Find the latitude of any place.  

And here it is ... this

And here it is ... this is why Alabama is at the bottom in . People like this , (In My Opinion) who feels kids reading about -white and is and . Mr. wants to educate and keep the from about . Feel free to replace the *'s with :// in the link below. I didn't want to give him any accidental clicks.

https***youtu.be/qboivzsddY0

A -shot request to the collected memory...

I vaguely recall a scene from a recent British police drama, I *think* it was , where the detective was called in to her boss (Superintendent) for a very awkward conversation about an email she had supposedly sent asking her (happily married) boss out on a date. Turned out it was a prank email from her colleagues using her unlocked computer.

I thought it would make a great and humorous way to make the point with my team about locking workstations when not in use (as per company policy). And trying to find it is now bugging me!

Does anyone out there have a better memory of the scene. Which series or episode Do I even have the show right

Or maybe you can suggest alternate scenes/clips that emphasize the same point

Thanks hivemind!

Votes are in for . This time it was about whether or not long posts should have a content warning.
The majority of Mastodon voters (9 of 14) voted against it, but roughly one out of three Mastodon voters voted in favour of it.
Even if I'll definitely ignore the one voter who wants posts over 500 characters banned all over the entire Fediverse, I'm not sure what to make of it myself. I mean, I almost always post over 500 characters.
On the one hand, content warnings for over 500 characters have their place. There seems to be at least one app that was built under the assumption that the Fediverse is only vanilla Mastodon, and there will never be over 500 characters in the Fediverse, so folding posts is unnecessary. Thus, it can't fold posts, and it shows all posts at their full length. Other frontends may offer the option to always unfold all posts, and users who thought that no post will ever exceed 500 character anyway have chosen that option.
I've only got one way to keep my posts from showing up in their timelines as gigantic walls of texts, and that's a summary which appears as a content warning on Mastodon. In fact, I've always added the character count, so people know beforehand if that post has only 700 character or over 75,000, and they can decide whether or not to open it. And yes, I've once posted over 77,000 characters in one post.
On the other hand, I guess that Mastodon users are blocking me left and right for my long posts anyway, regardless of whether or not I issue a content warning. I think there are tens of thousands of Mastodon users who have blocked me meanwhile.
The worst offenders, I think, have to be my rare image posts. Mastodon wants image descriptions. Image descriptions which actually describe what's in the image sufficiently both for the context and for the target audience and which also explain what the target audience doesn't know or understand. Yes, I do that, but for , I always have a lot to describe and explain. This, however, means that I regularly put more characters into the description of one image than many prolific alt-text writers on Mastodon put into all their alt-texts of one whole month. And such a description can only go one place. That isn't the alt-text, that's the post.
So if I don't describe my images, my image posts may not be boosted, and Mastodon users may pester me to write alt-texts. But when I do describe my images, the posts aren't boosted either due to being too long and not even interesting, and Mastodon users block me out-right for excessively long posts. A content warning won't change anything.
Besides, I can't put Mastodon-style content warnings on replies anyway. On Hubzilla, replies aren't just posts like any other post. Hubzilla is not a Twitter clone. On Hubzilla, replies are comments like blog comments or Facebook comments or Tumblr comments. They even have their own dedicated entry masks while Mastodon has one for everything. And those entry masks don't have a summary field which is the same as Mastodon's CW field. I mean, who would put a summary on a blog comment
Lastly, no warnings for my long posts reduces the effort for me. See, Hubzilla doesn't have a character counter, not in the post editor and not in the comment editor either. It doesn't need a character counter. It doesn't have any character limit to worry about.
So whenever I write a post, I generate a preview, then I copy the preview into a text editor, e.g. Mousepad, then I count the characters. And if they're over 500, I write a summary including a "CW: long (insert rough or exact character count here characters)" content warning and the four hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost for those who have filters for long posts which either remove them entirely or generate content warnings for them. So my long posts always grow longer by another 36 characters due to these hashtags. But I guess nobody filters either of these hashtags anyway.
I think I don't have to do either if people block me for my long posts anyway. I mean, I'll go on issuing content warnings for what might disturb Mastodon users see this very post. And I'll go on issuing them two-fold, both as a Mastodon-style CW in the summary field and as filter-triggering hashtags. But maybe long-post warnings are ultimately useless because they don't change anything.
P.S.: Of course, non-Mastodon users don't care either way. My fellows on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) are used to massive walls of texts as regular posts because that has been part of their culture since 2010. They can't see how this could possibly be a problem. People on Misskey and the Forkeys are used to long posts, too, and besides, the *keys apparently reject posts with over 10,000 characters anyway.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta #LongPosts #LongPostMeta Let's face it, most people migrated from Twitter to Mastodon not in search of an anti-Twitter, but in search of Twitter without Musk. And Mastodon was the next-best thing they knew back then.
Many have never settled in. They've never adjusted to Mastodon's culture nor the overarching culture of the greater Fediverse. They keep using Mastodon like Twitter, and they're waiting for either the whole Fediverse to become more like pre-Musk Twitter or something that's more like pre-Musk Twitter to come along.
You can tell them by staunchly refusing to use hashtags and add content warnings and alt-text. The worst still speak of tweeting and re-tweeting because they can't even be bothered to get used to Mastodon's lingo.
The reason why they didn't get an invite was either because that felt like too much of a hassle in comparison with just installing the app and creating an account or because they have applied for an invite, but still haven't received it.
Now that they don't need an invite, they can easily jump ships and join something that's oh-so-much easier to use with its Twitter clone UI and its fully-featured official app that bears the same name as the service itself and not having to choose an instance and not having to write content warnings and alt-texts and not even having hashtags in the first place and a secret-sauce algorithm that feeds them posts without them having to do anything for it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #BlueskyNow that Bluesky registration is fully open, I expect hundreds of thousands of active Mastodon users to flock to Bluesky.
That'll be those who have only been on Mastodon and mostly big general-purpose instances because it was the closest thing to "Twitter without Musk" with open registration. The same people who staunchly keep using Mastodon like they used to use Twitter before. And Bluesky has given them the gift of an open but still central registration without having to pick an instance. I mean, it has yet to go fully decentral.
So as of now, Bluesky really is "literally Twitter without Musk" as expected.
The results I expect are mastodon.social no longer being the most active instance and Mastodon itself no longer being twice as active as the whole rest of the Fediverse combined, not nearly. For all the other Fediverse projects, nothing much will change. They've always been completely unknown on Twitter. So those who have never wanted anything different from Twitter still sit on the same general-purpose Mastodon instance with a domain that hints at Mastodon. But I guess not for much longer.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Bluesky How much can describing images and adding alt-texts be made easier anyway What's peak ease-of-use that's worth achieving
If you want to go all the way, you have to take away all means of writing image descriptions manually and have them always written by an AI without the author of a post even knowing or noticing. But that requires an omniscient AI that can describe absolutely any picture, no matter how niche and obscure the topic, accurately and at an appropriate level of detail.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI

We Understand Why Live So

I've recently sent a post with 26,000+ characters. The delivery report tells me that every last *key instance had problems with it.
They often rejected it entirely with an error 413. (delivery rejected: 413 "statusCode":413,"code":"FSTERRCTPBODYTOOLARGE","error":"Payload Too Large","message":"Re)
This means that Misskey and the Forkeys have a hard limit not at 50,000 characters as I previously thought, but at 25,000 characters, 20,000 characters or even lower, and they refuse to accept any incoming objects that are longer. I mean, I know that Mastodon has a 100,000-character limit that acts the same, and I think I've read that so have Pleroma and Akkoma, but that limit has to be ridiculously low. Essentially, I can barely send virtual world pictures with sufficient image descriptions out to Misskey and the Forkeys.
Of course, this stays largely unnoticed because there are only so many users in the Fediverse who a) write posts that grow that long and b) have access to delivery reports for their own posts. Another advantage of being on Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon #Hajkey Late, but still:
Mastodon doesn't know titles as coming from Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).
Mastodon's CW is Friendica's abstract/abstract BBcode tags and Hubzilla's and (streams)' summary.
A unique Friendica feature, and this should be interesting for you, , is:
When you write a post without a title, it goes out to ActivityPub as a Note object, like a Mastodon toot.
When you write a post with a title, it goes out to ActivityPub as an Article object, like a blog post. Mastodon knows how to handle Article objects/long-form blog posts, and that's by linking to them. This is intentional and a feature, not a bug.
The alternative would be to slam 10,000 characters into the timelines of people who aren't used to over 500 characters, ripping the pictures out of the post, leaving the last four of them dangling under what's become a gigantic toot in reverse order and, if there are more than four pictures, throwing the others away. For this is what happens to blog-style posts that go out from Hubzilla and (streams).
won't be able to answer questions about *blogging services that aren't Mastodon because they don't seem to know what anything beyond Mastodon does.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Title #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

Een petitie om het het amendement van Julian Bushoff te ondersteunen voor speciale -covid klinieken

Find the latitdue and longitude of any place Spt, aber vielleicht bekomme ich das noch zusammen:
Der erste richtig groe Forkey war Calckey von 2022. Wie in den frhen 2020ern blich wurde das von Misskey softgeforkt, wohl vor allem, um Extrafeatures drankleben zu knnen und es ein bichen mehr auf nicht-japanische Nutzer in der westlichen Welt zu trimmen. Dahinter steckte jemand, der sich ursprnglich ThatOneCalculator nannte, wonach auch Calckey benannt war, und spter dann Kainoa.
Dann kam Supakaity, die Administratorin von blahaj.zone, und hat Calckey zu Hajkey softgeforkt, weil blahaj.social gewisse nderungen und Spezialfeatures brauchte. Hajkey hat nur diese eine Instanz.
Bis irgendwann Anfang 2023 war ja der Pleroma-Fork Akkoma der heie Schei im Fediverse, zumindest fr die, denen Mastodon nicht reichte, die aber nicht irre genug waren, gleich den Schritt nach Friendica oder gar Hubzilla zu tun. Dann aber hat jemand Calckey so hart gepusht, da es in aller Munde war und super-populr wurde. Weil es jetzt aber keine Nischenerscheinung war, war der Name "Calckey" auf einmal doof. Also wurde das Projekt in "Firefish" umbenannt und zwecks besserer Weiterentwicklung in einen Hard Fork umgewandelt.
Auch Hajkey wurde auf Firefish rebased und trgt hier und da immer noch Firefish-Logos, aber das ganze Projekt scheint im Gegensatz zu blahaj.zone tot zu sein. Die Website und das Repository sind jedenfalls offline.
Jetzt lag allerdings die gesamte Projektverantwortung fr Firefish bei Kainoa, der auch die Leuchtturminstanz firefish.social administrierte. Und Mitte 2023 wurde Kainoa mit dem Studium fertig und begann in seinem Job. Und hatte auf einmal genau null Zeit mehr fr Firefish in irgendeiner Form.
Ende 2023 wurde dann die Community langsam unruhig. Misskey hatte Firefish in der Entwicklung berholt. An Firefish war seit Juni 2023 genau berhaupt nichts mehr gemacht worden, weil der einzige, der irgendwas einpflegen und releasen konnte, also Kainoa, nichts mehr tat. Noch dazu machte firefish.social komplett die Grtsche, weil der einzige Tech-Admin, also Kainoa, futsch war.
Also war Eigeninitiative angesagt.

Ach ja, Kainoa hat sich doch noch geregt. Vor vier Tagen hat er das seit Monaten vllig unbrauchbare firefish.social abgeschaltet, und gestern hat er das Projekt Firefish an sich in andere Hnde bergeben. Ich glaube aber nicht, da es wieder gro rauskommen wird oder irgendjemand, der Ahnung hat, darauf noch einen Fork basieren wird.
Meisskey ist wieder ganz was anderes. Das ist ein japanischer Fork von Misskey, der auch schon einige Jahre auf dem Buckel hat, auf dem Stand von Misskey 10 stehengeblieben ist und seinen letzten Pull Request vor fnf Monaten eingepflegt hat. Zum Vergleich: Firefish entspricht Misskey 12, whrend Misskey schon im Januar 2023 Version 13 rausbrachte und seit August ein ganz anderes Versionsnummernschema hat. Also Asbach Uralt.
brigens hat Misskey alleine auf GitHub an die 1200 Forks, von denen etliche eigene Namen haben. Und imaginre Forkeys mit Namen mit irgendwas mit "-key" am Ende sind lngst zum Meme geworden.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Hajkey #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon #Meisskey There are three things I like about this.
One, while it's about alt-text, it doesn't treat alt-text and image description as identical and mutually synonymous. It actually mentions that certain things should be described in the post.
This is completely useless for both commercial walled-garden social networks/microblogging services and Mastodon due to their puny character limits. But for the Fediverse outside of Mastodon, it's the more useful.
Two, at the same time, it doesn't imply that everything and anything where you may add alt-text to an image is a static website or an HTML-based blog.
Three, it acknowledges that there are pictures about topics that are too niche for most people, and that require some more description and explanation. Unlike alt-text guides for Mastodon, it doesn't imply that everything is as simple and casual as a cat photo.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta AI must never be mandatory, and AI must never be forced upon anyone or everyone.
For example, image descriptions. I write them myself. I write the longest, most extensive, most detailed image descriptions in the whole Fediverse because I'm largely free from Mastodon's restrictions. I spend hours researching for and describing and explaining one picture in tens of thousands of characters.
The full image description goes into the post itself, but I always have an additional actual alt-text with a short description which also mentions that there's a full description with lots of explanations in the post. I have to do this because I have to hide posts with image descriptions behind content warnings for being over 500 characters long.
Now imagine what'd happen if AI-generated image descriptions were forced upon everyone. The AI would first throw my own alt-text away. Result: Hardly anyone would even discover the actual image description because the alt-text would no longer explain where it is. Or that there is one in the first place.
Besides, the AI would write a completely mangled, non-sense description of an image which it fails to understand because the picture was not taken in the real world. The AI wouldn't even understand that the picture wasn't taken in the real world because it wouldn't expect that.
I wouldn't let my own hashtags be forcibly replaced by AI-generated hashtags. AI doesn't necessarily understand my posts, it doesn't have the competence in the super-niche fields I write about. How is an AI supposed to know what the Hypergrid International Expo is or what the Discovery Grid is Worse yet: How is it supposed to tell from a picture which OpenSim grid name to hashtag
Besides, I have my own way of using hashtags which is not rooted in Mastodon's culture. After all, I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on something that has existed since before there was Mastodon. It does things differently.
I always add hashtags with the purpose of triggering automated, reader-side content warning filters which are standard where I am, and which became available to Mastodon itself last year with the 4.0 release.
For example, if a post exceeds the 500-character mark like this one, I add the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost. Or if I talk about something concerning the Fediverse which many people don't want to read about either, just like I'm doing here, I add the hashtags #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta, #CWFediMeta and #CWFediverseMeta.
Or if I ramble about image descriptions, and I'm pretty sure that many many Mastodon users don't want to read about that, I add the hashtags #AltText, #ImageDescription, #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta.
You can easily make these trigger the automatic generation of a content warning just for you. Or you can have any and all posts with them deleted automatically. That's what they're there for.
But if some AI that's only built against Mastodon and Mastodon's culture comes and deletes them and replaces them with its own ones, it takes away this feature.
And don't get started about opt-out. You can add opt-outs for whatever you want on Mastodon. But I'm on Hubzilla. I can't opt into or out of anything that Mastodon and only Mastodon does.
#AI #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMetaAlso, yes, I've cheated.
The camera position was selected carefully. I've tried to reduce the description effort by not showing any buildings, save for the motel and that tiny bit of roof of Black White Castle. I didn't want to study design and architecture so I could describe buildings properly.
Besides, the conifer trunk covering one of the posters is intentional, too. I've avoided having to describe two drawings of angels.
The monochrome setting is not me cheating around having to describe colours. I still had to describe grey at various levels of brightness or darkness.
But turning my avatar's back to the camera was cheating all right. It saved me from describing facial features and a facial expression where there isn't really one. And most of all, it saved me from the trouble of shielding sensitive users on especially Mastodon from a picture with eye contact which would only be possible by linking to the picture instead of adding it to the post itself. It actually took me a while to position my avatar in such a way that not the least bit of face is visible.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaGranted, yes, the image description is lacking. I could have put more effort into describing the motel doors, the motel windows and the illuminated signs. I mean, I haven't even said a word about something being written on the doors, much less transcribed it.
I could have explained the proportions of the motel.
I could have mentioned, described and transcribed the license plate hanging above the office door, maybe even tried figuring out and then explaining why it's there.
I could have mentioned what pieces of furniture are visible through the motel windows with open blinds and described them, including the flowers.
I could have given a full, detailed description of what a 1957 Chevrolet Impala 4-door Sedan looks like from all proportions to the exact way the tail fins are shaped to how the chrome trim follows the fins.
I could have given a more detailed description of the ice box and the security camera.
Sure, all of this is in a picture in the actual picture. Even in that picture in the picture, it can barely be made out. In the picture itself, it's so tiny it's bordering on invisible. Each of the two Chevys is about a dozen pixels or less, and the closer one is actually invisible because it blends in with its surroundings. The security camera is not even one pixel. In order to describe the picture of the motel, I went to the actual motel and looked around because I couldn't see enough details in the picture of the motel.
But it's within the borders of the picture, so it should actually be my duty to describe it all because there may always someone blind or visually-impaired who wants to know what everything in a picture looks like.
Maybe I could have described more features of Black White Castle peeking through the various tree textures in front of it. But in a fully monochrome environment, even I can't see what's tree and what's building because everything is the same soup of grey.
I could have written more about Pangea Grid, including when and why it was created.
I could have explained who Edgar Wallace was. I could have explained what made the German films based on his novels cult classics.
All just to describe and explain this one picture so that people who can't see it can experience it, and people who don't know anything about it will understand it.
But I'm pretty sure no AI is capable of writing what I've actually written plus what I think I should be written plus even more details on top. There, I said it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AII've tried a few new things in the image description here.
First of all, most obviously, I've split it into sections with headlines. I've hoped it could loosen up the utter wall of text that's the description of any of my own original pictures. However, describing what's to the right of the path required so many words that this section grew into its own unwieldy wall of text.
That's because of another first: For the first time, I've dared to include, describe and explain an OpenSimWorld beacon. The description and explanation of this object which doesn't exist in the real world takes up 5,434 characters or 21% of the whole image description alone.
Also, I might have written the longest actual alt-text for any of my image posts with an in-post description so far. That's partly because I've actually provided a very rough visual description, albeit no explanations for anything. And I've announced parts of what can be found in the actual image description that may or may not be worth reading over 25,000 characters for.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaHere are the stats for the post:
The summary and Mastodon-style content warning: 189 characters
The actual post: 889 characters, counted raw (as opposed to the Mastodon way with 23 characters per link and including the summary/content warning)
Alt-text: 920 characters
Image description: 25,420 characters, counted raw again, all headlines included
Hashtags: 147 characters in 13 hashtags, four of which are for triggering content warning filters
The whole post body: 26,312 characters
This is my third-longest image description to date.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #CharacterCount #AltText #ImageDescriptionInspector Jupiter Rowland, Scotland Yard, visiting Black White Castle.
OpenSim has places where you can theoretically roleplay in Star Wars settings, in Star Trek settings, in Harry Potter settings, in Tolkien settings...
...yes, Gor, too...
And now it even has a place where you can roleplay in an Edgar-Wallace-like setting. Even a monochrome one like those old German films from the 1950s and 1960s. Black White Castle.
In other words, this image is not edited in any way except for being shrunk. The motive itself is monochrome. The whole sim is monochrome. And so is my avatar outfit. Good thing I had my skin as loose textures that I could edit. I only had to look for new eye textures which you can't see here.
Appropriate music to go with it (obligatory content warning: gunfire right at the beginning, disturbing 1960s psychedelic jazz): .

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 my avatar on a paved path surrounded by conifer trees and with cliffs in the background. Everything in the picture is in monochrome like an old black-and-white film. However, the image is unaltered and shows both my avatar and the scene as they are in-world.

What OpenSimulator is


OpenSimulator 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 Labs 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 broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.
, OpenSim in short, was first published in January, 2007. Unlike Second Life, it 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.
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".

Where the picture was made


The picture displays a part of Black White Castle, a fairly recent sim in Pangea Grid. "Sim" is short for "simulator" which refers to what is running in a region so that something can be built in it, and avatars can enter it. In Second Life, a sim is always one region. In OpenSim, so-called varsims can span multiple regions, always in a square arrangement with the same number of regions in both directions. Up to 32x32 regions in one sim are possible. Black White Castle only covers one region.
is a German OpenSim grid with a special focus on arts, architecture and landscaping.
The name "Black White Castle" is most likely borrowed from a section of the innuendo-saturated German comedy film Neues vom Wixxer from 2007, the sequel to Der Wixxer from 2004. Both films are parodies on the German black-and-white mystery thrillers Der Hexer from 1964 and its sequel Neues vom Hexer from 1965. These films, in turn, are part of a series commonly referred to as "Edgar Wallace films" as they're based on crime novels written by the British author Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace. These two films are based on the novel The Ringer from 1926, a revised version of a 1925 novel known by the titles The Gaunt Stranger and Police Work.
Neues vom Wixxer, while generally in colour, picks up black and white as what has grown into a style element in the classic Edgar Wallace films in a place named "Black-White Castle". As the name indicates, it is entirely black and white for reasons of tradition, everyone and everything inside it included.
The eponymous sim was built in small parts by making entirely new assets with monochrome textures, but mostly by taking existing objects, extracting their textures, exporting them from OpenSim, using an external image editor to reduce their saturation to zero, re-uploading them to OpenSim and replacing the original textures on the objects with their new monochrome versions. The basic ground texture was altered in the same way, and even the sky and the sunlight are devoid of colour. Likewise, it's common for visitors like me to try and make their own avatars entirely black and white.
The sim was built by Bink Draconia who had previously built a sim with the TV series The Good Place, started in 2016, as its theme.

My avatar


My avatar is standing in the middle of the image, the head right of centre by about two or three percent of the image's width due to most of the weight resting on the right foot, the feet a few percent above the bottom edge of the image, roughly centred on average and slightly apart. His back is turned towards the camera, and he is facing away from the camera, so his face is entirely invisible.
He is a male human with fair skin that was altered to light grey and short black hair. He is wearing a dark grey tweed suit with a very large herringbone pattern on the jacket and an even larger herringbone pattern on the trousers. Underneath the jacket, he is wearing a white button-down shirt, of which only a part of the collar above the collar of the jacket and the cuffs below the sleeves of the jacket are visible. In addition, he is wearing a black bowler hat and a pair of dark grey, slightly shiny formal dress shoes.

The ground


Beneath the avatar, there is a straight path with irregular edges that is about five metres or 17 feet wide and leads about 40 metres or 140 feet forward, ahead of and away from the avatar. Its texture shows pavement made of medium grey, rectangular concrete pavers, placed in alternating orientations in a 90-degree herringbone pattern, but rotated against the region's coordinate axes by 45 degrees and against the rough direction of the path by about 20 degrees to the right. The pavers are about twice as large as they would be in real life.
On both sides of the avatar, the pathway widens into a crossing, but the other three paths are beyond the edges of the image.
The ground on the sides of the paved path has a blurry light grey texture with a coarse resolution that is either a desaturated, very light grass texture or thin, dirty snow.

The scenery to the left


To the very left, there is a wooden arrow sign that is approximately rectangular except for the rough shape of the wood, including four notches on the left-hand side, and the extra corner protruding from the right-hand edge that points into the distance along the path. The bottom edge of the sign is at roughly the same height as the middle of my avatar's thighs, and the top edge is a little bit more than twice as high.
The sign has has "BlackWhite Castle" written on it in a Fraktur blackletter typeface, reminiscent of bright, shiny embossed metal with some dark shading surrounding it, but with a hard-to-identify texture on it. "BlackWhite" is written as one word, but in Pascal Case with the first letters of both "Black" and "White" as capitals. The writing is a bit less than a third of the height of the sign and about as long as its top and bottom edges. The medium-grey paint has partly come off again, especially near the top, but the writing is still intact. The sign shows the way to the building after which the whole sim is named. The sign is placed on top a lighter piece of wood with a rectangular cross-section that is a bit thinner than the sign itself and serves as its sign pole.
The sign is surrounded by three identical groups of eight bushels of high grass each, one to its left, one behind it, one to its right and partly in front of it. Most of the grass is less tall than the sign, but some of it, especially in the bushels behind the sign which have been enlarged, is taller. Also, in front of the sign, there is a group of six stone mushrooms at six different sizes which, given the colour-less setting, appear like actual rock. The two biggest ones have a diameter larger than that of my avatar's bowler hat.
There are three mountain pines to the left of the path which are identical, save for their size. The one the farthest away is about 12 metres or 40 feet tall. It is mostly obscured by another pine which is standing a little further to the left in the image and closer to the on-looker, and which is roughly 14 metres or 47 feet tall. Just right of the arrow sign and behind the right-hand grass bushel, there is a pine of about 20 metres or 70 feet, tall enough for its treetop to be beyond the borders of the image. All three cast a shadow on the ground around them and the pathway, as does a fourth 12-metre pine way to the left whose trunk is entirely outside the borders of the image, but whose shadow ends at my avatar's feet.
Between the second and the third pine, closer to the edge of the pathway than any of the pines, there are two rocks lying on the ground. Both take up the same ground area, but the one to the right is about knee-high, and the one to the left is roughly 60 percent higher. There is another group of eight grass bushels, four of which are in front of these two rocks while the other four seem to have fused with the rocks. More grass bushels surround the first pine.

The scenery to the right


To the right of the end of the path, there is another set of six stone mushrooms.
Another mountain pine, just a little shorter than the second one, is standing opposite the second one. Further to the right and further up-front, there are several more conifers of various heights, some only nine metres or 30 feet, others twice as high. The closest of these conifers, also one of the smallest, is at about a quarter of the width of the image away from the right-hand border, and it is the closest to the edge of the pathway.
All trees are made the tradition Second Life and OpenSim way: The trunk is a textured 3-D model. Everything else consists of the same partly transparent texture with branches, twigs and and needles on flat surfaces that pass through the trunk and have the texture on both sides. The mountain pines have three such surfaces at angles of 60 degrees from another, the other conifers have four which are 45 degrees apart. Within the context of the scenery, however, this is hardly noticeable, and it puts less strain on the graphics hardware.
To the right of the path, the ground is covered by a lot more grass, only that most of it more simple, using one partly transparent 2-D surface for each bushel, and only a bit higher than knee-high at its maximum.
A mostly wooden outdoor info board is protruding to the left from behind the closest of the conifers. Two vertical wooden teams have between them, from top to bottom, a longer but smaller horizontal beam, six rows of two slightly darker horizontal planks and another two horizontal beams, nine much smaller vertical bars standing between these two and connecting them. On top of each of the big vertical beams, two short beams mounted in a 90-degree arrangement carry a roof with a texture that seems to suggest slate shingles. The rooftop is a bit more than 3.60 metres or 12 feet above the ground. On the second row of planks, "Info Board" is written in a lighter tone of grey than the planks themselves. The last two letters are behind the trunk of the conifer in front of the sign.
Below the writing, at eye height, there are three square info panels on the board, each with a wooden frame around it. Only the ones on the left and in the middle are visible the one to the right is fully obscured by the conifer again.
The panel on the left carries a worn-out advertising poster for BlackWhite Motel which is on the sim as well, in the opposite direction of where my avatar is looking. It is a two-storey building which is shaped like the letter L laid on the ground. On the short side in the left of the picture, it has room 101 and the office on the ground floor and rooms 201 and 202 upstairs. On the long side, it has eight more rooms, numbers 103 through 106 and 203 through 206, only six of which are in the picture if you visit the motel itself, it becomes clearer why.
There is a parking-lot in front of the building with spaces for eleven cars, separated by white lines. One of the spaces in front of room 104, in the middle of the poster, is occupied by a two-tone white-and-white 1957 Chevrolet Impala four-door sedan which not only lacks hubcaps on its steel wheels, but also has opaque windows in a tone of grey just slightly lighter than the asphalt. Three spaces further to the right, at the right-hand edge of the poster, there is an almost identical car which is only darker all over from the carbody to the chrome trim to even the white walls on the tyres.
The ground floor of the building has a concrete walkway in front of itself which is a bit higher than the parking-lot. The upper floor can be accessed via 180-degree angled stairs in the corner of the building and an open gallery on the parking-lot side. Both the gallery and the actual front of the building are supported by vertical columns made of dark grey concrete with a square cross-section, save for one square cut-out in each corner.
All rooms, the office included, have dark grey doors which face the parking-lot, as do their windows which have very dark grey wooden frames and always come in pairs. Rooms 101 and 201 have two pairs of windows, one on each side of the door. The office and room 202 are window-less. The other rooms have one pair of windows to the right of the door. The doors are framed by two columns with a dark grey concrete panel above them. The wall sections with windows are otherwise filled with very light grey brick walls with unusually long bricks. The same bricks are used for the wall sections to the left of rooms 103 through 106 and 203 through 206 which also feature shiny black wall lamps with energy-saving bulbs.
The low walls that surround the gallery between the columns are made of eight long, very bright grey horizontal panels of probably some kind of metal each, topped with dark grey wooden handrails. The one in front of room 201 carries a flashing neon sign which reads "Vacancy" in all-caps with a brighter rectangular frame around it. Also, on top of the roof, near its front edge, in front of rooms 204 and 205, there's a "motel" sign with no caps and a rather unreliable illumination. Both signs are glowing on the poster.
All windows have blinds on the inside which are mostly closed. Only the right-hand blinds of rooms 101 and 201 and the blinds of rooms 103 and 204 are open. For those who want to know, even though it's outside the advertising poster: The blinds of room 106 are pulled up.
On the gallery-supporting column in front of the door to room 104, a medium-grey surveillance camera facing the parking-lot is moving into various positions. Next to the door of room 105, there is a refrigerated container for packaged ice with two side-hinged but actually unmoving bulb plate hatches on it.
On the ground in front of rooms 101 and 104, there are arrows consisting of seven chevrons each which point towards the office door. In order to enhance their effect, a gradient texture scrolls along them on each of them.
In the background behind the motel, a mountain pine rises above the roof in the middle to the left of the "motel" sign. Behind the sign and all the way to the left, there are three more conifers. These trees are basically identical to the ones in this image. Also, left of centre, a snow-covered mountain top rises further in the background.
The left half of the poster is covered by a dark overlay. Near its top, there is a very light grey rectangle aligned with the right-hand edge of the overlay. It has "Best Price" written on it in dark grey letters. Below that, there are five slightly ligher grey dingbats, either teardrop-spoked asterisks (Unicode U+273B) or sparkles (Unicode U+2747), which imply a five-star rating. An almost identical rectangle is just as close to the bottom and aligned with the left-hand edge of the poster, only that it has "Book Now" written on it. Between them, in the middle of the darkened half, "The BlackWhite Motel" is written in three lines with "BlackWhite" joined to one word again. All writing is done in the same narrow slab-serif typeface, and all characters including the dingbats have lighter lines around them that make them appear embossed.
Back to the panels on the info board: The one in the middle is mounted a bit lower than one on the left. It shows what appears to be a late medieval sea map of a place which I couldn't identify. Due to the limitation of in-world texture sizes to a maximum of 1024x1024 pixels, the rather small writing on the map is indecipherable. Most of it is ocean with some land in the upper half. On the land and in the bottom right corner, there are typical illustrations for maps from those days. The map shows its age with its darker tint and its jagged edges, and its shading makes it appear like it had been folded to a sixteenth of its original size before.
In front of the info board from the on-looker's point of view and actually between it and the conifer nearby, there is another group of eight grass bushels.
In front and partly to the right of the conifer, there is an object which doesn't exist in real life, but which is typical for OpenSimulator: an official OpenSimWorld beacon of the latest generation, but modified to fit the style of the sim.
This particular device has a shiny black foot with a long rectangular footprint which is about 80 percent as high as it is deep and tapered upward, and which has rounded edges. It carries the less shiny main body of the device. It starts narrower than the top surface of the foot in all directions. From bottom to top, it first protrudes forward and immediately increases in depth and slightly and curves backward and continues in a straight slope which still goes more upward than backward. Eventually, it curves upward and ends in a slim, rounded top. Transversally, it keeps the same width all the way. Both sides are carved out and illuminated, normally in cyan, here in almost white. Otherwise, it comes in its standard dark grey. However, it's actually a brownish anthracite grey, and the very top shows some light blue, so while it clearly hasn't received the monochrome treatment all over, a closer look also reveals that it should have. The same goes for the foot which is slightly bluish.
The straight section of the main body carries a shiny black frame with the central element of each OpenSimWorld beacon: the touch display with a ratio of 4:3. When not in use, this specimen shows the standard idle screen, only that it was modified to monochrome. Slightly above the middle, there is the official OpenSimWorld logo, namely the word "OpenSimWorld" itself with no actual caps. However, the "O" at the beginning is replaced with a circle matching the rounded sans-serif typeface which contains a stylised globe tilted to the left by an angle similar to Earth's inclination and showing three parallels and two meridians, but no land underneath. The last five letters, "world", are darker than the rest. Below it, in the same typeface, but in an even lighter grey, and without caps again, but a bit smaller, "teleporter" is written. Both lines also have shaded outlines that make them appear imprinted.
Further below, "Click for destinations" is written, still in the same type face and in about the same shade of grey as "OpenSim" above, but small enough to appear shorter than "teleporter" above. The background of the screen is a very light grey on the top 35 percent, medium grey on the bottom 35 percent and a gradient between the two. Clicking the screen breaks the monochrome theme, though, because the user interface which then appears has not been modified.
Lastly, there's a light grey panel on the front side of the foot which is scripted, too. It has "Like or comment this region" written on it in two lines in the same typeface as the writing on the touch screen, but with medium grey outlines. On the left, there is a medium grey thumb-up symbol, and on the right, there is a speech bubble with three dots in it in two shades of medium grey.
An OpenSimWorld beacon serves several purposes. For one, it transmits information about the sim to . This information includes not only the name of the sim and whether it's currently online, but also how many avatars are currently on the sim. The identities of these avatars are not transmitted, only how many they are. This makes finding sims with activity on them easier for users who want to go to parties or otherwise get into contacts with others, for OpenSim's general population density is much, much lower than Second Life's. This feature also helps generate rather controversial statistics about how popular any given sim is.
OpenSimWorld itself can be seen as the third-party centre of the decentralised Hypergrid. It started out about a decade ago as a sim catalogue, making navigating the Hypergrid and finding places much easier and more convenient than previous solutions like teleport stations or simply exchanging landmarks. Sims must be listed manually by registered users, and they need one OpenSimWorld beacon in-world. For example, is the entry for Black White Castle.
In addition, OpenSimWorld offers discussion forums, user-created information and discussion groups for various topics, announcements of in-world events, information about free or paid land rentals other than whole sim rentals by grids, a catalogue for in-world scripts etc.
The other purpose of an OpenSimWorld beacon is as a teleporter which gives you access to currently about 1,700 sims all over the Hypergrid by means of a crowd-sourced sim list, namely that on OpenSimWorld itself. If you click the touch screen, it shows a list with the ten sims known to OpenSimWorld with the most avatars on them. Each sim is listed with its activity ranking, its name, the letter "A" in square brackets if it is Adult-rated and the number of avatars on it. The list can be navigated page by page with always ten sims on them. However, while it gets the information it shows directly from OpenSimWorld, it doesn't show any further information, not about the sim and not about whatever event may be on-going on any given sim. Clicking on a listed sim will immediately teleport you there, but it won't tell you what the place is where the beacon is taking you.
After a while of inactivity, the touch screen switches back into its idle mode.
Clicking the panel on the foot leaves a like on the entry of the sim.
The shadow of the tallest mountain pine on the left-hand side of the pathway is cast on the OpenSimWorld beacon.
All the way to the right, two leaves of an otherwise out-of-frame fern reach into the picture. Further above and in the background, the lower one of another pair of rocks appears with the higher one being to the right of it and hidden behind the trunk of a conifer.

The background


Just right of the avatar's head in the picture, the paved path ends at the foot of a rock cliff which spans the whole width of the image. The cliff is about nine metres or thirty feet high. A narrower, rocky path leads to the right and upward from just right of the middle of the paved path to about 40 percent of the height of the cliff. Then, hidden behind the mountain pine tree to the right of the end of the paved path, it takes a sharp turn of roughly 180 degrees to the left and ascends to about 80 percent of the height of the cliff. Right above where the paved path ends, almost right above my avatar's head, the cliff path takes another sharp U-turn to the right and ascends in a fairly gentle slope until it reaches the top of the cliff about as far right as the first turn.
The cliff extends to both sides at a constant height, save for its jagged upper edge. On the left and within the borders of the image, it does so roughly parallel to the paved path. It surrounds a largely snow-covered plateau with more mountain pines and other conifers on it and Black White Castle itself.
To the left of the top of the second mountain pine from the centre, upward from the pair of rocks left of the paved path, the top right corner of Black White Castle's dark grey roof of unidentified material peeks through a gap between the trees. The whole rest of the building is either hidden behind the forest, outside the image borders or both.
Further in the background, snow-covered mountains rise high above the treetops. These are actually already outside the sim, reaching into regions with no sim running on them. A little bit of sky appears to the right of the mountains. It is clear, but true to the visual theme of the whole sim, it is deep grey.

The final details


The camera is roughly at realistic eye height and oriented south-by-southwest-ward. The position of the Sun as the only directed light source in the picture is unusual for OpenSim, namely in the southeast. It is permanently fixed in this place because making one single setting for the sky is great deal easier than making settings for a whole day. But if it was moving, it would not do what it almost always does in OpenSim and pass through the zenith. Still, judging by the length of the tree shadows since the Sun is absent as an actual celestial body in the sky, it is too high up for winter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #BlackAndWhite #Monochrome #MonochromeMonday #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #PangeaGrid #Sim #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds Quite a coincidence that you reply to this thread while I'm working on a new image description. 23,000 characters so far, and I'm not nearly done yet.
This figure alone should show that I don't use "image description" and "alt-text" mutually synonymously, and neither should you. For I don't put my full, detailed and explanatory image descriptions into the alt-text. I mean, I could where I am. But if I put 41,300 characters of image description into alt-text, Mastodon would cut off and throw away 39,800 characters, including everything that actually describes the image plus a whole lot of explanations.
What I'd do instead is:
Write a short image "description" which actually doesn't really describe the image's visuals at all, but I have to keep it brief. Put it into the alt-text.
Add to the alt-text where to find the actual, full, detailed image description with all explanations and whatnot. Namely, if you're on Mastodon, right above in the post that's hidden behind the "CW: long post (50,000+ characters)" content warning. And if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), right below within the same post that the image is embedded in.
Alt-text length altogether = well under 900 characters.
And then put said image description into the post text body itself where I don't have any character limit.
Believe me, I've seen lots of alt-text guides. And I can tell you that they're all useless if you're in the non-Mastodon Fediverse.
Most of them are written for static, commercial or scientific websites or, if you're lucky, for HTML-based blogs. For social media, they're garbage. Well, semi-garbage because a few bits of what's written there can be re-used for Hubzilla. But information about decorative images and setting their alt-text to empty is as completely useless in the Fediverse as everything that requires HTML.
Those that are for social media are for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and whatnot, all the commercial walled gardens. For the Fediverse with its own rules and its own culture, not to mention higher character limits, they're garbage.
Those that are written for the Fediverse are actually written for Mastodon with its 500-character limit in posts taken for a universal law. For Hubzilla with no character limits at all, which is where I am, they're garbage.

Oh, and not every picture out there can be described in a few hundred characters, and still, everyone gets them. Not every picture is a generic illustration for a blog post or a cat picture on Mastodon.
I myself usually post pictures from obscure 3-D virtual worlds which nobody knows full of stuff that nobody knows. If I want people to get these pictures, it requires infodumps of out-right titanic dimensions. I could use more than the 1,500 characters available on Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks for alt-text just to explain where a picture is from.
Hard to understand
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaOn the one hand, I'd like to post an in-world picture from OpenSim again.
On the other hand, it's hard to find something that's interesting, but that doesn't mean too much of an effort to describe.
I always have in mind that whenever I mention that there is something in a picture, blind or visually-impaired users may want to know what it looks like. And I'm not too keen on spending hours educating myself on architectural features and design elements and then spending hours explaining them to laypeople in an image description, only because there's a building or a dozen somewhere in a picture. But I also hate writing image descriptions that lack information.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Accessibility #A11y #InclusionWitcraft (Hubzilla) Mastodon was built first on top of OStatus and then on top of ActivityPub because using an existing protocol was much easier than making your own protocol from scratch.
Diaspora* was built around a scratch-made protocol because it was invented by four Apple/Mac fanbois to whom the concept of using something that already exists and was made by someone else was totally alien. The typical Apple mindset is, "Let's not be compatible to those filthy peasants out there. We're better than them." Thus, Apple has created proprietary solutions for literally everything without caring for compatibility with anything else. Remember the first two iPod generations were only compatible to Macs.
Diaspora* was built against Macs as servers and against MongoDB and a version of Ruby on Rails available for Macs, but for no typical Linux server distro. In fact, the first Diaspora* alpha releases only ran on Mac servers. And even when they were made cross-platform because it turned out that data centres rarely have Mac servers, and only so many people can buy a Mac Pro and have a fast enough landline to host a large pod at home, they still required server admins to compile a specific Ruby on Rails version from sources.
Federation with Diaspora* wasn't established by Hubzilla. Hubzilla only took over that technology from Friendica for which it was invented. And when it was invented, Diaspora* had no API whatsoever. I think it still doesn't. So Mike and the rest of the Friendica team had to reverse-engineer Diaspora*'s inner workings from its source code and spend months cracking Diaspora*'s home-brew encryption.
Imagine you want to connect a periphery device to another, very special device. Imagine you take a diamond milling cutter, you mill a hole into the steel/ceramics/Kevlar/carbon fibre compound layer case of the latter, figuring out what layers there are in the first place, and then you use the board layouts in the maintenance manual to figure out where to solder your connector cable directly onto the various circuit boards inside that device.
That's basically how Friendica federated with Diaspora*.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Diaspora* #Friendica #HubzillaScott M. Stolz
In a way, I understand why they chose the summary field for content warnings. If someone writes a summary, there is usually enough information to let people know what the rest of the content is about. It's just that on Mastodon, they don't care about summaries, they care about content warnings, so they renamed the field.

Mastodon actually chose to use the summary field for content warnings because of its hard 500-character cap. You don't need a summary for 500 characters, full stop. So they could also use that field for something else. Hey, why not use it for content warnings
And they likely did so under the assumption that, even though Mastodon spoke a common language with GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla, no Mastodon user would ever follow or be followed by any non-Mastodon user.
One part of the assumption was that Mastodon users wouldn't find out that there's a world outside Mastodon anyway. Mastodon wasn't targetted at geeks proficient enough in decentralised networking history to know GNU social. GNU social itself was probably deemed so small and so self-centred that nobody there would even think of following someone on Mastodon. Not if Mastodon isn't officialy being advertised as compatible with GNU social. Which it wasn't.
Now you might say that the federation-happy Friendica and Hubzilla users were just too eager to connect with Mastodon users to pin the "Federated with Mastodon" badge on them, right next to the badges for Diaspora*, GNU social and RSS.
But it's very likely that Gargron did not even know that Friendica and Hubzilla exist back then. Both were never advertised or promoted in any way that could have piqued public interest. They were largely made and maintained with an "If you build it, they'll come" mindset. And Hubzilla was brand-new when Mastodon was made, and its existence was only known to Mike's connections who paid close attention to his development posts.
And even if Gargron had known Friendica, he might not have known that Friendica speaks OStatus, much less that Friendica users tend to federate with everything that moved just because can.
Basically, Mastodon was designed to be federated within itself but effectively a walled garden towards the outside. And a walled garden doesn't have to take compatibility with anything that already exists into consideration.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MastodonWitcraft (Hubzilla) We Hubzilla users let ourselves be thrown into the cold water with an out-right feature monster with a lacking UI and even more lacking documentation. Hubzilla is for die-hard geeks who can wrestle sich a monster. Most of us came either from Friendica which has never been that extremely better or from nowhere. Add to this that the most popular platform here is probably desktop Linux.
Mastodon users are vastly different, especially since the second wave of Twitter migration. Most of them are on phones, many are only on phones. Almost all came from Twitter. And what they sought was not something like Twitter, but more for geeks. What they sought was Twitter without Musk, but otherwise 100% Twitter. And Mastodon was promised to them to be just that.
Also, unlike us, Mastodon users were generally mollycoddled to no end from the very moment they got disgruntled with Twitter. They were always protected from the harsh reality of the Fediverse outside Mastodon and, in fact, from much of what makes Mastodon "harder" to use than Twitter.
We had to fire up a search engine to find a website that lists Hubzilla hubs, including whether sign-up is open or not. They weren't even told that Mastodon is decentralised. Instead, they were railroaded to mastodon.social or any other big instance, and decentralisation was kept away from them until they had settled in and made themselves comfortable.
They weren't told either that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. I think nobody even thought about what'd happen if they find that out because those who mollycoddled them and railroaded them onto Mastodon were and often still are barely aware of that themselves.
It usually took them months to even read about Pixelfed and PeerTube which are all over Mastodon. Okay, so there's an Instagram and a YouTube in the Fediverse, too. Neat. Okay, and WordPress connects to the Fediverse, too. Maybe neat. Okay, and there's actual Instagram by Facebook pushing into the Fediverse. Not so neat.
But even then, they did not know or even expect that there are other things in the Fediverse that do the same as Mastodon. And do it differently. It took them the odd month on top of that to learn about that.
Hubzilla users are kind of intrigued when someone from remote corners of the Fediverse connects to them. We're used to federating with anything and everything because that's a killer feature.
Mastodon users of about six months or less recoil from their phones or computers when they see a post with over 500 characters for the first time. This shouldn't even be possible! Mastodon can't do over 500 characters! Witchcraft! Black sorcery!!!
It gets worse if they see text formatting.
It gets even worse if they see someone being quoted or "quote-tweeted". It gets much worse if it's them who is being quoted or "quote-tweeted".
Again, their first reaction is that this shouldn't be possible, and that this has to be some black-hat hacker's work. This just has to be illegal.
If that offending post came from you, and they ask you what you've done, and you tell them you're on Hubzilla, their first understanding is that Hubzilla is the name of a Mastodon instance. You know, like Universeodon.
If you tell them it isn't, they'll assume that Hubzilla is a Mastodon fork.
Then you tell them it isn't that either. It's a wholly independent project that has nothing to do with Mastodon. And they'll wonder why someone would make something like Hubzilla if there's already Mastodon. Mind you, at this point, they still assume that Gargron has made Mastodon in 2022 as a reaction upon Musk's plans to take over Twitter, and everything else was made after that. Because "everybody knows" that Gargron invented a) Mastodon, b) ActivityPub and c) the Fediverse.
Because nobody has told them otherwise before they joined. Because that would have made things so overwhelmingly complicated that they would have noped away from Mastodon.
Well, and then you tell them that Hubzilla is, in fact, older than Mastodon. It literally existed before Mastodon was even made. And even with Mastodon being six years older than they think, Hubzilla is almost another whole year older than Mastodon. And Hubzilla is a fork of a fork of another Fediverse project, Friendica, that's almost six years older than Mastodon.
Tell you what: They might still refuse to accept that there has been something in the Fediverse before Mastodon. Okay, if Hubzilla is actually older than Mastodon, it must have been made to federate with Mastodon just recently. Hubzilla is a rude, reckless intruder in Mastodon's nice and cosy and fluffy Fediverse that refuses to adapt to Mastodon and its culture.
At this point, their assumption is still that the whole Fediverse was built around Mastodon.
And then you tell them that, no, Mastodon is the intruder. When Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and Hubzilla and GNU social because it spoke GNU social's language from the very beginning, and Friendica and Hubzilla spoke and still speak that language, too, only that all three did so already before Mastodon. Oh, and even when Mastodon adopted ActivityPub, Hubzilla had it first.
This will drive them further into defending Mastodon's alleged position as the supreme leader over the whole Fediverse to whom all others have to bow. Well, at least it's the best. Everything else has to be inferior. Or why else is Mastodon the biggest
Well, that's because 99% of all Mastodon newbies were railroaded into it. They weren't given a choice between Fediverse projects. Either because whoever showed them the Fediverse didn't want to make matters too complicated and spare them of having to choose, or because whoever showed them the Fediverse only knew Mastodon, too. And it usually takes them months to find out the disturbing truth that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.
And since there's no easy-peasy, nomadic-identity-level way of moving from instance to instance and from project to project outside of Hubzilla and (streams), and since they don't want to get used to yet another project, and since Mastodon has the vastly best support for mobile apps (remember, everyone's on phones), they're stuck on Mastodon, demanding that Mastodon and their home instance introduce features that are readily available just about everywhere else in the Fediverse.
And since they're tendentially tech-illiterate and used to being mollycoddled, they demand all new Mastodon features have their personal preferences as the default settings.
Not to mention that they'll neither understand nor accept that other projects may have a different culture and have had it since times long before Mastodon.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon

New Comic Trailer: LONG HAUL Coming Feb. 21 from Storm King Comics
The Barren Highways of the American West Become a Place of Terror and Violence in a No-Holds-Barred Tale Not for the Squeamish

The sun-baked deserts and wide-open vistas of the American West may have inspired tales of romance and grand adventure, but LONG HAUL, the newest graphic novel...
haul king

Ontario expands program to train long-term care staff
Ontario is extending a program that helps long-term care homes provide clinical placements for nursing and personal support worker students.
-termCare -termcareministerStanCho -TermCareStaffing

Ontario expands program to train long-term care staff
Ontario is extending a program that helps long-term care homes provide clinical placements for nursing and personal support worker students.
-termCare -termcareministerStanCho -TermCareStaffing

Scott M. Stolz
In the end, people have a choice of who they follow and who they don't. And with the fediverse, they have a choice of platform. If someone does not want to see over 500 characters, then they should not follow people who post over 500 characters. And there is even a block function, if they don't want to see their comments either.

Mastodon users don't necessarily only react like this upon posts in their personal timelines.
See, Hubzilla's pubstream is optional, and almost all hubs have it turned off. Mastodon's federated timeline is not optional, always on and quite popular. And I guess not few Mastodon users react upon posts in the federated timeline the same as upon posts from their own contacts.
Ideally, instead of content warnings, Mastodon should just collapse long posts and add a "read more" option. I thought it already did that, but if it doesn't, that feature should be added.

Mastodon's Web interface does have this feature.
But the vast majority of Mastodon users is on phones, using dedicated apps. And some apps were built by people who at that point didn't know that the Fediverse is not only vanilla Mastodon. They made them under the assumption that there'll never be posts longer than 500 characters in the Fediverse. So they didn't add a post collapsing feature because they deemed it unnecessary for posts of 500 characters and shorter.
Either they still don't know that posts over 500 characters are possible, even on Mastodon. Or it's too late now adding post collapsing would require re-writing half the app.
That, or there are apps which let you turn collapsing completely off, and people actually do that.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be complaints by people for whom extremely long posts show up in their timelines at full length.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

Ontario expands program to train long-term care staff
Ontario is extending a program that helps long-term care homes provide clinical placements for nursing and personal support worker students.
-termCare -termcareministerStanCho -TermCareStaffing

Mumbles Pier, Swansea South Wales

image destinations wales

Das Fediverse ist eben Mastodon. Und alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, hat auch geflligst Mastodon zu sein. Das sind die Eindringlinge, die die Ruhe in Mastodons Fediverse stren. Auch Friendica von 2010 und Hubzilla von 2015, die die Frechheit besaen, sich in dem Augenblick mit Mastodon zu fderieren, als Mastodon 2016 startete.
Alles, was Nicht-Mastodon-Projekte knnen, strt. Auch nur ein bichen ber 500 Zeichen, Textformatierung, Codeblcke, Listen, Zitate, Quote-Posts usw. Ich bin ja sogar schon angegangen worden, weil meine Mentions so komisch aussehen, und ich sollte das geflligst abstellen.
Ich warte wirklich schon darauf, da ganze Projekte gefediblockt werden sollen, weil deren Nutzer sich so unmastodonhaft benehmen.
Meinen Main hast du, wie's aussieht, auch schon geblockt, weil ich mich nicht wie auf Mastodon benehme. Daher verwende ich hier jetzt meinen Klon.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NichtNurMastodon
Woran wrde ich sehen, wenn jemand nicht von Mastodon kommt

Ein paar Beispiele ohne Anspruch auf Vollstndigkeit:

Ansonsten kannst du es auf dem Webinterface auch selbst berprfen:

Alternativ kannst du auch das Profil des Nutzers aufrufen. Das siehst du auch auf dessen Heimatinstanz und nicht auf Mastodon, wenn es nicht auf Mastodon ist.
Es wrde jetzt allerdings den Rahmen sprengen, wenn ich erklren wrde, an welchen visuellen Merkmalen man welches Projekt erkennt. Einige Projekte sind ja im Aussehen extrem variabel, und bei einigen Projekten knnen sogar die Nutzer das Aussehen ihres Kontos oder Kanals verndern.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Fediversum Dann mten aber DFRN (fr Friendica), Zot (fr Hubzilla), Nomad (fr (streams)), BBcode (fr alle drei), Markdown (fr (streams)), HTML (fr (streams) und die Darstellung im Web generell), ActivityPub (fr das gesamte restliche Fediverse) und Rich Text (fr ActivityPub) erweitert werden um die Mglichkeit, Alt-Text an Links anzuhngen.
Auerdem mten ausnahmslos alle Fediverse-Projekte nachziehen, dieses Feature einbauen und obendrein eine separate Vorschau bieten, die mit 100%er Verllichkeit anzeigt, wie der Post letztlich auf Mastodon aussehen wird. Gleichzeitig mten sie ihrerseits die Bildbeschreibung fr Linkvorschaubilder ignorieren, weil es die so nur auf Mastodon gibt.
Nur, damit Alt-Text fr Linkvorschaubilder auf Mastodon perfekt funktionieren.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch #NichtNurMastodon
Also your post sets out two options then the poll has four.

Does Mastodon only support so short option names that the "- sighted" and "- not sighted" appendices are swallowed
Each option is there once for sighted users and once for blind or visually-impaired users. I want to be able to distinguish between their opinions.
And people who want the description in the alt text have no way to vote for it.

That isn't an option, and I've explained in the start post why. Money self-quote:
Note 1: "In the alt-text" is not an option, by the way. Explanations never go into the alt-text. Besides, without a 500-character limit, I don't have to shove stuff into the alt-text because there's no room in the post.

First of all, there must never be any information exclusively available in alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text. There are physical disabilities that make that impossible. If information is only available in alt-text, it's lost to certain disabled users.
Besides, Mastodon chops off long alt-text that comes in from outside at the 1,500-character mark. And I mean it permanently discards everything that goes beyond 1,500 characters.
This isn't nearly enough for even basic explanations plus visual descriptions in my case. My images are always about an extremely niche topic. Thus, for a casual audience to even be able to understand them, I have to explain a lot, and I have to explain the explanation itself.
1,500 characters aren't nearly enough for that.
includes an explanation that's 2,635 characters long. This is not a typo.
I have to explain what Padm is so sceptical about.
In order to make that understandable, I have to explain in altogether 501 characters what OSgrid is.
Then I have to explain in 572 characters what OpenSimulator is in order for people to understand what OSgrid is.
Then I have to explain in 545 characters what Second Life is in order for people to understand what OpenSimulator is.
Then I have to explain in over 200 characters that and why worlds in OpenSim are called "grids" in order for people to further understand what OSgrid is.
Then I have to explain in 487 characters what it is about OSgrid that has Padm worried.
Without these explanations, nobody but OpenSim veterans would even get the meme. And I didn't even explain the meme template if I were to do that as well, I'd go well beyond 6,000 characters only for explanations because I'd have to go as in-depth as .
Only for explanations. This does not include visual descriptions. And if you've ever actually read any of my over-500-characters-long posts, you should know that my visual descriptions of my own pictures give "excessive" a new meaning. And they come with increasingly extensive general explanations plus detail explanations themselves.
You tell me how to get thousands upon thousands of characters in alt-text into Mastodon in one piece, undamaged.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Auch hier wieder: Mit Friendica, Hubzilla und (streams) technisch nicht mglich.
Noch einmal: Da gibt's kein Alt-Text-Eingabefeld. Alt-Text wird in den Bildeinbettungscode im Post selbst reingeschrieben.
Das heit, wenn du z. B. Alt-Text an ein Bild in einem Post von Hubzilla einbauen willst,

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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch #NichtNurMastodon
Auch wichtig:
Usern erlauben Alt-Texte erzeugen zu knnen auf ProfilPhoto, ProfilBanner und ALLEN Link-Vorschau-Boxen in Posts!

Ich hoffe nur, da das nie zur Pflicht wird mit Defderation ganzer Instanzen als Sanktion bei Nichterfllung.
Das Fediverse ist nicht nur Mastodon, auch nicht nur Mastodon und Mastodon-Forks. Einige Projekte sind vllig anders aufgebaut und funktionieren vllig anders als Mastodon. Vor allem Friendica, Hubzilla - da bin ich - und (streams) handhaben Alt-Text vllig anders als Mastodon, nmlich nicht in einem separaten Textfeld. Da wre der Aufwand, Alt-Text fr Profilbilder zu erlauben, viel zu gro.
Und Alt-Text fr Linkvorschaubilder ist da berhaupt nicht umsetzbar. Die drei haben gegenber Mastodon zwar den Vorteil, da sie eine Vorschaufunktion haben. Aber die Vorschaufunktion zeigt nicht an, wie die Posts auf Mastodon aussehen werden. Und "zu Hause" sehen sie vllig anders aus als auf Mastodon eine Linkvorschau gibt's da nicht.
Zum einen wrde ein Post mit Link also noch lnger ohne Alt-Text frs Vorschaubild im Fediverse stehen. Unsereins mte nmlich eine Mastodon-Instanz aufrufen, mit der wir verbunden sind, und da dann nach dem Post suchen, und warten, bis er da angekommen ist. Erst dann wissen wir berhaupt, was fr ein Bild Mastodon da eigentlich als Vorschau eingesetzt hat. Und bis der Alt-Text geschrieben ist, der Post editiert ist und der Edit durchs ganze Fediverse durchgereicht ist, das dauert nochmal.
Zum anderen ist das eh irrelevant, weil so etwas auf Friendica, Hubzilla und (streams) technisch unmglich ist. Wie gesagt, keine Alt-Text-Eingabefelder. In Posts werden Bilder ja auch nicht als Dateien angehngt, sondern wie in Blogposts eingebettet. Der Alt-Text wird dann ins Markup fr die Bildeinbettung reingeschrieben. Aber ein Link ist nur ein Link. Kein Markup der Welt sieht Alt-Text fr Links vor.
Und:
Ich will endlich QuoteShares auf Mastodon, so da Kommentare zu Posts anderer User, fehlende #BiBesch etc prominent in neuen Posts geteilt werden knnen.

Es wre einfacher, wenn Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc. pp. einen Ein-Klick-Totalimport ganzer Mastodon-Accounts anbieten wrden, um das Umziehen zu erleichtern. Die konnten nmlich alle schon immer Quote-Posts.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch #NichtNurMastodonI have a question regarding descriptions and explanations for images:
Let's suppose I post an image showing something extremely niche and extremely obscure, something that'd require a whole lot of explanation for most people to understand. This also includes memes.
Let's also suppose I don't have a 500-character limit, for I don't have any character limit.
Where would you prefer general explanations

All options are listed separately for sighted and non-sighted users.
Please boost for a larger sample size!
Note 1: "In the alt-text" is not an option, by the way. Explanations never go into the alt-text. Besides, without a 500-character limit, I don't have to shove stuff into the alt-text because there's no room in the post.
Note 2: "No description" is not an option either. You shouldn't just leave it to your readers to search the Web for whatever they don't get. Besides, no, you can't Google everything, and ChatGPT doesn't know everything either.
Note 3: Explanations for specific elements in an image that go along with describing what they look like will always go into the image description, i.e. into the post, especially if there is no external webpage explaining them.
#Poll #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #DescriptiveText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #Inclusivity #Blind #VisuallyImpaired Just FYI: At least Hubzilla has the built-in functionality to add a geographic location to each post, and you can optionally even enter a default location into your channel settings. There's an optional app named that can show the post location or any other place in OSM. There's also an optional app named that can be used to plan meetings using OSM as the map provider.
Both and have similar OpenStreetMap add-ons, but they don't have anything like Rendez-vous.
Granted, it all dates back to before Mastodon, so it isn't geared towards working with Mastodon. Also, it isn't built against ActivityPub primarily but against DFRN (Friendica), Zot6 (Mastodon) and Nomad ((streams)). But maybe it's worth checking out.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenStreetMap (streams) has always been a fully-fledged Fediverse server application capable of working as a decentralised social network, only that it has been slimmed down in extra features in comparison to Hubzilla to be easier to maintain. Its federation is reduced to Nomad, Zot6 and ActivityPub, and apps like Calendar, Articles, Webpages and Wiki are gone, too, while it got to keep WebDAV, CardDAV and now-headless CalDAV. On the other hand, its ActivityPub connectivity has been improved.
Its original intention was not to be built into other projects, but other projects to be built around/on top of it by developing add-ons for it and giving it a name. (streams) itself doesn't have a name, doesn't have a brand, doesn't have a logo and isn't actually even a project, only a software repository. But if you take what's in that software repository and install it on a Web server, you still get something that blows Friendica out of the water in all but cross-protocol federation, calendar and maybe fancy UI elements.
Its main "issues", apart from not handling anything like Mastodon either, are that it has precious few public instances with open sign-up, and that its very concept (it doesn't have a unique identifier for its instances, and it's being kept away from all instance listing websites) makes its instances next to impossible to find unless you already know one.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
"a full, nomadic-identity-style move from Mastodon to anywhere is technically impossible"
It really isn't. Moving your social graph is built in. The lack of content portability is a problem, but there's tool now that helps with that

It still isn't nomadic identity style.
Imagine you move from foo.social to bar.social. Your whole account, just without the instance-specific login credentials, moves along with you. Including all your posts.
Now it comes: Your posts don't re-appear on everyone's timelines as new, unread posts as they normally would. They don't appear as read double posts either. Your whole backlog of existing posts on everyone's timelines all over the Fediverse are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social as the author.
Also, nobody has to re-follow you. All your followers and all your followed are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social, too, without having to do anything themselves.
Also, your account on foo.social is completely wiped and ceases to exist.
Afterwards, everything looks like you've always been on bar.social.
That would be nomadic identity style.
"99% of all Fediverse newbies are railroaded to Mastodon without being told what else there is in the Fediverse"
That's not really what happens, though. No one is strong-arming people to join Mastodon. It's just the one that's caught attention.

That's because the main gateway into the Fediverse is not or . It's rather or which nudges everyone to mastodon.social, too. Or for Japanese users, it's .
Justifiedly so. If you tell people who want to get away from Musk that they first have to choose one out of dozens of Fediverse projects and then one out of dozens or hundreds or thousands of instances without even knowing what either is, they'll nope out because that's way too complicated.
If you railroad them to mastodon.social and leave them to figure out everything themselves when they're ready for it, they'll bite because that's easy enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Last updated: 2024-02-10






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