posts. "Das Fediverse" sollte die auf gar keinen Fall einfhren, sagten einige. Der Witz: Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, CherryPick, Sharkey, Iceshrimp, Catodon, GoToSocial, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte usw., sie alle haben Quote-Posts. Und zwar schon lnger, als es diese Debatte auf Mastodon berhaupt gibt. Und sie alle (auer GoToSocial) knnen widerstandslos jeden, aber auch wirklich jeden Mastodon-Trt quote-posten.
Oder damals der Widerstand gegen Volltextsuche. Auf gar keinen Fall sollte "das Fediverse" Volltextsuche haben. Nur hatte das Fediverse schon lngst Volltextsuche: Friendica war schon im Mai 2010 mit eingebauter Volltextsuche an den Start gegangen.
Ach ja: Zeichenlimits. Wer "Mastodon" und "Fediverse" gleichsetzt, fr den hat auch das Fediverse ein festgelegtes Limit von 500 Zeichen. Friendica und Hubzilla hatten aber nie wirklich Zeichenlimits. In deren Kultur kommen auch keine Zeichenlimits vor. Aktuell haben sie brigens ein "Limit" von ber 16,7 Millionen Zeichen. Bis auf Threads hat alles im Fediverse ein sehr viel hheres Zeichenlimit als Mastodon. Entsprechend kriegen Nicht-Mastodon-Nutzer stndig auf den Deckel, wenn sie das angeblich von Gargron fr das ganze Fediverse festgeschriebene Limit von 500 Zeichen berschreiten.
Also: Das Fediverse ist nicht nur Mastodon. Das Fediverse war auch nie nur Mastodon. Das Fediverse ist nicht nur ein Twitter-Klon. Das Fediverse hat sehr viel mehr Features als Mastodon. Und das Fediverse hat auch nicht berall dieselbe Kultur und wird sie auch nie haben.
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ich werbe ins Fediverse zu kommen und sage klar das erstmal als Alternative zu FB,Insta, X etc zu nutzen und das Andere nach und nach auszufaden.

Das Fediverse: ja.
Aber komm nicht auf die Idee, Mastodon und nur Mastodon als alleinige Alternative zu und Facebook und Instagram zu verkaufen.
Mastodon ist eine Alternative zu . Nicht die einzige. Eine von vielen. Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey usw., sie sind auch alle Alternativen zu und besser als Mastodon. In mancher Hinsicht sind brigens Misskey und seine Forks sogar dichter an dran als Mastodon.
Mastodon ist keine Alternative zu Instagram. Die hauptschliche Alternative zu Instagram ist Pixelfed. Man kann sogar sein komplettes Instagram-Konto mitsamt allen Bildern direkt nach Pixelfed importieren.
Mastodon ist auch keine Alternative zu Facebook. Nein, wirklich nicht. Die populrste Alternative zu Facebook ist Friendica, das 2010 vorn vornherein als Alternative zu Facebook entwickelt wurde. Es ist also sehr viel dichter an Facebook dran als Mastodon. Wer mehr Features will und/oder mehr Sicherheit und/oder mehr Resilienz gegen Serverausfall, kann sich auch Hubzilla angucken.
Was die Themen Synthesizer und Musikproduktion angeht: einfach mal aufhren, mit Hashtags in den ther zu rufen und zu hoffen, da die richtigen Leute anbeien. Statt dessen sich einfach mal da umzugucken, wo es ein Killerfeature gibt, auf das Mastodon nicht mal vorbereitet ist: Gruppen.
Beispiel: Lemmy. Die primre Alternative zu Reddit im Fediverse.

Beispiel: Friendica.

Und falls dir das nicht bekannt sein sollte: Alles, was ich hier jetzt erwhnt habe, ist nicht nur im Fediverse, sondern das heit, es ist auch mit Mastodon verbunden. Und miteinander.
Gru von Hubzilla brigens.
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Wenn aber Leute, die schon lange hier sind, manche Dinge ber das FediVerse und seine Dienste tatschlich grob fehlerhaft darstellen, dann darf man das schon mal richtigstellen, finde ich.

Und dann wirst du von den fanatischen Mastodon-Sektenanhngern wegen "Mansplaining" und "Fedisplaining" stummgeschaltet oder gleich blockiert.
Oder es ergeht dir wie : Der hat sich mal mit einem Tech-Journalisten auf Mastodon gezofft, der der felsenfesten berzeugung war, Mastodon sei ein in sich geschlossenes Netzwerk. Crossgolf ist schon lnger auf Calckey, als dieser Journalist auch nur wei, da es Mastodon gibt. Aber der Journalist nahm fr sich die alleinige Kompetenzhoheit in Anspruch, weil er ja Journalist und somit Profi ist und Crossgolf nur Amateur.
(Falls jetzt irgendjemand sagen sollte: "Wieso, der Journalist hat doch recht": Leute, ihr habt noch sehr viel ber das Fediverse zu lernen. Ob ihr das wollt oder nicht.)
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Das direkt wohl nicht, aber es sind immer mal wieder Leute schnell dabei neuen Leuten sehr deutlich zu beschreiben, dass dass hier nicht Mastodon heit und wie das Fediverse funktioniert und dass es noch zig andere Mglichkeiten zur Interaktion und viele viele andere Dienste gibt usw

Das ist aber durchaus gerechtfertigt, sie so frh wie mglich darauf hinzuweisen, da das Fediverse nicht nur Mastodon ist. Du als Sharkey-Nutzer solltest das eigentlich aus eigener Erfahrung wissen.
Klar, jemand, der nur Mastodon kennt und vielleicht noch die "Mastodon-Satelliten" PeerTube und Pixelfed, wird sagen: "Ist doch scheiegal. Lat sie glauben, das Fediverse ist nur Mastodon. Ist doch viel einfacher und sympathischer und weniger nerdy." Auch klar, fr jemanden, der nur Mastodon kennt, sieht in der eigenen Timeline erstmal alles aus wie von Mastodon. Auer vielleicht, wenn es Sachen macht, die Mastodon nicht kann, wie hier z. B. Teilzitate oder Kursivschrift oder auch nur ber 500 Zeichen. Aber auch dann wissen Mastodon-Nutzer nicht, woher es statt dessen kommt. Viele glauben, das kommt alles von irgendwelchen frisierten Mastodon-Servern.
Diejenigen, die schon lange etwas anderes als Mastodon daily-driven, sehen das alles aber vllig anders. Die wissen aus eigener leidvoller Erfahrung, da solche Leute sich dann ber Monate oder gar Jahre daran gewhnen, da das Fediverse nur Mastodon ist und auch nur die Features von Vanilla-Mastodon hat. Wenn Mastodon-Nutzer nicht von Anfang an wissen und sich nicht von Anfang an daran gewhnen, da das Fediverse nicht nur Mastodon ist und das vllig normal ist, neigen sie dazu, das Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse zu diskriminieren. Doch, diskriminieren. Nicht selten entwickeln sie sogar eine Feindseligkeit gegenber dem Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse.
Dann sehen sie Mastodon als den alleinigen Goldstandard im Fediverse an, an dem sich alles andere zu orientieren hat. Was anders ist als Mastodon, ist schlecht. Und Features, die Mastodon nicht hat (und die sie persnlich nicht unbedingt haben wollen), sind bse.
Dann versuchen sie mit aller Gewalt, Mastodons Kultur und Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln allen aufzuzwingen, die irgendwie in ihre Timeline gesplt werden. Es ist ihnen ja nicht klar, da das nicht alles Mastodon ist. Es ist ihnen noch weniger klar, da das nicht mal alles wie Mastodon ist, da das auch mal vllig anders sein kann als Mastodon. Vom Konzept her, von den Features her und, ja, auch von der Kultur her.
Die wissen einfach nicht, da auf Pleroma ist, das ungefhr so alt ist wie Mastodon selbst, und wo mindestens 5000 Zeichen ganz normal sind. Die wissen auch nicht, da du auf Sharkey bist und 3000 Zeichen hast und auch das ganz normal auf Sharkey ist.
Die wissen auch nicht, da auf Calckey ist mit, soweit ich wei, 3000 Zeichen. Er ist tatschlich schon mal angeschnauzt worden, da er seine Posts auf maximal 500 Zeichen beschrnken oder sich aus dem Fediverse verpissen soll. Glaubt ihr nicht, weil euch das noch nie passiert ist Ist aber passiert. Fragt ihn. Fragt , die ist auch auf Calckey, die wird das besttigen.
Die wissen auch nicht, da ich auf Hubzilla bin. Da es Hubzilla schon 10 Monate lnger als Mastodon gibt und es einen Stammbaum hat, der zurckgeht bis zu Friendica von Mai 2010, also mehr als fnfeinhalb Jahre (!) vor Mastodon. Und da wir hier nicht nur ber 16,7 Millionen Zeichen haben (doch, wirklich), sondern da Hubzilla genau wie Friendica weder ein Twitter-Klon ist noch eine Immer-alles-schn-kurz-Kultur hat und noch nie hatte. Und da Hubzilla genau wie Friendica schon technologisch nicht zur Mastodon-Kultur pat.
Auch das kann niemand nachvollziehen, der nur Mastodon kennt.
Es kommt sogar vor, da Mastodon-Nutzer der felsenfesten berzeugung sind, Gargron habe das Fediverse als in sich geschlossenes reines Mastodon-Netzwerk erfunden. Folglich mu alles, was im Fediverse ist, was aber nicht Mastodon ist, unrechtmig da sein und ein bses Hackertool sein. Der Friendica-Nutzer jakob ist tatschlich genau deshalb mal von einer Mastodon-Nutzerin gesperrt worden, weil sie der Ansicht war, er mu ein bser Hacker sein, der sich illegalerweise mit seinem bsen Hackertool Friendica ins Mastodon-Fediverse reingehackt hat.
Falls so jemand ein fhiger Programmierer ist, wird er mglicherweise ein Tool oder eine Website fr das Fediverse bauen. Er wird sie aber hart nur gegen Mastodon bauen. Also nicht gegen die Mastodon Client API, sondern direkt und nur gegen Mastodon und gegen Eigenarten, die nur Mastodon hat. Und er wird womglich trotzdem "Fedi" in den Namen einbauen. Wenn man ihn darauf hinweist, da es im Fediverse auch noch andere Sachen gibt, zu denen seine Kreation aber komplett inkompatibel ist, dann kann er nur mit den Schultern zucken, weil sein Werk so, wie es ist, in Stein gemeielt ist und er Untersttzung fr jede einzelne andere Fediverse-Serveranwendung nachtrglich einbauen mte.
Wenn man Mastodon-Neulingen von vornherein erklrt, da das Fediverse nicht nur Mastodon ist, bevor sie sich an ein reines Mastodon-Fediverse gewhnt haben, dann kann man all das abwenden.
Wenn man Mastodon-Neulinge glauben lt, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon, dann passiert aber genau das. Und weil das beinahe alle Mastodon-Neulinge glauben und man sie auch glauben lt, ist das Fediverse ein buchstbliches Minenfeld, wenn man selbst auf etwas anderem als Mastodon ist, aber mit Mastodon kommuniziert.
So ist Mastodon zu einem Groteil zu einer fanatisierten Sekte geworden, die dem unumstlichen Glauben anhngt, Gargron htte das Fediverse als reines Mastodon-Netzwerk erfunden.
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(PS: Irgendjemand hier, der allen Ernstes geglaubt hat, alle erwhnten Personen und ich selbst seien auf Mastodon Seid ehrlich!)
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Describe it as if you were on the phone and you wanted to fully explain the image to your correspondent.

I always fully explain my images. My posts are generally about very obscure niche topics, my image posts even more so. This means I always have a whole lot to explain, sometimes on various levels (explanations of explanations of explanations of explanations).
However, I don't describe and explain my images as if I'm on a phone. If I were on a phone, my correspondent could talk back. I could ask them inhowfar they're familiar with the topic at hand, what they need described, what they need explained and what they don't. Then I could give them a description and explanation tailor-made just for them.
This doesn't work in the Fediverse. I don't have one correspondent, but potentially millions in the Fediverse and billions on the Web. I can't tailor one description and explanation for all of them all the same. I can't even ask them all what they need and what they want, and even if I could, I'd get lots of different replies that'd contradict each other.
So what I do instead is write one gigantic info dump right away. It doesn't go into the alt-text, though. For one, explanations must never go into the alt-text. They must always go into the post text where everyone can access them. See also . Besides, Mastodon, Misskey and their forks cut alt-texts with over 1,500 characters off, so I can't really exceed that. But as far as I know, Mastodon allows external posts to have 100,000 characters before it rejects them, and my character limit is over 16.7 million. So I have much more space in the post than in alt-text anyway.
When I post a meme, the image gets a regular alt-text that also transcribes the relevant bits of text verbatim, and I add an explanation section to the post text that links to whatever I can link to for explanations and explains directly what I don't have external explanations for. I've read that at least some Mastodon users prefer explanations right in the post to links because linked websites don't necessarily have to be accessible. But my experience is that if you give them the choice between one link to KnowYourMeme and seven explanations measuring over 10,000 characters, they'll prefer the link to such a monster post.
Still, I can't always link to external explanations, so I might still have to inflate meme posts with long explanations.
Examples:

My original images are rendering from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. When I post one of these, I describe it twice.
For one, I write a full, detailed description of the entire image. I can never know if someone is curious enough to want the whole image described. Besides, more often than not, what matters in the image in the context of the post is not one specific element in the image, but the whole image, the whole scenery. This description also includes transcripts of all text within the borders of the image as long as I can read it in-world, and it includes all explanations necessary to understand the post, the image, the image description as a whole and all elements of the image description.
The long description goes into the post text.
As it's a hard requirement to have an accurate, sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text if your posts reach Mastodon, I distill a shorter image description for the alt-text from the long one. It has to fit into 1,500 characters together with a note where to find the long image description. The alt-text doesn't contain any text transcripts because I can impossibly put 20 or more individual text transcripts into well under 1,500 characters.
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*7 Cat Breeds with the Longest Tails

7 Cat Breeds With The Longest Tails

This is exactly the problem.
I'm on both Hubzilla and (streams) with multiple channels, and I've been on Hubzilla under various guises for longer than the vast majority of Mastodon users have been on Mastodon. I guess you can say that I know both very well.
I can tell you that the possibilities of Hubzilla's permissions system are staggering. It works on up to three levels: for the entire channel (that's "account" in Mastospeak), for individual connections (that's "followers and followed" in Mastospeak), for individual content (posts and and entire conversations, but also images and other uploaded files and documents).
For example, you can grant or deny permission to

All in all, Hubzilla has 18 such permissions, but these are the ones that matter from a Mastodon point of view. They can be granted or denied for your entire channel at seven or eight levels, and if they're denied at channel level, they can be granted for individual connections. Imagine that, on Mastodon, you could allow only certain followers to see your profile and your toots. Or you could only allow certain followed accounts to send you their toots. All of this is reality on Hubzilla right now.
Better yet: You know that you can send toots only to mentioned accounts on Mastodon. Hubzilla exceeds and improves upon this in three ways. First of all, you can send posts to individual connections. Or to a certain privacy group (from a Mastodon POV, that's a list on steroids). Or to a custom selection of individual connections and privacy groups while even being able to exclude certain other connections or privacy groups. This goes way beyond Mastodon's "mentioned = allowed to see".
But this doesn't only define who will receive your post. It also defines who is permitted to see your post.
And: The permissions of a post are inherited by the entire conversation. Comments always have the same permissions as the top post. There's no restricting the permissions in a comment, and there's no relaxing the limitations of a comment. It's impossible to pull other Fediverse users into a private conversation by mentioning them if the top post wasn't targetted at them.
Even better yet: You can allow or disallow comments on individual posts (remember that a post on Hubzilla is only a post if it starts a conversation, not if it's a reply).
On top of all this, Hubzilla's filters are both vastly more powerful than Mastodon's filters and easier to use. Mastodon requires you to set up one new filter for each word that you want filtered. It's always blocklisting. And it's always account-wide.
Hubzilla covers Mastodon's entire filter functionality with one or two text fields. You have one blocklist for the whole channel. And you have an optional extra feature named "NSFW" with its own filter list that generated individual, reader-side content warnings for you. The equivalent of defining a new filter on Mastodon is to add a new line to one of these filter lists. Want to back them up Just copy-paste them into a text file.
But wait, there's more: Hubzilla also has a channel-wide allowlist. If you only want to see certain content in your stream, you can allowlist certain keywords.
Hubzilla even optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per connection. Imagine you could filter individual followed accounts on Mastodon.
Hubzilla's filter lists support regular expressions. There is also a "filter syntax" that lets you filter by whether a message is a top post or not, whether a message is public or private, whether it's a repeat (that's "boost" in Mastospeak or "retoot" for those of you who still have Twitter on the brain). The filter syntax even lets you use Boolean operators.
(streams) and Forte are similar. Their permissions are somewhat different (you don't need permissions for wikis and websites if you don't have wikis and websites). The permissions system is vastly easier to use because it's no longer template-based. You can simply switch permissions on and off for your channel as well as for connections. And you can choose to have even more options for reply control.
Again, all this exists in the Fediverse right now. And most of it has existed for longer than Mastodon. Some of this dates back to the earliest days of Friendica in May, 2010.
Unfortunately, next to nobody knows.
For most Mastodon features, the features that Mastodon has are the features that the Fediverse has. If Mastodon doesn't have it, the Fediverse doesn't. Not only is Mastodon the default, but there's nothing that strays from this default. That's why Mastodon users keep wishing for "the Fediverse" to introduce features which Friendica has had for almost 16 years already. Or which Hubzilla has had for over a decade.
In addition, probably not even 10% of all Mastodon users have ever heard of Hubzilla. Probably not even 1% of all Mastodon users know what Hubzilla can do. And even only the existence of (streams) and Forte is almost entirely unknown outside of (streams) and Forte themselves and Hubzilla.
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** Information Briefing: **

Second for K-Drama "Can This be "


Verfgbar in (lang=de)//Available in (lang=en)//Disponible en (lang=fr)

Netflix Releases Second Long Preview for Romance K-drama Can This Love be Translated with Kim Sun Ho and Go Yoon Jung

Aus dem Fediverse wird an vorderster Front berall nur Mastodon empfohlen. Sonst nichts. Man wird sich sehr weit durchklicken mssen, um auch nur Pleroma als Zweitalternative fr zu finden.
Fr Nicht-Mastodon-Nutzer, denen die allgegenwrtige Mastodon-Zentrizitt und Mastodon-Normativitt und das vllige Ignorieren odar gar absichtliche Totschweigen des brigen Fediverse schon lnger gegen den Strich geht, sieht es so aus, als wrde genau das hier wieder passieren. Dabei sind die meisten Microblogging-Serveranwendungen im Fediverse Mastodon haushoch berlegen.
Natrlich kann man jetzt sagen, da es beim Digital Independence Day darum geht, europische Alternativen zu finden und die meisten anderen Fediverse-Serveranwendungen eben nicht in Europa entwickelt werden.
Aber: Nicht nur Mastodon wird in Europa entwickelt. Auch nicht nur Mastodon und Pleroma.
Friendica wurde zwar von einer Privatperson in Australien erfunden, ist aber seit 2011 in deutscher Hand. Einzig die Tatsache, da Friendica weiterhin beharrlich den Code bei GitHub in den USA hostet, knnte zur Disqualifikation reichen. Aber auch Mastodons Code liegt bei GitHub.
Hubzilla stammt ursprnglich vom selben Australier und aus derselben Softwarefamilie. Aber seit 2018 ist es in den Hnden eines deutschen Chefentwicklers, der als Vize einen Norweger hat. Auerdem liegt der Code bei Framagit in Frankreich.
Beide sind also sehr wohl europische Projekte. Noch dazu sind beide lter als Mastodon und trotzdem mit Mastodon verbunden. Aber kurioserweise werden sie im Rahmen des Digital Independence Day nirgendwo erwhnt. Direkte Alternativen zu Facebook werden gar berhaupt nicht genannt.
All dies pat wunderbar zusammen mit der allgemeinen medialen Darstellung und befeuert sie sogar noch weiter: Entweder ist das Fediverse gleich Mastodon. Oder es gibt kein Fediverse, nur Mastodon. So oder so wird Mastodon flschlicherweise dargestellt als a) das einzige seiner Art und b) in sich geschlossenes Netzwerk.
Ich kenne gengend Leute, die sich genau daran sehr stren und das auch zum Ausdruck bringen.
Nur daran stren sich dann wiederum diejenigen, die selbst praktisch oder tatschlich nur Mastodon kennen und Mastodon ansehen als Standard, Goldstandard oder tatschlich das ganze Fediverse, die auf jeden Fall aber so Sachen wie Misskey, Pleroma, Friendica und deren jeweilige Nachfahren ansehen als bse, rcksichtslose, kulturlose, unerwnschte Eindringlinge in ihrem kuscheligen Mastodon-Fediverse.
brigens dient ein Groteil meiner Hashtags dazu, Filter auszulsen inklusive dem automatischen Erzeugen individueller leserseitiger CWs. Gerade letztere sind da, wo ich bin, schon lnger technisch mglich und Teil der Kultur, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt. Und obwohl Mastodon sie auch hat, sind sie da nie Teil der Kultur geworden, weil sie nicht hat und auch Mastodon sie erst im Oktober 2022 eingefhrt hat.
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People keep thinking that AI solves the alt-text problem perfectly. Like, push one button, get a perfect alt-text for your image, send it without having to check it. Or, better yet, don't even push a button, the AI will take care of everything fully automatically.
However, at best, AI-generated alt-text is better than nothing. Oftentimes, AI-generated alt-text is literally worse than nothing.
First of all, AI does not know the context in which an image is posted. But an alt-text should always be written for a specific context because it usually depends on the context what needs to be described at all and on which level of detail.
This means that AI tends to leave out details that may be important while describing details that literally nobody is interested in.
AI can't take your target audience/your actual audience into consideration either. It can't write an alt-text specifically for that audience, fine-tuned for what that audience knows, what it doesn't know and what it needs and/or wants to know.
Worse yet, AI tends to hallucinate. It tends to mention stuff in an image that simply isn't there. It tends to describe elements of an image falsely. You could post a photo of a Yorkshire terrier, and the AI may think it's a cat because it can't distinguish it from a cat in that photo.
Seriously, AI may get even descriptions of simple images of very common things wrong. If you post images with very obscure, very niche content, AI fares even worse because it knows nothing about that very obscure, very niche content.
If you post a screenshot from social media, AI will not necessarily know that it has to transcribe the text in the screenshot 100% verbatim. And just pushing one button or running AI on full-auto, the thing that so many smartphone users are so much craving for, will not prompt it to do so.
If you want good, useful, accurate, sufficiently detailed image descriptions that match both the context of your posts and your audience, you will have to write them yourself.
Trust me. I know from personal experience. I post some of the most obscure niche stuff in the Fediverse. And I've pitted an image-describing AI against my own 100% hand-written image descriptions twice already. The AI failed miserably to even come close to my descriptions in both cases.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # Eigentlich bruchten wir mehr Vergleichstabellen und auch Vergleichsvideos: Mastodon vs. andere Fediverse-Anwendungen. Videos vor allem fr diejenigen, die nur Twitter und Mastodon kennen und nicht die Aufmerksamkeitsspanne haben, um mehr als 500 Zeichen lesen zu knnen.
Die Videos mte es jeweils in zweifacher Ausfhrung geben. Einmal informativ fr diejenigen, die wirklich neugierig sind.
"Von Mastodon nach Sharkey: So gelingt der Umstieg auf die mchtigste Microblogging-Anwendung des Fediverse"
Idealerweise wrden hier auch die kommerziellen, zentralistischen Dienste zum Vergleich rangezogen fr diejenigen, die im Kopf immer noch da sind. Z. B. , Mastodon und Sharkey. Oder , Mastodon, Facebook und Friendica, damit die Leute begreifen, da vieles, was auf Friendica anders als auf Mastodon ist, daher kommt, da es Facebook nachgeahmt ist und Facebook wiederum in diesem Punkt anders als ist.
Auerdem reierisch fr die Mastodon-Fanbois und -Fangurls, die Mastodon als unschlagbar und perfekt ansehen, aber immer aus der Sicht von jemandem, der Mastodon schon kennt und die jeweils andere Anwendung gerade neu entdeckt hat:
"Mastodon vs. Hubzilla: Der FEDIVERSE-ALLESKNNER, der Mastodon VOLL FETT KRASS HART IN DEN ARSCH FICKT!"
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A futuristic building

What does it look like
My experience is that, at least when your image posts reach Mastodon, you cannot simply mention what's in an image. You have to describe what it looks like. This is even more important if people aren't familiar with what something looks like. And next to nobody knows what this specific buildling looks like.
You cannot expect Mastodon users to ask you for extra details in your description. Having to ask for extra details is almost as bad as having to ask for a description in the first place.
with a large circular clock on the facade,

Factually wrong. There is no clock anywhere on the building.
surrounded by a grassy area and trees

Bordering on factually wrong, at least very incomplete. Also, what do the trees look like, or what kinds of trees are they
What else the image description leaves out:

In fact, in addition to the visual description, this image requires an explanation where it was taken. And I mean a full explanation that will not make it necessary for anyone to ask the poster anything about the image and the location or to have to look it up themselves.
This explanation will inevitably have to go into the post text. Explanations must never go into the alt-text.
# # # # # # # # # # #I'm experimenting with filters on Hubzilla again.
For some reason, Boolean lines with (or) on the allowlist of a contact not only don't work on my channel, but they actually defeat the whole filter, i.e. they render both the whole allowlist and the blacklist non-functional. Unfortunately, the devs can't reproduce the bug, so I'll have to go find the specific edge-case in which it appears.
Until then, I've decided to turn the Boolean lines inside-out: I've written their exact opposite, and I've placed it onto the blocklists.
So instead of having "the body contains foo, or the body contains bar, or the body contains baz, or it's a private message, or it isn't the top of the thread" on the allowlists, I now have "the body does not contain foo, and the body does not contain bar, and the body does not contain baz, and it isn't a private message, and it isn't not the top of the thread" on the blocklists. Let's see how it works.
# # # # # # # # # # #I'm experimenting with filters on Hubzilla again.
For some reason, Boolean lines with (or) on the allowlist of a contact not only don't work on my channel, but they actually defeat the whole filter, i.e. they render both the whole allowlist and the blacklist non-functional. Unfortunately, the devs can't reproduce the bug, so I'll have to go find the specific edge-case in which it appears.
Until then, I've decided to turn the Boolean lines inside-out: I've written their exact opposite, and I've placed it onto the blocklists.
So instead of having "the body contains foo, or the body contains bar, or the body contains baz, or it's a private message, or it isn't the top of the thread" on the allowlists, I now have "the body does not contain foo, and the body does not contain bar, and the body does not contain baz, and it isn't a private message, and it isn't not the top of the thread" on the blocklists. Let's see how it works.
# # # # # # # # # # # Wie soll das dann aussehen
Ich stelle mir das gerade auf die Spitze getrieben vor: Du ldst aus dem App Store eine App namens "Fediverse" aufs iPhone. Du startest sie zum ersten Mal. Bestenfalls bekommst du ein Eingabefeld fr einen Namen idealerweise nicht mal das, und die App sucht automatisch Benutzernamen aus deinem Adrebuch oder aus anderen Apps und stellt dir drei oder vier davon zur Wahl, da du auch ja nichts tippen mut. Darunter ein groer knallblauer Button mit "Los!" drauf.
Du tippst auf den Button, die App legt automatisch ein Benutzerkonto fr dich auf mastodon.social an. Um ein Pawort brauchst du dich nicht zu kmmern, das macht die App fr dich.
Du landest auf einer topaktuellen Designeroberflche im Look hauseigener Apple-Apps, fr die ein professionelles Designstudio mit haufenweise Referenzen im UI-Design 165 Millionen Euro kassiert hat. Deine Timeline ist sofort voll mit Zeugs, das dich interessiert. Die App hat dir in dem Sekundenbruchteil, den die Oberflche zum Laden brauchte, mehrere hundert Follower hinzugefgt, die ber das schreiben, was die in die App eingebaute KI an Interessen deinerseits aus deiner Kommunikation aus verschiedenen schon installierten Apps herausgelesen hat. Auerdem hat sie automatisch deren Posts der letzten 48 Stunden in deine Timeline importiert und chronologisch sortiert.
Ganz oben gibt es zwei groe Buttons: Timeline und Posten. Der "Posten"-Button wird am Anfang leicht hervorgehoben, um dich zu deinem ersten Post zu bewegen. Du tippst ihn an, und die App ffnet den Post-Editor und formuliert fr dich einen "Neu hier"-Post inklusive Hashtags vor.
Allerhchstens gibt's unten noch zwei Buttons: Einstellungen (der dich auch nur zum Ausfllen deines Profils und Auswhlen von Profilbildern fhrt, es sei denn, du tippst noch einen gut versteckten hellgrauen Schriftzug "Erweiterte Einstellungen" an) und Follower. Das war's.
Die App prsentiert dir das Fediverse nicht als Netzwerk aus lauter verschiedenen Serveranwendungen. Sie prsentiert dir das Fediverse auch nicht als reines Mastodon-Netzwerk. Sie prsentiert dir das Fediverse auch nicht als nur mastodon.social. Sie prsentiert dir das Fediverse nur als Handy-App und versteckt die komplette Technik vor dir.
Dabei leistet auch die in die App eingebaute KI ihren Beitrag. Wenn irgendjemand irgendwie ber das Fediverse postet, schreibt die KI entweder den Post so um, da smtlicher "Technobabble" und smtliche Hinweise auf die Technik hinter der App komplett und spurlos verschwinden. Sollte das nicht mglich sein, entfernt die KI den Post komplett, ebenso alle Reaktionen auf den Post, die sich nicht so umbiegen lassen, da nicht auffllt, da da gerade ein Post ber das Fediverse entfernt worden ist.
Die KI in der App geht bei denjenigen, deren Posts sie modifizieren oder lschen mu, auch deren kompletten Backlog an Posts durch. Wenn jemand viel ber das Fediverse schreibt, womglich gar ber das Fediverse jenseits von Mastodon, oder hufig ber 500 Zeichen schreibt, wird derjenige von der KI appintern komplett blockiert und seine Existenz fr dich gnzlich ausgelscht. Sogar dessen Erwhnungen in Beitrgen anderer werden entfernt.
Posts mit ber 500 Zeichen werden entweder von einer KI in maximal 500 Zeichen zusammengefat und diese Zusammenfassung dir dann als der eigentliche Post dargestellt. Oder sie werden gnzlich beseitigt.
Benutzernamen werden immer in Form der Langnamen dargestellt. Auch in Erwhnungen. Von der Existenz zustzlicher Kurznamen erfhrst du nicht einmal. Auch die hinterm Kurznamen angehngte Server-Domain bekommst du nie zu Gesicht.
Du erfhrst nicht nur nicht, da das Fediverse mehr ist als nur Mastodon. Du erfhrst nicht mal, da es Mastodon gibt. Du erfhrst auch nicht, da das Fediverse dezentral ist. Du erfhrst von der ganzen Technik berhaupt nichts. Du hast einfach nur die schicke App, und die kmmert sich um alles.
Du wirst nie irgendetwas ber das Fediverse erfahren. Aber das sollst du auch nicht. Damit sollst du dich nicht befassen mssen. Niemals. Diese ganze Technik knnte dich nur berfordern. In den Apps fr Twitter und Facebook und iMessage und YouTube und so brauchst du dir doch auch keine Gedanken ber die Technik zu machen.
In Folge dessen gibt's auch keine Mglichkeit, das abzustellen. Selbst in den erweiterten Einstellungen gibt es keinen solchen Schalter. Jede zustzliche Konfigurationsoption wrde die App nur unntig komplexer und schwerer zu handhaben machen. Und weil die App auch weder deinen Kurznamen noch deine Serverdomain noch dein Pawort rausrckt, wirst du nie auf eine andere App umsteigen knnen. Folglich verschleiert die KI in der App auch jegliche Erwhnungen anderer Fediverse-Apps und der Weboberflchen.
Alternativ ist die App eine reine Mastodon-App, die die Existenz des Fediverse nicht verschleiert, die aber mittels KI alles dafr tut, das Fediverse aussehen zu lassen wie nur Mastodon und Mastodon statt als dezentrales Netzwerk zigtausender unabhngiger Server auch wieder nur als Handy-App.
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# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Wenn dir Akkoma gefllt, guck dir mal Mangane als Frontend an. Da schwren wohl so einige drauf und sagen, das ist besser als Pleroma-FE/Akkoma-FE.
Und das Risiko, da bei Akkoma oder Sharkey das Licht ausgeht, ist auch nicht grer als das Risiko, da bei so manch einer anderen Fediverse-Serversoftware das Licht ausgeht. Beides sind keine im Affekt aufgezogenen Forks irgendwelcher emotional labilen Einzelkmpfer, wie es sie unter den Forkeys schon einige gab.
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In the past year, a handful of sheriffs departments in California have started refusing to respond to 911 calls that involve a mental health crisis, but where no crime has been reported.

In February, the sheriff, Jim Cooper, announced that his deputies would only respond to mental health crises if a crime had been committed or was in process,
or if someone other than the person in crisis was in imminent danger.

Down in county,
the police chief for the city of , Jeremiah Larson, made a similar policy decision in May.

Several other law enforcement agencies in the state, including the county sheriffs office
and the police department have said their officers will respond to every call,
but they may not stay if no crime is happening and the person in crisis does not pose a threat to other people.

The trend comes as data shows the catastrophic results of police responding to mental health calls.
But the removal of police from these situations,
which civil rights advocates have long sought,
has also raised questions about the real-world impact in communities where alternatives are incomplete.

Maybe this is interesting for you:
(streams) had almost all nodeinfo code intentionally removed. This was done to keep (streams) from being crawled by instance-listing websites and dragged into competitions between server applications and particular servers.
Also, (streams) does not have a unified instance type identifier. Server admins may not only enter their own name for the server, but also their own custom instance type. If no instance type is given, (streams) uses the first word in the server name as the instance type.
Likewise, Forte's stats being reported as zero is fully intentional in order to keep it out of competitions. I'd be very surprised if there was an ActivityPub-compliant way around this.
By the way, here is a correction: Iceshrimp.NET is not a Misskey fork. It is being rewritten from the ground up in C# whereas Misskey and all Forkeys are written in TypeScript and Vue.js.
A few more Forkeys, dead or alive:

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # Add your location to a Google Map This is my personal analysis of the AI-generated image description, quote-posted from my original comment in the thread linked in my first comment:
RE:
(6/6)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # After I have written the long description, distilled the short description from it and posted the image with both, I have asked a LLM AI for a description.
The AI of my choice was LLaVA 1.6:
The prompt was, "Describe the image in detail."
LLaVA took about half a minute to generate this image description:
The image depicts a modern architectural structure with a distinctive design. The building features a large, curved roof that appears to be made of a reflective material, possibly glass or polished metal. The roof is supported by several tall, slender columns that are evenly spaced and rise from the ground to the roof's edge. The structure has a circular emblem on the front, which includes a stylized letter 'M' and a series of concentric circles, suggesting it might be a logo or emblem of some sort.
The building is situated on a landscaped area with a well-maintained lawn and a few trees. There is a paved walkway leading up to the entrance of the building, which is not visible in the image. The sky is clear with a few scattered clouds, indicating fair weather conditions. The overall style of the image is a digital rendering or a photograph of a 3D model, as indicated by the smooth surfaces and the absence of any visible texture or imperfections that would be present in a real-world photograph. There are no visible texts or brands that provide additional context about the building's purpose or location.

(5/6)
# # # # # # # # # # # # This is the alt-text with the short description which I've distilled from the long description. It is exactly 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are image description.
Digital shaded rendering of the main building of the Universal Campus, a downloadable island location for 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. The camera position is about three metres or ten feet above the ground. The camera is tilted slightly upward and rotated slightly to the left from the building's longitudinal axis. The futuristic building is over 200 metres long, stretching far into the distance, and its front is about 50 metres wide. Its structure is mostly textured to resemble brushed stainless steel, and almost everything in-between is grey tinted glass. The main entrance of the building in the middle of the front has two pairs of glass doors. They are surrounded by a massive complex geometrical structure, very roughly reminiscent of a vintage video game spacecraft with the front facing upward. Four huge cylindrical pillars carry the roof end, the outer two of which extend beyond it. All are tilted away from the landing area in front of the building and at the same time outward to the sides. The sides of the building are slightly tilted themselves. In the distance, a large geodesic dome rises from the building. There is a large circular area in front of the main entrance as well as several wide paths. They have light concrete textures, and they are lined with low walls with almost white concrete textures. Furthermore, various shrubs and trees decorate the scenery. A more detailed description including explanations and text transcripts can be found in the post.

(4/6)
# # # # # # # # # # # This is the long description that went into the post text. It is over 60,000 characters long. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research and write. It takes about three hours to read it. Apologies for it being somewhat outdated by my current standards.

Image description

The picture in this post is a digital rendering from inside a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator, generated in a regular client for this kind of virtual worlds, also known as a viewer, using shaders and generated shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows the main building of the Universal Campus as mentioned in this post.

What OpenSimulator is

, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, cross-platform server-side re-implementation of the technology of . The latter is a commercial 3-D virtual world created by Philip Rosedale, also known as Philip Linden, of Linden Lab and launched in 2003. It is a so-called "pancake" virtual world which is accessed through desktop or laptop computers using standard 2-D screens rather than virtual reality headsets. Second Life had its heyday in 2007 and 2008. It is often believed to have shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 when the constant stream of news about it in mainstream media broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.
OpenSimulator was first published in January, 2007. It was made possible when, in 2006, Linden Lab open-sourced the official Second Life viewer, which is how client applications for Second Life and OpenSim are called, thus laying its viewer API open. This led to the development of third-party viewers. After the development of third-party viewers had started, OpenSim was developed against them and the Second Life viewer API. It does not have its own official viewer, but most of the popular third-party Second Life viewers are compatible with OpenSim as well.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.

What grids, regions and sims are

Second Life and the OpenSim-based worlds are called "grids" because they are flat worlds divided into square areas of 256 by 256 metres each which is roughly 280 by 280 yards. These areas are called "regions". Regions can be empty, in which case they're shown as ocean, but they can't be entered. In order for any actual content to exist in a region and for avatars to be able to enter regions, a simulator, sim in short, has to run in a region.
In Second Life, a sim is always one region. OpenSim had a hack from 2009 on that was called "mega regions". It exploited a feature in third-party Second Life viewers that was not used by Second Life itself, and that made it possible to extend a sim across multiple regions in a square arrangement. The Universal Campus itself is built as a mega region of two by two standard regions. Since this hack was buggy and limited, varregions, now known as varsims, were first developed for the OpenSim fork Aurora-Sim. Eventually, they were officially introduced into OpenSim in 2014. They theoretically allow for a sim to stretch across as many as 32 by 32 standard regions with no borders in-between.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim also has the option to save entire sims into archives and load them from archives, so-called OARs which is short for OpenSimulator Archives. Many of these are available online. Mega regions are saved in one OAR for each region, and as the Universal Campus was designed as a mega region and pre-dates varsims, it is divided into four individual OARs. A varsim, on the other hand, can be entirely saved in and loaded from one OAR.

Where the pictures were made

Particularly, the picture was created at UniCampus, an instance of the Universal Campus in OSgrid () owned by one of the grid admins. Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid and intended as a testbed for OpenSim's development. Next to Wolf Territories Grid from 2021 (, ), it is one of the two biggest OpenSim grids each one of these two grids has more landmass than Second Life.
OSgrid also adopted the early OpenSimulator slogan "The Open Source Metaverse" immediately after its launch. It still uses that slogan, and the term "metaverse" has been commonly used by the OpenSimulator community ever since.

Camera position and general setting

The picture was taken from a point of view higher than the eyes of an avatar, ca. three metres or ten feet above the ground. The position of the camera is near the inner edge of a wide path that describes an eccentric path of three quarters of a circle around the likewise circular main landing zone as well as just a bit south of the southern edge of a wide, straight path that least eastward fromo the main landing zone. The direction of view is almost northward and slightly to the west. Also, the camera is tilted upward by a few degrees due to its low position and the height of the building.
All dimensions in this description are estimated.

Main building, southern end and main entrance

The main building of the Universal Campus is the centre-piece of the image. It is a gigantic building that towers high above all surrounding trees, although it is not actually a tower, nor does it have one. It is rather a lengthy building that stretches from north to south. In the image, the middle of its front is at one third of the width of the image from the left-hand edge, reaching to the left as far as one sixth of the width of the image from the left-hand edge. The conference hall at the far end is at one third of the width of the image from the right-hand edge with parts of the building almost reaching the edge. Its supporting structure mostly shows textures with highlights included which suggest that it was made of stainless steel. Otherwise, glass with a horizontal gradient between lighter grey and darker grey on the outside and a plain darker grey tint on the inside is the most commonly used material. The building does not have any exterior walls.
The southern entrance, the main entrance to the building with the main landing area right outside the doors, is surrounded and marked by a tall geometrical structure which is rather complex in spite of only having straight edges. It resembles a spaceship from an early video game as roughly as it resembles the letter A or an upside-down V. It is almost perfectly symmetrical around both vertical planes. Its medium grey surfaces are untextured otherwise and don't mimic any particular material.
On each far side is a vertical "column" with a footprint with the shape of a trapeze, very roughly four metres or thirteen feet wide and four metres or thirteen feet thick. The short side of the trapeze, measuring only a bit over three and a half metres or twelve feet, is on the outside. These columns rise up some nine metres or 30 feet on the inside. The top slopes downward towards the outsides, so the columns are less than eight or about a half metres or 27 feet high on the outside.
The centre and top piece of the structure, right above the doors and roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet above the ground, is roughly ten metres or 33 feet tall and roughly four and a half metres or fifteen feet wide. It has a rectangular cross-section when looked at from inside the building or from the main landing area, but a heptagonal cross-section when looked at from the sides. Its seven visible faces are all rectangular. At the bottom, it is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick with only one surface. The top is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick, too, but with a pair of surfaces of the same size at an angle of under five degrees, forming a slight ridge at the top.
The inner and outer sides of this centre-piece are each made up from an upper surface which is a square and sloped outward from the top and a lower surface which is a rectangle and sloped outward from the bottom. They meet at an angle of roughly 20 degrees.
On each side, two irregularly-shaped structures of seven surfaces each connect the seven edges of the sides of the centre piece with the four edges of the inner sides of the columns. Six of these surfaces are more or less slightly twisted because they connect edges at different angles with each other. The only planar surface is the one that connects the bottom edges which are all horizontal.
Two pairs of double glass doors make up the actual main entrance. Each door blade is about two and a half metres or eight feet wide and about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high. The glass has the same horizontal gradient texture both on the inside and on the outside so that all door blades can be identical. The only difference between the door blades is whether the door script opens them clockwise or counter-clockwise. The texture is arranged in such a way that there are narrow lighter areas along both vertical edges when the hinge is on the left, and there is a wide lighter area on the lock side and a narrow lighter area on the hinge side when the hinge is on the right. The narrow sides of the door blades are opaque when looked at from the outside but, due to OpenSim's limitations, not when looked at from the inside. The doors open inward by 90 degrees, and they do so when they're clicked, or when an avatar approaches them. They can be closed manually by clicking them again, otherwise they close automatically after ten seconds.
Each door blade has one simple door handle on the inside and the outside tinted the same generic grey as the large structure surrounding the doors. The handles are only a few centimetres wide. The grips have a square cross-section. Above and below, there are thicker parts which connect the grips to the doors while being flush with them on the sides and facing away from the door blades. Altogether, each handle is half a metre or one and five eighths feet long. The top of each handle is about one and three quarters metres or five and three quarters inches above the ground.
Between the two door pairs and on their sides, there are altogether three columns with a rectangular footprint of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet width by 30 centimetres or one foot thickness, each roughly seven and a quarter metres or 24 feet tall. Above each pair of doors, they are connected with a horizontal beam that fits between the top surfaces of the columns and the top edges of the doors while being half as thick as the columns.
The spaces between the large structure around the entrance, the columns and the horizontal bars are filled with glass panes.
The whole door ensemble does not sit exactly at half the thickness of the large structure. It is shifted outward by about half a metre or one and five eighth feet.
A structure shaped like an almost flat pyramid, but with a flattened top, is mounted upside-down against the bottom surface of the centre of the large structure around the main entrance. The glass pane above the doors passes right through its middle. A square light is installed on the flattened top which is actually the bottom now, illuminating the entrance area when it is dark. Otherwise, this flat structure has the usual brushed stainless steel texture which appears rather dark here.
On each side of the entrance area, a cylindrical column with a diametre of roughly four metres or thirteen feet rises some 20 metres or 66 feet upward. Each column is slightly tilted inward along the longitudinal axis of the building and outward to the sides. On each side, farther outside, there is another, even taller column, easily over 30 metres or 100 feet tall. These columns are tilted along the longitudinal axis of the building at the same angle, but outward to the sides at a smaller angle. They make up the southern corners of the main building. All four columns are textured to resemble brushed stainless steel.
A semi-cylindrical structure connects the complex main entrance structure through the inner columns with the outer columns on the ground. Its diametre is roughly 2.40 metres or eight feet. It uses the usual brushed stainless steel texture, but the brushing direction is radial, and the texture is stretched along the axis of the cylinder so much that its nature is anything but obvious.
Between the columns and the main entrance structure, there are three more glass panes. The panes between the inner and outer columns are mounted halfway into the building whereas the one around the main entrance structure is almost all the way inside the building. Three horizontal stainless steel rods of about 30 centimetres or one foot lead through each pane. They are roughly evenly spaced, but closer to the upper and lower edges of the glass panes than to each other. The rods that pass through the panes between the columns grow to a diametre of roughly 45 centimetres or one and a half feet towards their ends before ending in short cylinders with diametres of about 1.80 metres or six feet.
On top of the inner columns and partly intersecting with the outer columns, a massive, upright, flat structure with stainless steel textures serves as the southern end of the roof. It has to be about 50 metres or 160 feet wide, about 15 metres or 50 feet tall and about 3.60 metres or 12 feet thick. The front and rear surfaces are slightly countersunk with margins of slightly varying thickness all around except for the bottom. The top edge has a fairly short horizontal section of ten metres or 33 feet in the middle from which it curves downward in sections of ellipses. The bottom edge is almost horizontal and leads to corners from which short 45-degree slopes lead upward. The slopes from the bottom and the ellipses from the top meet in rounded corners. Unlike the columns below, this roof end is mounted vertically.

Main building, Universal Campus logo

The roof end also carries the logo of the Universal Campus, sitting at half the height of the outer countersunk area of the roof end and ever so slightly to the left of its middle. Its base is a circular, conical structure with a diametre of ten metres or 33 feet, the sloped edge being black. The actual logo is part of the texture on the front surface of the cone. It has a diametre of about seven metres or 23 feet.
The inner 80% of its diametre are filled with a gradient from medium dark grey at the top to medium light grey at the bottom. Three shaded three-dimensional primitive shapes are displayed in this area, a cube with one corner each pointed to the top and the bottom at the top, a sphere in the bottom left, a tetrahedron in the bottom right. At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source". Below, the Roman number MMXI, 2011, marks the year of the first public release of the Universal Campus.
A thin dark grey circle separates this area from the outer 20% which are light grey. Re-using the same typeface as in the inner part, and in dark grey with blue shading, "Universal" is written at the top and "Campus" at the bottom, both capitalised with otherwise small caps and following the circular shape of the logo.
29 identical black circular spots, very roughly evenly spaced, protrude from underneath the logo all around it by a bit more than their own diametre. They separate the logo from the surrounding white area which, in turn, is surrounded by the aforementioned black conical slope.
The Universal Campus logo is illuminated from below. The light source sits in a slot in a cylinder on top of the main entrance structure, about two metres or six and a half feet long and a diametre of about 30 centimetres or one foot. This cylinder has spherical end pieces, and the whole arrangement has a simple, glossy, medium grey surface.

Main building, side

Each side of the building, all the way to the conference hall at the northern end, is tilted outward at the same angle as the corner columns around the front and much simpler in design. Starting north of the side entrances right behind the front, a semi-cylindrical structure on the ground, similar to those at the front, extends northward towards the conference hall, only interrupted by another set of side entrances shortly before the conference hall. Farther up, there is another cylindrical structure of the same diametre and with the same texture on each side, but with a cutout on the upper inner side of a bit over 90 degrees to help carry the upper floor on the right, actually semi-cylindrical on the left and stretching all the way between the columns on both sides. Even farther up, right below the roof, another cylindrical structure is installed, but cut out on the inside by 60 degrees upward and 75 degrees downward.
Eight cylindrical beams with a diametre of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet and the usual stainless steel texture serve as the near-vertical supports. Nearly evenly spaced, except for the first being closer to the second, and running from the bottom to the top, they divide each side into eight full-sized sections and one small section right in front of the conference hall.
As mentioned above, the building has four sets of side entrances. One on each side is right behind the front behind the colour and the first support beam, one on each side is just south of the conference hall between the seventh and eighth support beams. The doors are identical to the ones that make up the main entrance, but each side entrance has three pairs of doors instead of two.
Between the three double doors, there is a filler column with a rectangular vertical cross-section, a width of about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet and a thickness at ground level that is slightly less than the width. While the inside surface is vertical, the outside surface is sloped in parallel to the outward tilt of the side of the building. Similar but wider columns are installed on the sides of the doors, being the closest that the building has to outer walls. Another structure with a rhomboid north-south cross-section sits on top of each set of four pillars, connecting them and carrying a glass pane on top. Its inside surface is sloped outside, its outside surface has a stronger slope than the outer side of the building. Also, its texture is lighter than that of the pillars.
Everything else between the vertical and horizontal structures on the sides of the building is filled with glass panes, all with a light vertical streak down their centres, blurred by the gradients on its sides.

Main building, roof

On the visible right-hand side of the building, right above the positions of the first seven of the eight support beams, curved brackets reach down from the roof, holding the upper horizontal cylindrical beam from the outside. They appear to be dark grey, but they actually have the usual brushed stainless steel texture. These brackets are installed on both sides across the outer parts of the roof, and slightly larger versions span across the centre of the roof as can be seen from below through the windows of the building.
A little bit of roof is visible underneath these brackets. The roof has four identical sections from its end to the conference hall. All are mostly planar with a rounded outer side. From above, they have the most elaborate surface of the whole building. It is almost black. A bump map or a normal map divides it into slightly embossed and slightly less rough rectangles, slightly countersunk and slightly rougher rectangles and the another bit smoother lines in-between. The rectangles are of varying size. They have an aspect ratio of four to five along the building's longitudinal axis by three to four along its transversal or vertical axis. In addition, the texture on these roof segments is glossy, giving it a plastics-like appearance. From below, however, it is smooth and transparent with the same tint of grey as the glass panes.
Between the inner and outer sections of this kind on each side, there is one long textured strip, on top of which rest the larger brackets across the centre of the roof. Its texture is slightly glossy, but hard to identify as resembling something: It consists of stretched rectangular fields of medium grey, arranged transversally, with very thin dark grey outlines, surrounded and interrupted by narrow areas of medium light grey which are emphasised by bump-mapping or normal-mapping which makes them appear embossed as well as specular-mapping which makes them appear glossier than the rest. Within these fields, but at some distance from its outlines, there are more nested rectangles, from outermost to innermost: medium dark grey, dark grey, medium dark grey, medium grey and slightly bumpy, medium light grey and bumpier as well as appearing to be slightly countersunk, light grey and appearing to be even more countersunk. This pattern repeats over a hundred times over the length of the southern part of the building. It is on the bottom face of these two strips as well, but not on its narrow sides.
The very middle of the roof is simply one long glass pane. It is separated from the dark sections to its side by what seems to try to resemble rectangular aluminium profiles with the long sides oriented vertically. On each side, at a height right above the glass pane, there is a stripe that glows white in the dark while not actually being a light source this is another OpenSim limitation.

Main building, domed conference hall

Beyond these parts of the building, a large geodesic dome rises up, below which is the conference hall. It is assembled from triangular glass panes in seven rows, four of which the image shows from outside, and untextured light grey cylindrical rods. The glass panes have the same tint or texture on both sides. The ones in the two bottom rows have the usual grey tint. The two rows above have the same lighter texture which most of the other panes on the building have on the outside. Unusually, this geodesic dome has no points at which five triangular panes meet. On all points which aren't on the bottom edge, six panes meet except for the very top where only four panes meet.
The dome is surrounded by a huge, disc-like object of varying thickness, but very thin on the eastern side which is revealed in the image, that is well over a hundred metres or 330 feet in diametre. It is bascially an eccentrical cone with a circular outer shape and a way off-centre hole towards it slightly slopes down. The geodesic dome mostly rests on the edge of the hole which means that the outer edge of the disc is shifted way to the east. There is also a cutout towards the south all the way to the circular hole, uncovering the roof of the southern part of the building. The western edge of the cutout deviates from being parallel to the longitudinal axis of the building by a few degrees to the right. The eastern edge of the cutout points at the centre of the circular hole.
Along the outer edge, the top surface of the disc is tapered over a distance of about seven and a half metres or 25 feet so that the outer edge is almost razor-sharp. For unknown reasons, the western edge of the cutout shows a similar sharpness by being tapered at the bottom.
The upper and lower surfaces of the disc shows variations of the usual brushed stainless steel texture. The cutout faces, however, show a dark grey texture with four darker grey grooves upon zooming in.
Right below, there is a second, similar asymmetrical cone, but smaller in diametre, even thinner and with a bigger slope. Its outer edge touches the first disc from below. Being dark coffee brown, it is the only outward part of the building that is not a shade of grey. Also, while it is half-transparent like tinted glass from above, all other surfaces are opaque and glossy, so it's possible to look through it from above, but not from below.
The inner edge of the brown cone connects to a ring around the conference hall at about roof height on the outside or the top. The ring describes about three quarters of a circle with the opening oriented towards the southern parts of the building. It has a slightly darker tint on its brushed stainless steel texture.
The ring also serves as the upper connection between the seven cylindrical pillars that surround the conference hall, four of which are hidden behind the building itself in the image. They have a diametre of about six metres or 20 feet, and they vary in length by a few metres. They all stand on the ground, and they are sloped outward from the conference hall, partly intersecting with the two cones above.

Main building, interior

Since the outer surfaces of the building are mostly glass, more can be seen inside the building than just the underside of the roof. Horizontal support cables are mounted between the textured roof strips and underneath each of the seven central roof brackets. They are similar to those through the side window-panes in the front, but longer and thinner. From all of these but the southernmost one, two darker, thinner and shorter support cables lead downward. Another pair is mounted farther south against the textured roof strip on its side. These fourteen vertical cables support the upper floor on its inner sides.
The upper floor is roughly U-shaped with the opening towards the south and the main entrance. It also serves as the ceiling for the ten seminar rooms on the ground floor, five on each side, above each of which it extends inward with a semi-elliptic shape. Its bottom side, the ceiling, is light grey. It has a bump map or a normal map which not only roughens it up but also divides it into octogonal pads with rectangular spaces in-between. The vertical surfaces towards the aisle have a texture that simulates small, square, dark grey panels in four rows held in place with one rivet in each corner. The seams between the panels are black. On some surfaces, the textures have obviously been stretched horizontally, making the panels rectangular, the rivet heads elliptical and the vertical seams wider than the horizontal seams. The upper side with its bluish-grey patterned carpet texture cannot be seen in the image.
The entire inner edge of the upper floor is protected by a railing. It consists of one mostly light grey rail with a rectangular cross-section on the floor, an identical rail that is a bit over 1.20m or four feet high above the floor and a number of small, slightly darker grey vertical beams with a square cross-section which connect them. The whole railing lacks texture and gloss.
Of the seminar rooms on the right, only the separation walls can be seen through the panes on the right of the building. These have mostly tan textures but with coarse and blurry stripes of various greys at the top and bottom.
Through the right-hand pane in the front, two seminar rooms on the left are visible, the rooms A7 and, north or to the right of it, A8. The seminar rooms A7 through A9, as well as A2 through A4 on the right, have a variety of untinted glass doors each: one in the northern corner towards the central aisle, another one in the southern corner, and one in each of these two corners that leads to the neighbouring seminar room. Apart from the lack of tint or texture, the glass doors are identical to the entrance doors.
The aisle-side wall of each seminar room can be described as convex although it is not rounded. It rather consists of four segments separated by narrow vertical columns with square footprints. They are connected by a number of horizontal rods with a rectangular cross-section. One is always right under the ceiling. Three more are roughly at 65%, 50% and 33% height above the ground. For the outermost segments, this is the height of the glass doors, so underneath the rod at 33% height above the ground, they have another vertical rod to separate the doorway from a narrower piece of wall. At some 12 or 13% height above the ground, there is another rod, and the last one is on the ground, in both cases except where there's a doorway.
The space between the latter two horizontal rods is filled with a wooden panel, showing the same reddish wood grain as all wooden-textured furniture in the building and on the sim. The other spaces have untinted glass panes in them. To illustrate the dimensions: The wooden panels are about 1.80 metres or six feet high, so for realistically-sized avatars, the only way to look into or out of the seminar rooms is through the doors.
On the vertical rod next to each aisle door, a sign with the room number is installed. The sign itself is simple, flat and rectangular. It is entirely black except for the white room number written on it in a regular Helvetica sans-serif typeface. It is attached through a glossy white cuboid that serves as a very simple mounting bracket.
Furthermore, there is an easel with a blank whiteboard standing next to each aisle door. It is a simple construction from cuboids, cylinders, a tetrahedron at the top and small spheres for feet and joints. Apart from the whiteboard which is mostly white and untextured except for the plywood texture on the back, the whole thing shows a brushed stainless steel texture with some gloss added.
Inside each seminar room, visible through the window-pane behind the easels, there is a whiteboard which is a much more elaborate construction. Each room has two of these. There is also a dark grey HDTV screen attached to the middle one of the three columns with a wall-mount swivel arm. A bit of furniture is barely visible through the closed glass door: Each room has seven quite long tables with elliptical ends, one long light grey foot on two legs with a wooden plank between them and a dark grey surface surrounded by wood grain. Six of these tables are for seminar participants with two chairs each. These chairs consist of two wooden parts in the shape of a stretched U with rounded sides and dark grey padding, two small metal rods connecting them and four conical metal legs. The seventh table is for the teacher whose chair is identical to those for the participants, only that it has an extra headrest in the same style as the rest of the chair plus a pair of elliptical armrests.

Main building, further interior objects

The large object that appears to be standing in front of seminar room A7 is a teleporter that was specifically designed for the Universal Campus due to its size. It is actually standing in the middle of the aisle, the control panel turned southward towards the main entrance. It is mainly a rectangular console on a massive angled stand. The frame around the control panel included, the console itself is about one and a half metres or five feet high and about three metres or ten feet wide. Above the control panel, there are two tiny spherical light sources on small trapezoid arms. They actually emit light to illuminate the control panel of the teleporter.
The control panel is labelled in a typeface not entirely dissimilar from Futura. On its left, there is a top-down view of the entire Universal Campus with the north oriented to the left. It shows the various buildings and other places. Ten circular markers are placed on the map, all with a glossy grey frame and a black number from one to ten. All markers but one are yellow one is always glow-in-the-dark green. In this case, it is marker number 6 to the right of a rectangular building with a circular extension in its bottom corner. Below the aerial view, there is another, slightly bigger yellow circular marker, but with a red frame surrounded by a glowing red aura while not glowing itself. It has the number 2. Next to it is a label with an arrow-like point to the left that reads, black on white, "This is currrent (sic) location". It is up to the user, however, to find the marker with the same number on the map.
On the right of the control panel, there is a touchable list of destinations with their numbers in markers of the same size as the glowing red one in the bottom left, but with the usual shiny grey frame. The labels with the names of the destinations are identical in style with the current location marker:
  • 1: Main Landing Zone
  • 2: Main Building Lobby
  • 3: Main Conference Hall
  • 4: Recreation and Conference Center
  • 5: Observation Deck and Sea Lab
  • 6: Science Lab and Conference Room
  • 7: Campfire and Beach Zone
  • 8: The Light House
  • 9: Engineering Conference Center
  • 10: Helicopter Landing Pad
Just like on the map, destination number 6 is the only one with a glow-in-the-dark green marker and a glow-in-the-dark green label background. It is the currently chosen teleport destination. Upon clicking another one, it would be marked green, as would be its marker on the map. Below the list, there is another white label, but with an upward arrow point on its left-hand end that points to the column of numbered markers. It reads, "click to select location then right click and teleport!" This means that if the user were to right-click the panel, thus opening a pop-up menu, and then choose the option "Teleport", the avatar would instantly be relocated to whichever location is selected on the teleporter. To the right of this label, there are two small red triangles with glowing auras pointing upward they appear to be non-functional.
The background of the control panel is glossy medium grey. The rest of the structure is glossy with a gunmetal-like dark grey texture.
There are also quite a few potted plants inside the building. On the sides of the teleport panel, there are two identical aa palms in square terracotta pots with wide rims. Like the other potted plants, these mostly dark green plants with long pointy leaves are kept at an indoor-compatible size, namely about three and a half metres or eleven and a half feet tall. Also, like the other potted plants, they are made of only four flat and surfaces with partially transparent pictures of the plant on them, arranged in angles of 45 degrees to one another.
Through the main entrance, a slightly taller Jacaranda tree with dark lilac flowers can be seen. It is planted in a bulgy terracotta pot with a smaller rim than the square ones which is supposed to be round. In order to reduce the impact on graphics performance, however, the pot is actually hexagonal. There is also one of the two angled flights of wooden stairs leading to the upper floor and, outside the building again, a small but wide maple tree with brown autumn leaves. A look through the side entrance to the right shows an even slightly taller Bougainvillea with purple flowers. Above these doors, the underside of the upper half of the other flight of stairs is shown. The steps are not covered from below, and the spaces between them are open.
Some of the unusual dividers on the upper floor can be seen through the windows, too. The main element is a half-arch of a bit over 90 degrees from the floor to the tilted structures on the side of the building. Its core is a thin, roughly 1.80 metres or six feet wide circle segment with an inner radius of about four and a half metres or fifteen feet and a dark grey texture which resembles some kind of rock. It is lined on both the inside and the outside with arches with a brushed stainless steel texture. The inner arch is about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet wide, the outer arch is slightly narrower, and both are significantly thicker than the core arch. From both ends of the arch, narrow brushed stainless steel bars extend to the centre of the arch where they meet. They are thinner than the stainless steel arches, but thicker than the core arch. Finally, the area between the two bars and the inner arch is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.
On each side of the upper floor, there are six such dividers. The southernmost ones are installed right above and north of the stairs and attached directly to the vertical structures on the sides. Between the other ten and the side structures, there are horizontal extensions in much the same style. The arches themselves are extended to the sides by two rhomboids in the same style, a longer one of some four and a half metres or fifteen feet with four cylindrical connectors of roughly 60 centimetres or two feet of diametre on its corners underneath which avatars can pass and a shorter one of some three metres or ten feet which connects to the vertical structures. The latter one also has a third stainless-steel-framed rhomboid all the way down to the floor underneath itself which is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.

Avatars in OpenSim and the avatar vendor rooms

On the eastern side of the building, barely visible through the large glass surfaces, there is an area that offers complete classic avatars as well as classic avatar accessories.
Unlike in most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars in OpenSim-based worlds, just like Second Life, are not monolithic. They are highly modular, they are highly configurable, and they have evolved over the years. The most basic classic avatar consists of five components that always have to be there. The only one that cannot be replaced is the system body which is automatically generated by the viewer application. OpenSim has the same system body as Second Life. The four components that can be replaced but never removed are the shape which greatly defines the look of the avatar with 88 parametres, the skin which is a set of three textures for the head and which can be tinted with parametres, the upper body and the lower body, the hair which defines the shape and length of the classic hairdo growing out of the head as well as its texture, and the eyes which are basically only a texture again.
Classic clothes are also referred to as layer clothes because they are just that, layers of textures painted onto the system body. Their order is defined by nine categories, in each of which a classic avatar can only wear one kind of clothing. A few of these have an influence on the shape of the avatar: The shirt and the jacket can widen the arms to simulate sleeves. Likewise, the pants can widen the legs downward to simulate pants legs and even bell-bottoms. And the shoes can both raise the avatar in general and grow a sort of spike out of the heel, lift the whole avatar except for the toe area because the system body does not actually have toes and thus generate high heels. A separate layer is for skirts it textures a part of the system body which is usually fully transparent and thus invisible. In 2011, four tattoo layers were added between the skin and the two underwear layers.
It is also possible to attach objects to an avatar at 30 different points, and it has been for as long as OpenSim was around. This was quickly used not only for things carried by the avatar, jewellery or other accessories, but also for more realistic hair, for better-looking shoes in comparison with the painted-on classic shoes, for various ways of having new shapes of skirts, for collars, for pants legs et cetera.
Originally, these attachments were made from primitive objects or "prims" in short: basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cones and the like which can be generated and manipulated a lot in-world without needing external software except for making textures. Since building complex objects from them is somewhere between highly complicated and impossible, it was made possible to import sculptmaps as exported from 3-D software like Blender and use them to create more complex prims. All kinds of prims can be made flexible with a little bit of physics which is used for hair and skirts as well as for flags, but the physics don't have collision detection.
The next step was the introduction of mesh. Mesh allows the user to directly import 3-D files in the Collada format, texture mapping included, without having to resort to sculptmaps. Mesh came to Second Life in 2011, as did experimental mesh support in OpenSim. The first stable release of OpenSim with mesh support came out in 2014. On avatars, mesh was originally used for hair, shoes, jewellery and other accessories. It really started a revolution with the introduction of rigged mesh which automatically latches itself to multiple points on the avatar. This made it possible not only to create clothes that move with the avatar's movement, but even to create all-new, better-looking bodies and heads. Nowadays, most avatars consist entirely of mesh.
The newest technological advancement for avatars was Bakes-on-Mesh which came up from 2019 on. This allows classic layer textures to be put onto worn mesh, especially mesh bodies, and in greater numbers than on the system body. The main purpose was to get away from skin appliers, scripted devices that have to be put on and used to put a different skin onto the mesh body. Also, the remaining onion layers around mesh bodies that were necessary for tattoos, but made mesh bodies unnecessarily complex, had become obsolete because Bakes-on-Mesh allows for wearing classic layer tattoos on mesh bodies. But it also makes wearing layer clothes possible again which can make sense in the case of skin-tight clothes.
The latest version of the Universal Campus from 2012 already uses mesh for a few things, mostly rocks. The main building itself and everything else shown in this image is still put together from prims and sculpties.
As for the contents in the avatar vendor area, none of it is newer than from 2011. Everything is still from times before mesh. The complete avatars come with layer clothes, but no attachments. They, like the skins and hair attachments, were created by Ina Centaur under the OS Avatars label around the same time as the Universal Campus. Many of the other items, the majority of which were made by Nebadon Izumi himself, are even older. All of them are offered under free licenses, however. In order to announce their availability, three of the divider extensions have signs mounted above them which can be made out in the picture. They are oval, black with a stainless steel frame, and they have the glowing, but not light-emitting white word "AVATARS" written on them in all-caps and in a typeface which looks to me like a regular Linux Libertine. The writing even uses proper kerning between the "A"s, the "V" and the "T".
In the first two of the three avatar vendor rooms, the rear sides of four stainless steel vendors each, lined up on the outer side of the room along the longitudinal axis of the building, and especially the signs above them on thin cylindrical stands can be made out, the only ones that aren't hidden behind something. The first four vendors offer one female skin each, the other four offer one male skin each. The displays on these eight vendors are oriented away from the camera.

Main building, upper floor, western side

The first two rooms on the western side of the building are conference areas, the other two are empty. Not much of them is visible except for three of the dividers, a semi-circular couch with a wooden frame and ten seats, a small banana tree in a hexagonal white concrete pot, another whiteboard and two HDTV screens in stainless steel casings on floor stands. One of them shows the monochrome test pattern which is actually on all of them, and which includes several screen-testing elements as well as a large medium grey circle in the middle with a white, a black and a thinner medium grey border around it and the digit 2 in black and in a heavy, condensed sans-serif typeface and a white square grid on medium grey ground with the capital letter "C" in two combined fields at the bottom.

The main landing area outside the main entrance

In front of the main entrance, there is the main landing area of the sim, a part of which is still within the image towards its bottom left. It is circular in shape with a diametre of about 40 metres or 130 feet. The centre of this circle is about 35 metres or 115 feet south from the main entrance of the main building. It shows the same light grey texture reminiscent of concrete that is used on most paths on the island. The texture is not shrunk to a realistic size, so it appears coarse and having a low resolution.
The outer edges of nearly all concrete surfaces on the island are lined with low walls of varying height and width. They all have the same concrete texture, but at a smaller scale and without the light grey tint so it appears almost white. The main landing area actually has two rows of walls around it. The inner walls are a bit over 1.20 metres or four feet high and about 1.50 metres or five feet wide. The outer walls at a distance of roughly three metres or ten feet are about 1.65 metres or five and a half feet high and about 1.80 metres or six feet wide.
At the ends, the gaps are closed with walls a bit lower than the inner walls and roughly 90 centimetres or three feet wide. The spaces between the walls are filled with dirt. They form planters with identical shrubs in them the short planters in the northwest and the northeast visible in the image have five plants each. These shrubs are not named in-world. They appear to be of tropical origin, and they have flowers with petals that are mostly white, yellow towards the centre and magenta along their edges. Like all trees on this sim, the shrubs are made of simple, textured sculpty prims for the trunks and branches, and the twigs, leaves and flowers are semi-transparent textures on intersecting two-dimensional surfaces, a popular way to make plants in Second Life and OpenSim before the arrival of mesh. The textures used for all plants on this sim are photo-realistic as far as the maximum possible or feasible texture resolution allows.
On the left-hand edge of the image, in front of the northwestern planter, there is another teleporter which is almost identical to the one that can be seen inside the building. There are two differences, however: Its current location is number 1, and the selected location in the image is number 4. Another one of the unidentified shrubs appears between the teleporter and the left-hand edge of the image, partly hidden behind the teleporter.
Another single-target teleporter is standing on its right. It is a custom addition to this particular instance of the Universal Campus. It was built by Neovo Geesink, formerly of Metropolis Metaversum fame and now involved in OSgrid, in his trademark style. This style includes a particular brushed stainless steel texture which, unlike those used by Nebadon Izumi, emulates the surface having been brushed circularly. The stand under the panel is a simple cone, flattened to an extremely elliptical footprint. The panel is as high as that of the original teleporter, but only slightly wider as it is high. The frame around the image in the centre is slightly narrower than that on the original teleporter.
The image itself shows an aerial view of its single hard-coded target, a sim named TeleHub, built and operated by Neovo. It is nothing more than a single region, a square of 256 by 256 metres or 280 by 280 yards, surrounded by blue ocean and a wall made of beige bricks which is about ten metres or 33 feet high. The ground is tan and divided into four triangular areas by two diagonal lines. In each area, there are 141 single-target teleporters similar to this one, but with a higher panel, in rows of eleven. A few show previews of their targets, but most are unused with black screens. In the very centre, there is a small circular platform on which avatars land after teleporting in. It has a beige top surface with a hexagonal tile pattern and a woodgrain texture on the sloped surface all around. Four arches with textures resembling rough taupe stones and black signs on them lead to one triangular area each. The position of the camera is off one of the corners and pointing diagonally downward to one of the yellow division lines.
Yet another one of the identical unidentified shrubs is behind this teleporter and shown to its right.
In the background, the low walls on the sides of a path appear between the shrub behind the teleporter to TeleHub and the main building. The path is straight and leads northward along the western side of the building.
Even farther in the background, behind the two teleporters, there is some vegetation. From left to right, it starts with an unidentified tree of about eight metres or 26 feet of height. It has reddish-brown bark, medium green leaves in pairs and what could be taken for pale yellow-ish fruit. Below it, there is a large bushel of khaki-coloured grass that stands about two and a half metres or more than eight feet high. The tree intersects with another maple tree with brown and tan leaves that is about ten metres or 33 feet tall with more massive greyish trunk and branches. Immediately to the right again and partly intersecting with the maple tree, there is an even unidentified tree, about 17 metres or 56 feet tall, with grey bark on a fairly slim trunk and a messy crown of dark, brownish-green leaves which are so small that the texture makes it impossible to tell individual leaves. This tree is partly hidden behind the building already. It has another two bushels of the same tall grass underneath it which, due to the point of view, only seem to stand immediately to the right of the trunk.
Behind this vegetation, right below the crowns of the trees, the horizon separates the sky from the sea. What little sea the image shows is medium light blue. The sky right above the horizon is very light cyan, and around half the height of the image, it gradually changes into a tone of blue similar to that of the sea. From the top left corner of the image downward and to the right, more than half of the sky is covered by a cirrus-like thin cloud with a small hole above the roof end of the main building. On the right, the cloud dissolves into smaller clouds above the geodesic dome and the surrounding thin cones.
Further additions to the Universal Campus include five easels of the same type as seen inside, but with custom writing in it. They are lined up next to each other in front of the northeastern planter, starting right next to the wide path towards the main entrance. The writing on all five easels is done in black and in an unidentified humanist sans-serif typeface which appears condensed due to the texture having been stretched vertically, thus losing its original aspect ratio. Only the writing on the first of the five is visible from the camera's point of view, though. It reads in three lines, "To download a free copy of the Universal Campus Var Region." This is followed by a blank line and one more line that reads, "Click here for notecard". Upon clicking the easel, it gives the avatar a notecard with an Amazon cloud storage URL following an explanation that it contains the Universal Campus as a varregion archive and followed by a full copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Around the main landing area and the main building

Due to limitations in construction with prims, the ground of the main landing area is slightly higher than that of the three paths which lead away from it. The widest one of these paths is about one third of the diametre of the landing area in average width that leads to the main entrance. It is trapezoid in shape, and its sides line up with the centre of the main landing area. Two more trapezoid paths, also widening with the distance from the centre of the main landing area but only half as wide as the first one, lead westward and eastward from an imaginary point a little north from the centre of the main landing area. The western one is not visible in the image except for on the aerial view on the teleporter. The eastern one makes up most of the foreground along the bottom edge of the image.
On the outer corner of the northeastern planter on the eastward path, there is a lamp post standing on an almost white, cylindrical concrete block of about 1.80 metres or six feet of both height and diametre. From the camera perspective, it is in front of the main building and near the westernmost front column. It appears to be almost parallel with the column, but the lamp post is vertical while the column is tilted roughly northwestward.
The lamp post itself is about seven and a half metres or 25 feet high and very slightly conical with an elaborately-shaped round foot. At the top, it describes a sharp 90-degree angle towards the path, rounded on the outside, forming a corner on the inside. It then extends conically towards the path by another roughly 1.50 metres or five feet before ending in a small sphere. The bottom of the sphere is flattened, and the actual light source is installed on this flat surface. It is round, glowing and emitting slightly yellowish light. The rest of the lamp post is light grey or white and highly glossy.
The walls lining the paths to the sides of the main landing area rise no more than about 30 centimetres or one foot above the paths themselves while being twice as wide.
In the bottom right corner of the image, the path to the east intersects with a circular path around the main landing area that begins and ends near the southern side entrances of the main building. Its centre is some ten metres or 33 feet north of that of the main landing area, and its outer diametre is about 100 metres or 330 feet. Due to the aforementioned limitations, it is a little bit higher than the trapezoid spoke path at the bottom. Its walls rise about 60 centimetres or two feet above itself and about 80 centimetres or a little less than three feet above the path to the east, and they are about 2.40 metres or eight feet wide.
Between the main building, the path to the main building, the planter northeast of the main landing area, the path in the very foreground and the circular path on the right, a large patch of sim ground is still unused. It shows a green texture with some slightly darker or minimally more yellow-ish areas. The texture has a fairly low resolution. It is coarse and blurry, and at the same time, even this patch of ground reveals the repeating texture tiles. The ground itself is rather bumpy as though it has been manually treated to be like this. All the same applies to the corresponding area to the west of the path to the main building of which fairly little of it is revealed in the image.
Right before its end near the right-hand entrance, the circular pathway first branches diagonally to the right to another path three small steps down. On both corners of this junction, there are fairly cylindrical platforms inserted into the walls. Both have a diametre of about 3.60 metres or twelve feet and a height of about 1.20 metres or four feet above the branched-off path or a bit under 90 centimetres or three feet above the circular path. The walls along the branched-off path are fairly small, only some 45 centimetres or one and a half feet high and about 60 centimetres or two feet wide.
After about 15 metres or 50 feet of length, the branched-off path continues down a set of stairs. Due to how low the camera position is, the stairs itself are hidden from the camera, but the block and guide rails along the far side of the stairs, the northwestern side, are not. The block is the same shade of grey as the surfaces of the paths. It serves as a primary guard on the sides of the stairs. It is about 90 centimetres or three feet wide. It ascends from the usual wall on the side of the path which it overlaps by the same amount on both sides, and it does so at an angle of roughly 25 degrees. It reaches its peak right above where the stairs start at a height of about two metres or six and a half feet above the path. From there, it descends at an angle of about 35 degrees which, curiously, is a little less steep than the stairs themselves.
The guide rails are dark blue flat slabs, about 30 centimetres or one foot wide and about seven and a half centimetres or three inches thick. They come in stacks of four, arranged above one another with round about one and a half times the thickness of one rail worth of space between them. They are parallel to the descending surface of the block. The lowest one has a distance to the block of circa 30 centimetres or one foot. Each set of rails is held together and in place by two shiny, textureless blocks of 120 centimetres or four feet of height and a square top surface which, however, slightly narrows downward to the large concrete block below when looked at from parallel to the rails. Upstairs, the four rails extend beyond the stairs by roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet. Their upper ends are lined up almost exactly vertically. The whole arrangement is slightly shifted out of centre on top of the block, away from the stairs. A second, identical set of rails is installed further downstairs for no apparent reason other than looks. Such rails are actually on both sides of the stairs, but the image only shows them on one side.
Shortly before the stairs, one lamp post like the one is installed on the wall on each side of the path towards the stairs, complete with the cylindrical block underneath. In the image, the lamp post on the right with the exception of the foot and the cylindrical concrete block underneath is almost entirely obscured by two trees. One is identical to the tree with the chaotic brownish-green leaves to the left that is partly hidden behind the main building. It has another bushel of grass around where its roots were if it had any. Another much larger one is standing to its right, its trunk and most of its crown outside the image already. It is unidentified, too, but it shows some signs of being an acacia tree. Its bark is mostly greyish-brown with some rusty red patches on it. Its leaves are long, pointy and various tones of pale light to not-quite-as-pale medium green.
Immediately after the path towards the stairs branches off, the circular path leads into a straight path that runs parallel to the eastern side of the main building. The walls on its side have the same size as those on the sides of the circular path. On both of its ends, short, wide platforms lead to the side entrances of the building, connected to the path via two small steps each. These platforms do not have walls on their sides. At the far end, the straight path leads into another circular path, this time around the conference hall.
Some more vegetation is to the right of the path along the eastern side of the main building, all standing on sim ground. Right behind the unobstructed lamp post next to the path that leads downstairs, there is a fairly large unidentified tree that almost reaches the edge of the roof of the building. Its crown has rather dense foliage in a quite saturated medium green tone. The bark texture on its thin trunk and branches is mostly taupe with bits of copper brown and fairly smooth except for long dark rifts along the trunk and the branches as well as a few dark holes.
Behind the block and the dark blue rails along the stairs by the right-hand edge of the image, a gigantic version of the unidentified shrubs in the planters is located on the edge of the downhill slope which necessitates the stairs. It is about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high, and its flowers are up to 60 centimetres or two feet in diametre.
Farther in the background, also behind the lamp post and a little behind the shrubs, there is a group of seven pine trees of varying size. They have semi-transparent, conical surfaces around their trunks with textures which give the impression of very dark green needles. There are also bushels of tall grass on the ground between the pines.
Lastly, one of the four main light sources is the simulated Sun. Since it is shortly before noon, it is standing almost vertically above the sim and shining what is technically grey light down on it. The sim uses OpenSim's default daycycle in which the Sun always goes through the zenith. The same applies to all converted older daycycles originally available in OpenSim. The Sun is also the only light source on the sim whose light casts shadows. The other four main light sources are three types of ambient light in darker taupe, bluish slate grey and Prussian blue. These three neither have a specified direction of light, nor do they produce any shadows.

(3/6)
# # # # # # # # Allow me to give you an example.
This is the image I'm talking about: (linked instead of embedded so I don't have to go through the hassle of having to describe it right here right now).
This is the thread in which I've posted the image before, including image descriptions, also including a comment with the AI description and an analysis of the AI description in comparison with my own descriptions: (yes, this is part of the Fediverse it's on the same Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right now).
(2/6)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I've pitted an image-describing LLM AI against my own 100% hand-written image descriptions twice so far. I have first described an image myself, twice even, with a "short" description for the alt-text and a long, fully detailed description with text transcripts and all necessary explanations for the post text.
However, I'm always at an unfair advantage. My images are renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. LLMs know next to nothing or actually nothing about these worlds whereas I dare say I'm an expert on them. An AI couldn't even tell whether the image is from a game or from a virtual world, much less which virtual world. I can not only exactly pinpoint where the image was taken (which place on which sim in which grid), but also explain the location and these virtual worlds in general.
Besides, an AI would describe the image by examining the image. I describe my images by going in-world and looking at the real deal instead of at the image of it. I can see everything at a vastly higher resolution. I can transcribe text that is so tiny in the image that it's invisible. I can even look around obstacles and see what's behind them if necessary. No LLM AI can do any of this.
(1/6)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # Only if you have a significant number of following connections, though.
And if you're on Mastodon. My experience is that roughly the same number of following connections gives you much more reach if you're on Mastodon than if you're on e.g. Hubzilla.
And if you always play by Mastodon's unwritten rules and refrain from doing anything in your posts and comments that's impossible on vanilla Mastodon, including exceeding 500 characters, regardless of how many characters you could actually post.
I mean, I put more effort into image descriptions than anyone else. But the reach of my two channels on (streams) for image posts (, ) is so minuscule that I'm not sure if it really makes so much of a difference. Maybe the advantage I get by adding accurate, sufficiently detailed, 100% hand-written alt-texts to all my images is defeated by the long visual descriptions and explanations that inflate my posts to thousands or tens of thousands of characters.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # "Forkey" bezeichnet Forks von Misskey, Forks von Forks von Misskey usw.
Iceshrimp.NET fllt da nicht drunter, weil es komplett neu geschrieben wird. Es ist vom Funktionsumfang her noch ziemlich mager. Das Ziel des Rewrite war, soweit ich wei, zum einen, die Macken loszuwerden, die alle Forkeys von Misskey geerbt hatten, und zum anderen von JavaScript wegzukommen (Misskey und alle Forkeys sind in TypeScript und Vue.js geschrieben).
Aber gut, es gibt auch viele, die sich nicht vorstellen knnen, da gute Serversoftware in PHP geschrieben sein kann. Mike Macgirvin entwickelt seit jeher in PHP. Und was er baut, ist nicht nur sehr mchtig und fortschrittlich, sondern auch noch leicht zu installieren und zu administrieren und weniger leistungshungrig als Mastodon.
auf meinem Fediverse-Meme-Kanal.
# # # # # # # # # # #


<>

Die Idee hinter Sharkey war mal, in einen einzigen Forkey quasi alles auf einmal reinzuschmeien bis hin zur Kchensple. Das fiel vor allem auf, als es noch mehr lebendige Forkeys zur Auswahl gab.
Und in der Zeit hatte Sharkey auch noch gewisse Macken, z. B. eine schon legendr unzuverlssige Implementation der Mastodon Client API, wo es hie, am besten setzt sich einer hin und schreibt die neu. Wer was Zuverlssiges wollte, setzte damals auf Iceshrimp. Sharkey war fr wagemutige Spielkinder, die sich an Hubzilla nicht rantrauten.
Inzwischen ist Calckey tot, Firefish ist tot, Iceshrimp-JS ist im Wartungsmodus (Iceshrimp.NET ist derweil noch meilenweit von "fertig" entfernt), Catodon ist auch schon siech, und das nur fr eine Instanz gebaute Hajkey ist schon verwest.
CherryPick hat fast nur Server in den Grorumen Tokyo und Seoul und fhlt sich so auf den ostasiatischen Geschmack ausgelegt an wie vor ein paar Jahren noch Misskey selbst. Vielleicht erinnern sich ein paar noch daran, wie Misskey mal den Charme japanischer Verkaufsautomaten hatte.
Und der ganze noch lebende Rest scheint selbst mit Misskeys Entwicklung nicht mithalten zu knnen, also im Kern veraltet zu sein.
Derweil ist Sharkey wohl inzwischen ziemlich zuverlssig. So ist es zumindest im Westen zum einzigen noch nennenswerten Forkey avanciert.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Was jetzt, Friendica oder Hubzilla
Jedenfalls hatte Mastodon in mehrerlei Hinsicht Glck.
Erstens sind schon 2016 die deutschen Medien auf Eugen Rochkos Werberei fr Mastodon angesprungen, als Twitter noch gut war. Das hat Mastodon einen ersten riesigen Popularittsschub gegeben.
Zweitens hat der aber nicht auf das brige Fediverse abgefrbt, auch deshalb, weil seit damals das Fediverse entweder komplett ignoriert oder als das Mastodon-Netzwerk angesehen wird, also als "dezentraler Walled Garden". Bis heute glaubt so ziemlich jeder Mastodon-Newbie, das Fediverse bestnde nur aus Mastodon, und Mastodon sei das einzige dezentrale Netzwerk berhaupt. Dieser Glaube verbreitet sich schneller, als man dagegen ankommen kann.
Drittens hat Mike Macgirvin, der zum einen schon 2010 Friendica ins Leben gerufen und zum anderen auch schon 2015 Hubzilla gestartet hat, immer gesetzt auf "Wenn du es baust, werden sie kommen". Er hat bis 2023 nie fr irgendwas geworben und auch ab 2023 nur zaghaft und nur innerhalb des Fediverse.
Deswegen glauben viele, der beste Facebook-Ersatz im Fediverse ist Mastodon, weil sie noch nie von Friendica gehrt haben. Deswegen wissen selbst die Tech-Medien nicht, da es fr Friendica lngst freien, quelloffenen, dezentralen Ersatz la Mastodon gibt, der sogar mit Mastodon verbunden ist. (brigens ist auch Hubzilla nicht das Ende der Fahnenstange. Mike hat danach noch weitergemacht und noch andere Sachen rausgebracht, von denen (streams) und Forte heute noch existieren (wobei Forte ja erst 2024 entstand und 2025 den ersten stabilen Release hatte). Die kennt aber endgltig keiner.)
Deswegen geniet auch Bonfire so eine groe Popularitt auf Mastodon. Die htte es nicht, wenn mehr Mastodon-Nutzer wten, da Bonfire im Grunde Hubzilla auf Wish bestellt ist. Was Bonfire jetzt versucht, hat Hubzilla vor zehn Jahren schon geschafft, noch bevor es Mastodon gab. Das und noch mehr obendrauf.
Viertens wre die Zielgruppe fr Friendica nicht der Twitter-Nutzer, sondern der Facebook-Nutzer. Aber Facebook ist noch nicht zu so einer unertrglichen Nazi-Bar geworden wie Twitter, so da der Fluchtdrang lngst nicht so gro ist.
Fnftens bekommt man Leute aus Facebook eh schwerer raus als aus Twitter. Twitter ist ein soziales Medium. Da zhlt nicht, wer dir folgt, sondern wieviele dir folgen. Und da geht es auch nicht um Kontakt und Interaktion, sondern um das Rauspumpen von Content.
Facebook ist dagegen ein soziales Netzwerk. Da gibt es nicht Followers und Gefolgte, sondern "Freunde", also bidirektionale Kontakte. Und da geht es eben genau darum, mit wem man "befreundet" ist. Im allgemeinen ist man auf Facebook nmlich "befreundet" mit Leuten, die man eh schon von woandersher kennt.
Die typische Hrde, von Twitter nach Mastodon zu gehen, ist, da da insgesamt nicht genug Leute sind und man einfach nicht die 850.000 Follower zusammenkriegt, die man auf Twitter hat.
Die typische Hrde, von Facebook nach Friendica zu gehen, ist, da da die eigenen Real-Life-Kumpels nicht sind. brigens war das 2007 auch das Argument, weshalb niemand von StudiVZ/MeinVZ oder Wer-kennt-wen zu Facebook wechseln wollte: Die eigenen Real-Life-Kumpels waren nicht auf Facebook, also war Facebook nutzlos.
Sechstens schreckt an Friendica ab, da die Weboberflche in den frhen 2010ern stehengeblieben ist. Die von Hubzilla auch, und noch dazu ist die von Hubzilla ziemlich konfus und eine regelrechte Kapitulation vor Hubzillas Funktionsumfang, weil teilweise die Bedienelemente neuer Features planlos mal hier, mal da angeklebt worden sind.
Siebtens gibt es weder im Apple App Store noch im Google Play Store eine App namens "Friendica" oder "Hubzilla". Wenn es keine App namens "Mastodon" gbe, wre Mastodon auch nur einen Bruchteil so gro wie jetzt. berhaupt gibt es einfach mal so installierbare Smartphone-Apps fr Friendica nur fr Android, nicht aber fr iOS, und fr Hubzilla gleich gar nicht.
Achtens: Wenn Mastodon-Nutzer von Hubzilla schreiben, dann am ehesten davon, wie kompliziert und wie schwierig zu handhaben es ist. (Wenn Hubzilla-Nutzer von Hubzilla schreiben, kriegt das kurioserweise auf Mastodon kaum jemals jemand mit.) Zugegeben, Hubzilla ist kein Fall von "Website laden, registrieren, loslegen" und schon gar kein Fall von "App laden, registrieren, loslegen".
Neuntens glaube ich, Hubzillas eigene Community ist ein bichen hin- und hergerissen zwischen "Hubzilla mu populrer werden und braucht mehr Werbung", "vorher mu auf Hubzilla noch dies und das und jenes verbessert werden, damit es tageslichttauglich wird" und "fr viele Use-Cases wre Hubzilla Overkill und (streams) oder Forte eigentlich sogar besser, die sind ein ganzes Stck eleganter und moderner in der Handhabe, und die haben auch mehr Nutzer verdient".
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # Wieso ausgerechnet Mastodon Wieso nicht etwas Leistungsfhigeres wie Sharkey oder Akkoma oder so
Ich sage ja nicht gleich Hubzilla. Aber warum mssen sich noch mehr Leute diese unterausgestattete Software antun und dann glauben, das Fediverse sei nur diese unterausgestattete Software und habe insgesamt nur die Features dieser unterausgestatteten Software
Das wre jetzt die Chance gewesen, Leute ins Fediverse zu holen und dann direkt auf etwas, was von vornherein eine vernnftige Ausstattung hat. Ich habe wei Gott gengend schlechte Erfahrungen gemacht mit Leuten, die monate- oder jahrelang glaubten, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon, und dann ihren Erstkontakt mit dem Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse hatten.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # The categories are not about how well something works together. They're only about how something is perceived by the majority of the Fediverse, i.e. Mastodon.
The second category means that Mastodon users perceive it as something that was explicitly created as a third-party add-on to Mastodon, like an extra feature that was bolted onto Mastodon.
Like, Pixelfed is seen as a Mastodon add-on that adds Instagram functionality to Mastodon. PeerTube is seen as a Mastodon add-on that adds YouTube functionality to Mastodon.
This is why so many Mastodon users try to log into Pixelfed with their Mastodon accounts: They actually think that Pixelfed is a Mastodon add-on, just like Friendica, Hubzilla and the like do actually have add-ons, just not off-site, but on the same server.
Basically, the next step after seeing the Fediverse as only Mastodon is seeing the Fediverse as Mastodon with extra stuff bolted on.
I cannot see PieFed being perceived as a Mastodon add-on that was created as a Mastodon add-on to add Reddit functionality to Mastodon.
In fact, it cannot be seen as a Mastodon add-on because, by its features and functionality, it can replace Mastodon. Technically speaking, it's a direct competitor of Mastodon, and Mastodon's competitors cannot rank higher than 3rd class. I mean, why would someone build a Mastodon add-on that can also do the same stuff as Mastodon
Besides, if it ranked higher than third class, it'd be as well-known as Pixelfed and PeerTube, when in reality, it isn't even as well-known as Lemmy which is third-class, too.
If it was more well-known, Mastodon users wouldn't sit and wait for "the Fediverse" (= Mastodon) to introduce groups. Rather, it'd be common knowledge that PieFed has groups. PieFed would be seen as the drop-in replacement for a.gup.pe, and everyone on Mastodon would agree that FediGroups is a dirty kluge.
Rather, it isn't even common knowledge that Friendica has groups, and it isn't common knowledge either that Friendica is federated with Mastodon. I speak from personal experience here.
# # # # # # # # # # # The categories are not about how well something works together. They're only about how something is perceived by the majority of the Fediverse, i.e. Mastodon.
The second category means that Mastodon users perceive it as something that was explicitly created as a third-party add-on to Mastodon, like an extra feature that was bolted onto Mastodon.
Like, Pixelfed is seen as a Mastodon add-on that adds Instagram functionality to Mastodon. PeerTube is seen as a Mastodon add-on that adds YouTube functionality to Mastodon.
This is why so many Mastodon users try to log into Pixelfed with their Mastodon accounts: They actually think that Pixelfed is a Mastodon add-on, just like Friendica, Hubzilla and the like do actually have add-ons, just not off-site, but on the same server.
Basically, the next step after seeing the Fediverse as only Mastodon is seeing the Fediverse as Mastodon with extra stuff bolted on.
I cannot see PieFed being perceived as a Mastodon add-on that was created as a Mastodon add-on to add Reddit functionality to Mastodon.
In fact, it cannot be seen as a Mastodon add-on because, by its features and functionality, it can replace Mastodon. Technically speaking, it's a direct competitor of Mastodon, and Mastodon's competitors cannot rank higher than 3rd class. I mean, why would someone build a Mastodon add-on that can also do the same stuff as Mastodon
Besides, if it ranked higher than third class, it'd be as well-known as Pixelfed and PeerTube, when in reality, it isn't even as well-known as Lemmy which is third-class, too.
If it was more well-known, Mastodon users wouldn't sit and wait for "the Fediverse" (= Mastodon) to introduce groups. Rather, it'd be common knowledge that PieFed has groups. PieFed would be seen as the drop-in replacement for a.gup.pe, and everyone on Mastodon would agree that FediGroups is a dirty kluge.
Rather, it isn't even common knowledge that Friendica has groups, and it isn't common knowledge either that Friendica is federated with Mastodon. I speak from personal experience here.
# # # # # # # # # # # Hubzilla ist die mchtigste Fediverse-Software berhaupt.
Vergleichen wir es mal mit Mastodon.

Links:



(kann man auch von Hubzilla und Mastodon aus folgen: hz-workshophub.hubzilla.hu)
(enthlt auch mglicherweise interessante Videos)

Direkte Vergleichstabellen zwischen

(die sind brigens auch auf Hubzilla)
Hier mal ein paar mehr Kontaktempfehlungen:



# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I will continue to describe my images by hand. I will not resort to have them described by an AI, no matter how much time that'd save. I see more than any AI because while the AI only has the image, I can look at the real deal. And I know more about the topic than any AI ever will.
AI can't pinpoint where exactly I've taken an image because it knows nothing about the worlds that my images are from. I can, and I will, and while I'm at it, I'll explain the location down to the very basics.
AI doesn't know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is. I know, and I can and will explain it.
AI can't transcribe the text on a sign that's a four-by-three-pixel blot in my image. I can and will transcribe it because when I look at it in-world, I can see its 1024-by-768-pixel texture in all its glory.
As for WCAG: They don't cover the special case of 3-D virtual world renderings posted into the Fediverse from something that is not Mastodon, and that offers vastly more characters than Mastodon.
The only alternative to posting my images with hand-written descriptions is to not post them at all.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Actually, I strongly recommend not to explain images in the alt-text, and I strongly recommend not to add any other exclusive information in the alt-text that is neither in the image not in the post. That's because not everyone can access alt-text. For example, depending on the frontend, reading alt-text may require at least one working hand, so a physical disability may make alt-text inaccessible to certain people.
So explanations and the like must always go into the post text. Granted, that's often easier said than done. Mastodon has a hard-coded character limit of 500, changing which technically speaking requires a soft fork. Sharkey has a configurable limit that defaults to 3,000. I'm on Hubzilla whose character limit is imposed by the database, and it's over 16.7 million.
That said, I myself always have a lot to write when I post images which is why image posts from me are extremely rare. I've only posted new images twice in 2025 before anyone goes looking for them, they aren't on this channel.
That's because when I post an image, it's always about a very obscure topic. It's either a meme about the Fediverse where Fediverse does not mean only Mastodon. Or it's a meme about usually super-obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Or it's an in-world rendering from one of these super-obscure 3-D virtual worlds, and these image posts need the most work.
Whenever I post images, I follow three premises.
One, next to nobody knows anything about the images in and the topic of my post. After all, just about anyone anywhere in the Fediverse could be my audience. For my virtual world pictures, this means that those who can't see them don't even have a remote idea what anything in them looks like.
Two, on the other hand, my posts about virtual worlds demonstrate something highly unexpected: 3-D virtual worlds, something that was considered the hottest thing ever in the early 2020s and that's now widely considered dead, are not dead after all. So while people don't know anything about them, they might pretty well be super-curious about them.
Three, especially some Mastodon users don't like to look up for themselves what they don't know. And they don't like to ask either. They prefer all information necessary to understand a posed served to them on a silver platter right away in the same post. This goes even more for image descriptions: Having to ask for a detail to be described is almost as bad as having to ask for an image description in the first place.
This means that my meme posts come with appropriate alt-texts including transcripts of all relevant text for all images. But they also come with explanations for a) the meme templates and b) the topic in the post text. I simply cannot assume that absolutely everyone who comes across the post will be familiar with both and able to understand my post with no explanations.
That is, if I can link to useful explanations, I do so. This means that I always link to KnowYourMeme for meme template explanations. And if I can link to someplace that explains or helps explain the topic, I do so as well. But if I can't, I write my own explanations, and I often have to do that. This leads to posts with several thousand characters worth of explanations.
When I post original images from within virtual worlds, it gets even worse. Not only does next to nobody know anything about these worlds, but nobody who can't see the image knows what anything in the image looks like. But they may be curious about what everything in the image looks like because they may be curious about these virtual worlds in general.
In addition, when I post an image from a virtual world, I often don't want to show just one specific element of the image. I rather want to show the entire scenery with everything in it. So there isn't that one element in the image that's important within the context of the post because everything in the image is important within the context of the post all the same. Even more so to those who are super-curious.
So I end up having to describe these images twice.
I start with a fully detailed description that includes everything within the borders of the image. It also includes transcripts of any and all text that's at least partially within the borders of the image, regardless of whether or not it can be read in the image itself. If I can read it in-world, I will transcribe it. And it includes all necessary explanations.
This description alone usually ends up exceeding all known character limits in the Fediverse by magnitudes. For example, it always takes me well over 1,000 characters alone to explain where the image was made. I've once had to describe an in-world object that doesn't exist in real life, and I ended up describing what it looks like in over 1,000 characters and explaining what it is and what it does in another over 4,000 characters. All in all, the long description regularly ends up tens of thousands of characters long. It goes into the post text, of course. I guess it inflates my posts to such sizes that Misskey and its forks reject them due to being too long.
But I also need an appropriate image description in the alt-text. So I start with an explanation that there is a longer, more detailed image description with text transcripts and explanations in the post text itself and where and how to find it this is a relic from times when Mastodon only hid the post text behind a content warning, but not the images. Then I take the long description and distill a shorter one from it, short enough that this description plus the note about the long description aren't longer than 1,500 characters.
Some people say it takes 20 seconds to describe an image. Well, it tends to take me literal days to describe one virtual world rendering. I haven't posted any virtual world images since 2024 because I have had the image descriptions for a series of avatar portraits in the making since late 2024.
(By the way: Don't go looking for image posts on this channel. I no longer use Hubzilla for posting images because Hubzilla can't make Mastodon blank out sensitive images. (streams) can do that, and so I use two separate (streams) channels for posting images now: for virtual world images and virtual world memes and for Fediverse memes.)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

Time keeps moving forward : : /11: : 1930 sec: 2025-12-08:

In other news:
Christmas is over, and so is almost the year. Snow-covered themes are being shut down again, and it won't be long after New Year's Day that OpenSim is back to its usual eternal summer until October. And then we'll have one month of autumn in a few places because autumn and Halloween are basically the same here.
Good thing there are a few exceptions. 's Novale on his own grid probably still changes its seasons along with real-life Qubec. Jimmy Olsen's Norge in the Wolf Territories shares its weather and daycycle with real-life northern Norway his Alfheim used to do the same. And there are a few permanent winter or Christmas places Dorenas World has three of them.
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Last updated: 2026-01-07






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