Dolphins in Depth: Cause for concern
I have no other choice.
First of all, each one of the images contains three images in turn, all three of which must be described.
Furthermore, all text in an image must be transcribed verbatim. No exception. Each one of the images contains 18 individual pieces of text. The first image alone has over 600 characters to transcribe:
And this time, all text is actually readable. This is not another case of countless microscopically tiny pieces of text of which you wouldn't even know where they are in the image unless you paid close attention to the description.
The target audience of my post should not go far beyond:
Nobody on Mastodon will be automatically notified about my comment. Mastodon does not fetch replies to posts as unread content. And when I comment on a post, this comment is not delivered to all my followers. This is how Hubzilla works, in stark contrast to Mastodon.
This also means that the alt-texts are exclusively geared towards Hubzilla and (streams). They are too long for Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks. Mastodon will truncate the first alt-text in the middle of a word ("...a dark and slightly bluish grey nec") because that's the 1,500-character mark.
Of course, I can take into account the millions of Mastodon users who might find the post or one of the comments somewhere, then open the whole thread, then click on the start post, then go through actually the whole thread, provided all of it was forwarded to their Mastodon instance, and then discover my comment with two screenshots.
Have you ever encountered a single one of my image posts Especially in the past six months or so
Because if I took all these people into consideration as my target audience, I would have to take a similar effort as for my usual pictures which would result in even more describing characters and four separate image descriptions plus one preamble for two of them.
I would have to describe each image twice with a long, detailed, explanatory description in the post itself and with a shorter, probably purely visual description with no explanations and no text transcripts in the alt-text.
After all, if I included any possible Mastodon user into my target audience, I would have to take into account what they know and what they don't. And they know a whole lot less about these images than the five gentlemen who are my actual target audience right now. One out of four Mastodon users has never heard of Hubzilla, and my estimation is that every other Mastodon user thinks the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
I would start with the descriptions in the post. And I would start these with a common preamble for both descriptions.
I would explain what the site from which I'm posting screenshots is about.
I would explain that, no, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Hubzilla is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Friendica is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what Friendica is is required in order to understand the explanation of Hubzilla.
I would explain what a software fork is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what a software fork is is required in order to understand both the explanations of Friendica and Hubzilla.
I would explain what the streams repository is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what a software repository is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what a software repository is is required in order to understand the explanation of the streams repository.
In fact, I would probably have to explain what source code is and what certain software licenses are because I can't assume either to be known, but it's necessary to understand software repositories and the streams repository.
I would explain what single sign-on is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what OpenWebAuth is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Zap was because I can't assume it to be known, and because that's a requirement in order to understand the history of OpenWebAuth.
I would mention early on that both images contain two almost identical variants of my profile picture.
In order for people to understand my profile picture, I would explain what OpenSimulator is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand OpenSimulator, I would explain what Second Life is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to further understand the description of my profile picture, which isn't necessary in reality because I don't mention where exactly I have taken it, but which would be necessary then because someone might want to know where exactly the image is from, I have to explain what the Wolf Territories Grid is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand the explanation of the Wolf Territories Grid, I would have to explain what grids are and why Second Life's world and the worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand that, I would have to explain regions and sims in the Second Life and OpenSim context because I can't assume it to be known.
The preamble alone might be longer than my longest image description so far, and my longest image description so far is over 60,000 characters long.
Then I would describe the first image in the post.
Then I would describe the second image in the post, assuming the description of the first image to already be known.
Then I would write a separate, shorter, purely visual image description for the alt-text of the first image. I would not assume any of the other image descriptions to be known and write it as a stand-alone description. The alt-text would also mention that there is a longer, more detailed, explanatory image description with text transcripts in the post, that the users of Mastodon, Misskey etc. etc. can find it hidden behind the content warning which reads, "<Insert full quote of the summary with all content warnings here>", and that the users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can find it in the post they are reading right now, right after the second image.
Then I would write a separate, shorter, purely visual image description for the alt-text of the second image. I would not assume any of the other image descriptions to be known and write it as a stand-alone description. The alt-text would also mention that there is a longer, more detailed, explanatory image description with text transcripts in the post, that the users of Mastodon, Misskey etc. etc. can find it hidden behind the content warning which reads, "<Insert full quote of the summary with all content warnings here>", and that the users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can find it in the post they are reading right now, right after this image.
I wouldn't be done before Monday.
And I still wouldn't be able to satisfy everyone. Some would demand my alt-texts to be no longer than 200 characters each while still being sufficiently descriptive. Others would dislike the total lack of text transcripts in the alt-text, regardless of the text transcripts plus necessary image description elements would have inflated the alt-texts to lengths that Mastodon could impossibly hold. And then there would be those who are enraged because I have the audacity to put over 500 characters into one post, something that should be forbidden Fediverse-wide.
The only choice I have not to throw anyone in front of the bus is by not posting these images at all.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility #AccessibilityMatters Find the latitdue and longitude of any place I'm keeping my word. I describe every single last image I publish anywhere. Even when I'm quite certain that the image in question will only be encountered by a small handful of users on Hubzilla and (streams), none of whom needs image descriptions. Just like this time: I'm describing two images in a comment on a Hubzilla post which will not be automatically forwarded to anyone on Mastodon. Mastodon users will only come across that comment if they check the whole thread.
The exception I'm making this time is that I'll only describe the image once. In the alt-text. With no explanations. The target audience doesn't need to be explained what Hubzilla is, what (streams) is, what OpenWebAuth is, what single sign-on is, and they probably don't care enough about what OpenSim is to expect an explanation either. In fact, neither Hubzilla nor (streams) has alt-text and image descriptions as part of their culture.
So there will only be the image descriptions in the alt-texts and not a set of full, detailed image descriptions in the post plus one image description shortened to under 1,500 characters in the alt-text of each image.
Still, although the image is a screenshot and far from being the most complex screenshot I've ever described, the image description will be several thousand characters long. That's halfway okay because Hubzilla and (streams) have no character limits for alt-text either, apart from how much the Web interface can show at once on any given output device. But even if the Web interface can't show an alt-text to its full extent, a screen reader should still be able to read it all. And sighted Hubzilla and (streams) users can take a look at the source code of my comment.
Part of the length comes from describing my profile picture in each one of the screenshots, but there are also lots of pieces of text to describe and transcribe. To keep it "brief" this time, I won't mention and describe the typefaces, though.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits
What actually happens is that Mastodon's "code sanitiser" strips everything out that Eugen Rochko doesn't deem old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-like microblogging. Except a little text formatting since Mastodon 4. But this includes in-line images which Mastodon removes.
In order for images in posts to make it to Mastodon in some way, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) make copies of inline images as file attachments because Mastodon does not strip file attachments away. File attachments are how Mastodon does images.
But even then, Mastodon only supports a maximum of four file attachments, even in incoming posts. Everything that goes beyond that is discarded entirely.
It's a default setting in Hubzilla. It can be found in the privacy settings. Or rather, the opposite can, namely that anyone can follow your channel just like so, without your explicit consent.
It doesn't just appear so.
If someone tries to follow me, all that happens is that I receive a notification. But they don't actually follow me. They aren't permitted anything, not even to receive my posts.
In order for them to actually follow me, I have to confirm their follow request. But in doing so, I automatically follow them back.
Hubzilla doesn't do that Twitter/Mastodon shtick of having followers on the one hand and followed on the other hand, and these are two different things, and if you follow one of your followers, congrats, you're mutuals.
Normally, Hubzilla works like Facebook. You're connected bidirectionally, mutually, or you aren't connected at all. Only that Facebook calls it "friend", and Hubzilla calls it "contact" or "connection".
Okay, but there's still that switch that I've mentioned above. It allows others to follow you without your consent. I've never tested this switch. None of my Hubzilla channels is experimental enough for me to try it. But thinking about it, I guess it should establish a bidirectional connection, too. Again, I don't know for sure.
This switch does not make much sense for a personal channel. It's much more useful for a public, anyone-can-join forum channel.
Now comes the extra trick that I've pulled, the thing that I mean with "I don't actually follow you back".
Most of my connections are Mastodon users who have absolutely nothing interesting to say. Not within the scope of my channel (primarily OpenSim, secondarily the Fediverse beyond Mastodon).
Some followed me because they took me for a Fediverse guru and nothing else because they had judged me by that one single post or comment they discovered from me. Others, especially from 2023 on, followed me because they found me on the federated timeline on mastodon.social, and they followed everyone whom they found there so they had their timeline abuzz with uninteresting cruft just like on Twitter.
If I actually followed them back like you'd expect me to follow them back, they'd completely and utterly soak my stream with what I consider totally uninteresting cruft, completely drowning out the interesting posts, even more so if I even let their boosts through.
On the one hand, I want to let them follow me. On the other hand, I don't want them to drown me in all that off-topic rubbish.
I tried filtering when the channel was new. All of a sudden, my stream was nicely quiet. Problem, however: Hubzilla can't apply a per-connection whitelist filter including a keyword list only on posts and neither on comments nor on DMs. At least once, I haven't received a DM because the filter blocked it, because it didn't contain any of the keywords that were required for any content to come through.
So what I did was:
Step 1 ensured that everyone who had one of my old channel roles assigned was still allowed to send me posts even after step 4. Step 2 and 3 made sure all those whom I wanted silenced were silenced when step 4 happened, and those were the majority of my connections.
Again, my stream was not nearly as busy as it would have been if everyone was permitted to send me their posts.
To reduce the cruft even further, I applied boost filters to those whose posts I allow, but who boost a lot of rubbish. And I also try to filter out specific uninteresting things from very busy connections which, at the same time, are unlikely to send me DMs by blacklisting certain keywords.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Filters #Permissions This is close to what I already do.
In fact, when I have an idea for a picture, I go through the image description in my head, then I look at the scenery, then I go through the image description in my head again with the scenery before my eyes. And when I hit obstacles while trying to describe the scenery in my head, I decide against both creating the image and writing the image post in the first place.
This is why I usually try my best to avoid e.g. having buildings in my images, especially, but not only realistic buildings. Having to describe them is actually worse than having to describe space nebulae, and I have described space nebulae before. I avoid space pictures in my images now as well.
For me, it isn't about having some alt-text for an image because any alt-text is allegedly better than none. It's about having a pair of descriptions for each image that are as informative, accurate and thus useful as I can possibly write them.
#Long #LongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Ich habe nmlich weder eine Benachrichtung bekommen, noch bist du unter meinen Verbindungen als unvollstndig gelistet.
Hoffentlich hat Mike nicht gerade jetzt Urlaub. Und hoffentlich sieht das auch mein Admin.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams)
First things first, reasons why you should block me rather than following me:
This is not someone's single, general, all-purpose, personal Mastodon account. This channel (not account) was created to specialise in the topics of virtual worlds in general and, more specifically, those based on OpenSimulator. You can consider me not much more than an OpenSim avatar.
Since most of you have probably never heard of OpenSim, and you're wondering what I'm talking about: And
In a nutshell, OpenSimulator is a free, open-source and decentralised server-side re-implementation of #SecondLife, created around Second Life's own viewer API after Linden Labs made the official Second Life viewer open-source. It was launched in January, 2007, and most OpenSim-based world, usually called grids, have been federated with one another since the introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008. One could say that it is to Second Life what Mastodon is to Twitter, what Pixelfed is to Instagram, and what Lemmy is to Reddit, only that the UI can be almost identical.
I've been in OpenSim since April 30th, 2020. By the way, I'm not in Second Life, and I've never been there.
I occasionally post about the Fediverse with which I mean the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. That's when I have to say something that nobody else says.
. Sometimes it's easier to express something in one image macro than in 5,000 words. New meme posts shall go elsewhere in the Fediverse see below.
I don't post about real life. I may occasionally comment posts about real life, but I don't post about it. This channel is not about real life.
Those of you who come across my channel in their Web browsers in search of my profile (which is , by the way), will most likely see it right away. But those who see this post in their Mastodon timelines won't, although the text formatting should be a dead give-away. So it's only fair to mention it here:
I'm not on Mastodon. Yes, I'm someplace that's connected to Mastodon, but I'm not on Mastodon proper. So some of you might learn it from this post: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
Instead, I'm using a project named ). It has tons of features that Mastodon doesn't have, including some that are highly requested on Mastodon such as full-text search, quotes, quote-posts, text formatting , magic single sign-on and nomadic identity. It practically doesn't have any character limits at all.
Also, Hubzilla is older than Mastodon. It had its 1.0 release in December, 2015, more than half a year before Mastodon, and it was renamed from a project named the Red Matrix that was launched as early as 2012, about four years before Mastodon. For as long as Mastodon has existed, it has continuously been connected to Hubzilla. Oh, and by the way: Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub in September, 2017. The first one, two months earlier, was Hubzilla.
My little in-world sister Juno has her own Hubzilla channel. It's even more specialising in OpenSim from her point of view.
Juno Rowland
In addition, I have another channel on an instance of a nameless Fediverse server application that can be found in , a descendant of Hubzilla by Hubzilla's creator. I have launched that channel to be able to post images that may be sensitive in some way, e.g. that show faces which means eye contact. Hubzilla can't make Mastodon blank them out (streams) can. Again, this channel is in the Fediverse, and you can follow it from Mastodon and anywhere else in the Fediverse.
Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet
On the same instance, I have a channel that specialises in posting self-made memes about the Fediverse, based on established and more or less well-known meme templates. This should be clear, but I'd like to mention it anyway: These memes don't suppose that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, nor do they treat Mastodon as the centre of the Fediverse.
fedimemesonstreamsstreams.elsmussols.net
Lastly, I have a blog about OpenSim in German on WriteFreely that's somewhat dormant currently, but I still have a lot to write and post about. is basically Medium in the Fediverse. Again, if you understand German, you can follow the blog from anywhere in the Fediverse. But you can't reply to my blog posts WriteFreely doesn't support comments.
Next to my hashtags and mentions looking weird in comparison to what you're used to on Mastodon, the biggest "side-effect" of this is that my posts can grow truly massive for Mastodon standards. Where Mastodon has a hard-coded limit of 500 characters, Hubzilla does not have any real character limit at all. It has never had one, and its predecessor, Friendica, has never had one either. Thus, character limits of any kind are not part of Hubzilla's culture which is very, very different from Mastodon's culture in many ways.
This means I don't do threads when I have to write a lot. I don't have to. I can put everything I want to post into one single post. Long posts are fortunately still something that Mastodon displays correctly even if you can't write them on most Mastodon instances. As far as I know, it's only above 100,000 characters that Mastodon rejects posts completely. And on Hubzilla, you can even post many times more characters than that.
This post, for example, is longer than 42 Mastodon toots, and as you can see, I didn't break it down into a thread of well over 50 single posts.
That is, if I really have to write something that's akin to a blog post with more than four embedded pictures, while I can do that as a regular post, I'll do it as a long-form article that doesn't federate and then link to it. I know that some of you mobile app users don't like your Web browser popping open, but trust me when I say it's the best solution, also due to what Mastodon does with embedded images which it can't display as such. Besides, I don't force you to tap that link to my newest article.
It's highly unlikely that I'll post anything with that many images, though, because describing each image would be extremely tedious, and the image descriptions would take up horrendous amounts of room in the post. I'll come back to that again further down.
Which takes us to images. It's here where I do acknowledge some of Mastodon's limitations, seeing as well over 90% of the recipients of my posts are on Mastodon, what with how many newbies indiscriminately follow everything they come across to get their personal timeline busy, and others following me with the belief that I'm a Fediverse guru first and foremost.
I no longer post more than four pictures at once in anything that federates into other people's or instances' timelines, streams or whatever. That's because Mastodon can't handle more than four file attachments, and Mastodon removes all embedded inline images from posts.
I still embed the pictures someplace in my posts that is not at the bottom. The bottom is for hashtags which I haven't already used in the text. Yes, I make a lot of use of hashtags for everyone's convenience, and I always write them in CamelCase when appropriate and/or necessary. As for the embedded pictures, sometimes I explain in my posts where which picture that you'll find at the bottom of the post should be where in the text, but I don't always do that.
I'm very serious about image descriptions, so I've been describing all my images for over a year.
However, the topic I post pictures about, virtual worlds based on OpenSim, is very, very niche and very, very obscure. Probably only one in every over 200,000 Fediverse users has even heard of the general topic. This is not even close to common knowledge. So I have to assume that the vast majority of my audience needs it explained, needs everything in my images explained extensively to understand it.
The topic of 3-D virtual worlds is a very visual topic, so it might not be interesting for blind or visually-impaired people. On the other hand, however, they may be excited about the discovery that the Metaverse is not dead, and that free, open-source, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds exist right now and have been since as long ago as 2007. Of course, they'll be curious, and they'll want to explore my images like someone would who can see them. To make that possible and satisfy their curiosity, I have to describe my images at extreme detail.
In fact, I often have to do so anyway when a picture doesn't focus on anything specific.
There is also the rule that any text within the borders of an image must be transcribed 100% verbatim. My images may contain a whole lot of bits of text. And this rule does not explicitly include or exclude text that is not fully readable for whatever reason. So I also transcribe text that can't be read in the image to be on the safe side. This means that my image descriptions may contain lots and lots of text transcripts.
My full, detailed, explanatory image descriptions always go into the post text body, right below the images themselves, and not into the alt-text. They do so for two reasons.
One reason is because they contain explanations and other things that may be useful for anyone, not only for blind or visually-impaired people. But not everyone can access alt-text. Some people can't handle a computer mouse steadily enough to make a mouse cursor hover above an image so that the alt-text shows up. Other people can't use pointing devices such as mice, trackballs, touchpads, trackpoints or the like at all. For example, they may use a pen in their mouth or a headpointer strapped to their forehead with which they can press the keys on the keyboard. These people can't access alt-text either.
For those who can't access alt-text, any information exclusively available in alt-text and nowhere else is completely inaccessible and lost. If it's in the post itself, however, they can access it.
The other reason is because my image descriptions are extremely long. If you as a Mastodon user think 800 characters are tremendously long, think again: My record for the description of one single image is . In words, over sixty-thousand. This is not a typo.
But Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks such as Glitch, Hometown, Ecko, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey or Catodon have a hard limit of no more than 1,500 characters for alt-text. Unlike the character limit for posts, they enforce this limit on external content by truncating it and removing all characters beyond the 1,500-character mark. I can post alt-text with 60,000 characters, but Mastodon will chop 58,500 of them off and throw them away. And even Hubzilla's Web interface is limited in how much alt-text it can show at once because it can't scroll through alt-text.
Thus, my long image descriptions always go into the post itself.
Nonetheless, I always write another image description for the alt-text. I have to satisfy those on Mastodon who absolutely demand a useful image description in the alt-text, no matter what. They may not care for there already being an image description in the post. In fact, I always hide these posts behind content warnings (see below), so they don't even see at first glance that there's an image description in the post unless I mention that in the content warning. To keep them from lecturing or sanctioning me for not adding alt-text to an image, I describe all my images twice.
However, due to alt-text being limited in length, I can't make the description in the alt-text as informative as the one in the post. I never explain anything, and I often don't transcribe any text either if it's too much. But the alt-text always mentions the long description in the post, what it contains (explanations, transcripts) and where exactly to find it.
First of all, Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in this regard. Mastodon is a Twitter clone from 2016 that has introduced the use of the StatusNet summary field for content warnings in 2017. Hubzilla is from 2015, and it was created by renaming something from 2012 which, in turn, was a fork of a Facebook alternative from 2010. Hubzilla has never been developed against Mastodon, and it has never tried to mimic Mastodon. It was there long before there was Mastodon. And both its creator and its current maintainer don't want it to ape Mastodon.
This means two things.
One, the summary field which Mastodon has repurposed as a content warning field in 2017 is still a summary field on Hubzilla. It doesn't make sense to give a summary for 500 characters or fewer. But it does make sense to be able to give a summary if you're theoretically able to post millions of characters at once.
So Hubzilla doesn't have Mastodon's CW field, at least not labelled "CW". And Hubzilla's culture was fully fledged and developed when Mastodon was launched in 2016, more so when Mastodon introduced the CW field in 2017, and even much more so when Mastodon exploded with Twitter refugees in 2022.
Putting writer-side content warnings into the summary field (which, again, is labelled "CW" on Mastodon, but not on Hubzilla) is not part of Hubzilla's culture.
Still, I do add Mastodon-style content warnings where I deem them appropriate. Apart from the usual suspects, of which I know hundreds, I add them for:
Two, Hubzilla has its own way of handling content warnings. It is called "NSFW". That's basically a simple word filter which can optionally activated that automatically hides posts behind content warning buttons, depending on the keywords in its word list. The word list is customisable, so everyone can get all the content warnings they desire, given sensitive posts have the necessary keywords or hashtags, and nobody has content warnings forced upon them they don't need.
Hubzilla has had this feature since years before Mastodon introduced its CWs, and Hubzilla has inherited it from Friendica which has had it for even longer.
But in order for these filters to be triggered successfully, a post needs to have the appropriate keyword or keywords in it. This works best with hashtags. This means that I have to double all my Mastodon-style content warnings with matching hashtags. However, in many cases, there is not only exactly one hashtag for the same kind of sensitive content that is universally used by everyone, not even in filters. Thus, there are often multiple hashtags going with the same content warning.
In combination, this leads to masses of hashtags at the bottom of most of my posts as I add hashtags for almost all my content warnings. I know that some Mastodon users have a problem with more than four hashtags in one post, but warning people about sensitive content and triggering their filters to remove or hide said sensitive content is more important than coddling Mastodon users who still have Twitter on their brains.
As for sensitive images, I have recently stopped posting any kinds of images of which I'm certain they're sensitive or triggering to someone on this channel. It is for these images that I've created (streams) channels for (see way above). (streams) can make Mastodon blank sensitive images out. Hubzilla can't do that.
Most of the time, it means nothing. It means that I let you follow me. It does not necessarily mean that I actually follow you back.
This is due to a technical limitation on Hubzilla. I've set my channel up in such a way that I have to confirm all new connections. However, being a fork of a Facebook alternative, Hubzilla does not treat followers and followed as two separate things. Just like on Facebook, a connection is usually mutual by default. In practice, this means that when I confirm a new follower connection, I automatically "follow them back", i.e. create a mutual connection. This is hard-coded. I can't change it, not unless I let everyone follow me automatically without my consent.
But this does not mean that all your posts actually appear on my stream. If you don't write anything that's within the scope of this channel, I won't allow you to deliver your posts to my stream. Hubzilla has an absolutely staggering set of fine-grained permission controls that makes it possible for me to deny other users the permission to send me their posts.
If you write about OpenSim, I will allow your posts.
If you write about Second Life, I might allow your posts.
If you write about another virtual world that might be interesting for me, I might allow your posts.
If you write about the Fediverse, and you don't reduce the Fediverse to only Mastodon, I might allow your posts.
If you're an in-world acquaintance of mine who doesn't post about OpenSim, I very likely will allow your posts.
If none of this applies, I won't allow your posts. I'll let your comments on other posts through, I'll let your direct messages through, but I won't let your posts clutter my stream.
If I let your posts through, this doesn't necessarily mean I'll also let your boosts through. I can block boosts individually per connection. So unless your boosts are mostly interesting to me, I will block your boosts.
If Hubzilla should ever improve their filters, and I let your posts through, I may still apply a filter that only lets through what I want to read if you post a lot of stuff that I don't find interesting within the scope of this channel.
If you aren't okay with any of this, feel free to block me now before it's too late. I don't care how many people follow me or can read my posts as long as the right ones can. But I will not change the way I post to make it more like Mastodon, especially not if I can't because something is hard-coded.
Thanks for your patience.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Introduction
Direct quote from my latest image description which I hope is acceptable: "The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green."
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta As long as neither the Fediverse as a whole nor Mastodon specifically is owned by a NASDAQ-listed Silicon Valley gigacorporation, it seems not worth publishing anything about it.
The novelty from late 2022 has worn off, too, and the typical Heise reader thinks Mastodon has vanished into thin air anyway, so why should any commercial news outlet be bothered to publish anything about it
Even if it has its own Mastodon instance
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFedi #CWFediverseMeta I'm not a friend of image-describing AIs.
I regularly see them mess up descriptions of something as simple as a cat photo. When it comes to images that show something more obscure that requires more descriptive effort, more niche knowledge and more explanation, AI fails almost spectacularly.
I've compared AI descriptions with my own ones. No comparison, in fact. Those were the only times I've ever used an AI to have any of my images described.
As long as people have to use external AIs to describe their images, there's still an obstacle that makes the use of AIs to describe images somewhat inconvenient. As soon as the Mastodon Web interface gets a button for a one-click, fire-and-forget AI image description, nobody will write image descriptions themselves anymore. And people will still not check what rubbish the AI produces. As I've said, fire and forget.
As for Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon, they won't integrate image-describing AIs anyway. Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that has image descriptions as an integral part of its culture.
What I want to see even less is any Fediverse project not only integrating an image-describing AI, but completely removing the possibility for users to describe their images themselves. I mean, I'm probably safe on Hubzilla and (streams), but I'm not the only one who prefers describing images themselves over having them described by an AI.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI I'd be very careful with involving the Lindens. For Linden Lab and Second Life, OpenSim is a direct competitor. A competitor that can become very dangerous even because it's actually unfair competition.
The Lindens won't play nicely with OpenSim if it starts growing too much, and they'll support OpenSim even less. They'll rather put rocks in OpenSim's path in some way, either out of their own will, or they'll be urged to do so by the three investors who own Linden Lab now. For these three, OpenSim siphoning a substantial amount of users off Second Life would mean less revenue for Second Life which, in turn, would mean less return of invest for them. So they'll put the proverbial guns on the Lindens' chests and tell them to stop this, no matter how, or they'll drop Second Life like it's hot.
Fair warning ahead: It's more than just a handful for a Mastodon newbie. It's basically the polar opposite of Mastodon, it works nothing like Mastodon, it handles nothing like Mastodon, and it's the most feature-rich Fediverse project of all.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds Hardly. I can't really schedule anything.
Also, if you need someone to join in on your project, I'm generally not available for anything like this at all. I do my stuff, and I do things my way. Also, I'm already on two grids, quite high-ranking on one of them, and maintaining yet another avatar on yet another grid would be too much.
By the way, if we weren't connected, you'd be very very lucky that I've caught this post of yours.
Mastodon users are always notified by default when someone whom they don't follow mentions them unless the mentioning post doesn't make it to their home instance.
Hubzilla users, by default, aren't. And most actually aren't. I'm a rare exception.
In general, if you want to talk directly to a Hubzilla user, don't just mention them out of the blue in a public post. They won't notice. Always send them a DM and hope they allow these. Same goes for Friendica and (streams) users.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds
For me, it usually doesn't. Now, I'm not a professional Web developer or designer, not even an amateur, and I'm not a commercial blogger either. I'm just a Fediverse user who wants to make his image posts as accessible to as many people as possible.
But what my images show is such an extremely obscure niche that I had to find my own way of describing images. It includes describing each image twice. One description is sufficiently detailed for even the most curious audience members, it's hopefully explanatory enough for everyone to understand the image with zero prior knowledge, and it contains all transcripts.
It goes into the post text body because that's the only place where explanations should go, for not everyone can access alt-text. Also, I've got more room in the post: Mastodon chops long alt-text from outside off at the 1,500-character mark, but I think it's only above 100,000 characters when Mastodon rejects overly long posts. And even that is only a tiny fraction of how many characters I could theoretically post at once.
The other description is for the alt-text. It's purely visual, it doesn't explain anything, and depending on how much I have to describe and transcribe, it may even lack transcripts. You can only do so much in 1,500 characters, and I often need more than 1,500 characters only to explain where I've made an image.
The alt-text also tells people where exactly the full, detailed description of the self-same image can be found, and that it contains explanations and transcripts.
So first of all, this means no explanation to "help the understanding" in the alt-text. Not everyone can access it there, 1,500 characters aren't nearly enough for explanations, and if I exceeded them in alt-text, it'd be useless for everyone on Mastodon, Glitch, Hometown, Ecko, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon and all the other Mastodon and Misskey forks because they'd get it truncated.
Besides, often enough, my images don't focus on anything specific. They may actually show an entire scenery as such. So no "important things". And the "most critical information" are the extensive explanations necessary to be able to understand anything in the image.
But even if the images focuses on something specific, the nature of the topic may make people curious about the image, but these people know exactly zilch about it. If they were sighted, they wouldn't concentrate on that one thing in the image that's important. Instead, they would let their eyes wander around the completely unimportant scenery, discovering a whole new, previously completely unknown world.
However, they aren't necessarily sighted. So in order to let them experience my images in the same way as someone sighted, I have to describe the whole image with absolutely everything in it and explain everything in the image that may be unfamiliar because it doesn't exist in real life.
In fact, I don't describe my images themselves as I post them at the resolution at which I post them. Having to write that something is impossible to identify due to its size in combination with the image resolution feels like laziness and weaseling out, especially since I know what it is.
So instead, I describe what I see when I look at not the image at the image's resolution, but the real deal at near-infinite resolution. All of a sudden, I can transcribe microscopically tiny text. And a 2-by-2-pixel blot becomes a strawberry cocktail and reason enough to flag the image sensitive and slap an alcohol content warning on the whole post.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Different Fediverse projects may have different ways of adding images to posts and alt-texts to images. Sometimes, they don't translate to Mastodon, so Mastodon users don't even notice.
The best examples would be Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Their preferred way of adding images to posts is the website/blog way: Upload the image to the file space integrated in your account/channel, then embed it in the post, inline, using markup code. However, Mastodon doesn't support inline images and "sanitises" them away, so these three have to convert the inline images into file attachments just for Mastodon.
If it was possible to add alt-text to someone else's pictures, Mastodon would not only have to send the alt-text back to the source, but Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) would then have to remember where the particular image is embedded in the post (there's no limit for how many pictures you can embed in a Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) post, by the way) and weave the alt-text into the markup code in the post.
This means that anyone on Mastodon would be granted permission to at least try and alter other people's posts, even if it's only indirectly. Not to mention that this would require modifications to Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) as well, and how very complicated the whole process would be.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
For starters, unlike Mastodon, Pixelfed and probably others, the instance cannot force-delete your content against your will. Not your posts and not the images and other files in your file storage either. You and you alone decide what's being deleted when, if at all.
Posts and DMs from outside are being deleted after a certain period. You can shorten it for yourself. But when you have interacted with something (replied to it, liked it, starred it, repeated it, saved it in a folder), it will not be deleted.
Comments from outside are only automatically deleted along with the posts they comment on. On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), you are the owner of the whole thread following any of your posts, all comments included, and you decide what'll happen to the comments. If you don't delete the post or have it automatically deleted, all comments will persist along with the post unless you manually delete them independently from the post, one by one.
Unfortunately, this does not translate to Mastodon which entirely relies on downloading and caching everything. So even if you keep your posts and your pictures and everything indefinitely, Mastodon instances will eventually purge them from their caches.
Vice-versa, while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) keep copies of posts, comments and DMs, they don't cache images and hotlink them instead. So when an image is purged from a Mastodon or Pixelfed instance, they can't show it anymore either because it's gone at the source.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Das ist eben eine fiese Kombination.
99% der Fediverse-Neuzugnge der letzten zweieinhalb Jahre wurden einfach mit einem Link auf eine Instanz nach Mastodon geholt, ohne da ihnen erklrt wurde, was das ist. Auer "literarisch Twitter ohne Musk" oder so. Die wuten doch zu dem Zeitpunkt nicht mal, da es das Fediverse gibt.
Nicht wenige wissen bis heute nicht, da das Fediverse mehr als Mastodon ist. Andere werden sich wohl nie dran gewhnen, weil sie es erst erfahren haben, als sie sich schon zu sehr an ein Nur-Mastodon-Fediverse gewhnt haben.
Und dann kommt eben dazu, da Mastodon-User nicht erkennen knnen, woher ein Post kommt. Ich meine, selbst dann, wenn man einen Post an seinem Ursprung aufmacht, sofern das eigene Frontend das kann, ist es nicht immer sofort klar, was da am Ursprung luft. Nicht alles reibt einem das unter die Nase wie Misskey oder einige Forkeys.
Und so hast du haufenweise Leute, die "Fediverse" und "Mastodon" gleichbedeutend und austauschbar benutzen und nichts dabei sehen.
Du hast Leute, die sich alles Mgliche an Fortschritten fr "das Fediverse" wnschen, damit meinen, die sollen nur in Mastodon implementiert werden, und sich einen Dreck darum scheren, ob das auch mit dem Rest des Fediverse kompatibel ist.
Du hast sagenhaft viele Leute, die mit absoluter Sicherheit sagen knnen, da das Fediverse jetzt im Moment keine Quote-Posts kann. Und die Ziegelsteine kacken drften, wenn du sie daraufhin quote-postest, und nervse Zuckungen in Richtung Block-Button bekommen.
Du hast sehr wohl Leute, die in einer reinen Mastodon-Blase leben. Aber du hast auch Leute, die genau das nicht tun, es aber gar nicht wissen, weil sie's nicht merken, weil selbst ihre Misskey- und Friendica-Kontakte aus unerfindlichen Grnden nicht aus dem Rahmen fallen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon
Give them tools of self-empowerment, and they won't use them and demand to be coddled some more. I mean, it isn't like Mastodon gives you no means of self-defence at all. But some people don't even seem to be able or willing to mute or block anyone. And I'm not convinced that they're all stuck with a mobile app that only offers the absolute bare basics.
And then there are those who came via Friendica to Hubzilla or (streams). Give them a dozen permission settings and a half, and they'll go to the code repository and ask for more.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #PermissionsLooks like a purely Mastodon solution for racism and harassment on Mastodon is being sought in this thread.
On the one hand, I think such threads need some more insight from outside Mastodon.
On the other hand, I think nobody in this thread really wants to know how things are outside Mastodon. Or, in fact, outside their own instance. They want solutions for Mastodon, for the instances they are on right now themselves. Without having to take the rest of the Fediverse into consideration.
Just to state the obvious:
Any moderation system like Mastodons that regularly lets through the kind of sewage that has been highlighting is a moderation system that is failing.
Failing.
Full stop.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Racism #CWRacism #Harassment #CWHarassment #QuotePost #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #FediverseSafety Allow me to answer with another question for clarification:
What kinds of counter-measures would be acceptable
If you asked me, which no-one has yet and probably no-one ever will, I'd say, "Forget Mastodon and look at other places in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon."
I tend to get a whole lot of backlash for this alone. If people don't want to ditch the Fediverse altogether, they tend to cling to Mastodon for their dear lives. No matter how racist Mastodon itself turns out to be, no matter how much racist harassment comes from within Mastodon, the typical assumption is that everything else out there in the Fediverse is even worse.
It's next to impossible to argue against the existence of Nazi instances on Pleroma. Even though Pleroma isn't even that big in the Fediverse. And even though not everyone on Pleroma is a Nazi.
Also, whatever I'd suggest doesn't do what I guess many see as the minimum feasible solution: purge any and all racism from the Fediverse for all time. I'm being realistic here: That won't happen. Not until racism is purged from this entire ball of rock once and for all.
So anything I could possibly suggest is something that helps shield members of marginalised groups from hate-speech against them. Or rather helps them shield themselves. That doesn't coddle them, but that empowers them. And that does so a lot better than Mastodon.
Still, this is difficult because what I'd suggest is very obscure. And again, what marginalised people don't know, they don't trust.
It's hard enough already to put trust in help offered by a middle-aged white cis-het male, especially when you're under attack so much that you've come to the conclusion that the concept of allies doesn't exist.
In fact, I expect this post to drive a few more Mastodon users to block me or even the entire instance that I'm on.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #FediverseSafety Es gibt ja ein , in dem so einiges steht, auch Technisches.
Das IndieWeb zhlt auch Fediverse-Protokolle und -Projekte zu sich, verwendet aber primr eigene Standards.
Wer allerdings eine Facebook-Alternative sucht, ist aktuell ziemlich gut auf Friendica aufgehoben, das ist schon seit 14 Jahren im Fediverse.
Oder man probiert (streams), das ist vom Friendica-Erfinder, am Ende einer langen Reihe von Forks und Friendica ganz hnlich, aber fortschrittlicher und andererseits nicht mit Friendicas vielen Verbindungsmglichkeiten.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Streams #(streams) #IndieWeb
For if they did, it would be non-standard, proprietary, undocumented, Mastodon-exclusive solutions that anything that isn't vanilla Mastodon or a soft fork would hardly be able to adopt themselves and oftentimes not willing either. Fediverse devs are turning away from allowing Mastodon to take control over the development of the Fediverse by introducing more and more non-standard, Mastodon-exclusive stuff.
Even worse: If these were Mastodon-only solutions, they might lead to two possible outcomes. One, since the rest of the Fediverse won't support them, the rest of the Fediverse would easily be able to circumvent them. Routinely even. See "quote-toot opt-in". Remember that almost everything in the Fediverse that's an alternative to Twitter and/or Facebook has quote-posts readily available and can quote-post any Mastodon toot right now.
Two, an unbridgeable rift through the Fediverse as Mastodon splitseverything that isn't Mastodon itself off. This could be because Mastodon makes itself incompatible with everything else in the Fediverse by introducing new mandatory features that everything else doesn't support. Or it could be because new rules come with new features that demand the use of these features at instance level, and instances that don't use these features will be Fediblocked. Only that nothing that isn't vanilla Mastodon is even able to use these features.
For these reasons, such safety advancements must never be Mastodon developments.
Instead, they must come from the ActivityPub side. And there are things in development right now which, if actually implemented, will increase security in the Fediverse tremendously.
Specifically, what I mean is what Mike Macgirvin is working on right now, the guy who invented Friendica, nomadic identity and Hubzilla, and who has created and is maintaining https://codeberg.org/streams/streamsthe streams repository/url which contains the probably most advanced Fediverse server application of all.
He wants to bring not only nomadic identity to native ActivityPub, but also (streams)' extensive, fine-grained, powerful system of permissions which would then be understood not only amongst (streams) and Hubzilla, but all across the Fediverse amongst those projects that implement them.
Imagine being able to post only to the members of a specific list. Imagine these posts being unable to ever leave the list, save for copy-pasting or screenshots.
Imagine being able to choose which ones of your connections shall be allowed to see your posts. Or send you posts. Or reply to your posts. Or send you DMs. Or see your followers and followeds.
Imagine being able to define permission roles, pre-configured sets of permissions, and assign one of these to each one of your connections.
Imagine being able to set your entire account to post only to your followers by default.
Imagine being able to deny everyone the permission to reply to a certain post of yours. Imagine being able to only allow your connections to reply to a certain post of yours. Imagine being able to limit the timespan within which a post of yours can be replied to. Only if that post isn't a reply itself, but still.
Imagine being able to wall up your account, but without walling it up against everyone by only walling it up against certain people.
Sounds like utter science-fiction. But all this is available on (streams) right now.
Granted, it does not provide absolute, 100% water-tight safety against everything. Like comparable with a shielding that wouldn't even let one neutrino through in ten billion years. But as much such perfect security is desired, as impossible it is. Not unless e.g. the Black community creates an exclusive, walled-garden safe space whose aspiring members must be validated by meeting an admin or moderator in real life, eye to eye, to prove that they're actually Black. Sorry, but everything else can and will be circumvented to attack and harass them.
Also, yes, this permission system is not as easy-peasy to handle as the official Twitter mobile app. And it currently comes with a fairly cumbersome UI. That's because, as of now, it only works with (streams)' Nomad protocol and, within certain limitations, the Zot6 protocol used by Hubzilla which has a similar set of permission controls.
I mean, I'd love to see a "Black (streams)" come into existence with a bunch of instances of its own and flourish. For one, (streams) has better chances to be a (fairly) safe haven than Mastodon. Besides, this would give (streams) the publicity it so much needs, especially if Black (streams) started thriving after Black Mastodon has failed so spectacularly.
But let's face it, it's more cumbersome to use in comparison with Mastodon than Mastodon is in comparison with Twitter, also because (streams) is the descendant of a Facebook alternative rather than a Twitter clone. And if you're on a phone, it's either a PWA or a Web browser because there's no (streams) app.
Good news, however: As far as I can see, Mike's goal is to implement all this in ActivityPub with FEPs so that any pure ActivityPub project can adopt it. Friendica can adopt it, fairly easily even because Friendica is (streams)' earliest predecessor. Misskey and its forks can adopt it, and these projects are chock-full of LGBTQIA+ people. Everything can adopt it.
Unfortunately, implementing it in ActivityPub so it works nearly the same as on (streams) will be easier than pressuring Mastodon into implementing that stuff.
Lastly, there's one feature of Hubzilla and (streams) that won't make it to ActivityPub because it can't. And that's the ability to turn ActivityPub support off altogether, both for users at channel level and for admins at instance level.
One flick of a switch, and the entirety of Mastodon is blocked. All of it. As is Threads. As are the various Mastodon forks, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Misskey forks, Mitra, micro.blog, Socialhome, Pixelfed, the entire Threadiverse etc. etc., and if you're on (streams), even Friendica and GoToSocial.
But if you are on ActivityPub, that wouldn't make any sense to be able to do.
CC, FYI because you've participated in the thread:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #ActivityPub #Permissions #FediverseSafety
Should be fixed now.
Before following me, notice this:
My (streams) channel is strictly limited to OpenSim image posts in topic.
I won't post about the Fediverse, and I won't post about real life either, only OpenSim. Probably mostly portraits and memes.
So here's how you could follow it:
If you're on a mobile app, there probably is no one-tap or two-tap follow from a (streams) channel in your browser to whatever app you're using.
You could do as follows:
If that should fail, here are the address and the ID as raw text for you to copy and paste:
If that should fail, too, here's my (streams) channel mentioned:
Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet
In case even that fails, here's my (streams) channel mentioned, but the mention is hacked to look like a Mastodon mention (may be less likely to work):
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams)OSgrid is celebrating its 17th birthday, and I took the opportunity for a first image post on my (streams) channel, showing two pictures of my in-world sister, Juno Rowland.
This time, for experimental purposes, I'm going to link directly to the post. I may link to my channel instead next time. I'll have to find a way of notifying Mastodon users of new posts on (streams) without Mastodon generating a preview image without eye contact.
However, as long as nobody on Mastodon is following my (streams) channel, I can't test what Mastodon does with my (streams) posts themselves. (Beware if you want to follow my (streams) channel: It is limited in topic to OpenSim. No Fediverse stuff, no real-life stuff, only OpenSim.)
(Content warning: eye contact)
Happy 17th birthday, OSgrid!
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #GridAnniversary #OSgrid #OSG17B
I know from personal experience.
I know that Mastodon truncates longer alt-text at the 1,500-character mark and throws the excessive characters away for good.
But this limit only applies to alt-text.
And this may come as a total surprise to you, but: You can put an image description elsewhere than the alt-text. For example, in the post text body itself.
That's difficult on vanilla Mastodon with its 500-character limit. But everywhere else, you have either a higher character limit for posts than for alt-text or no character limit at all.
So my strategy is:
This way, I have a full, detailed image description that should satisfy everyone's needs for information in the post. And I have a separate, different, shorter image description in the alt-text to try and satisfy those who demand there always be a sufficiently useful image description in the alt-text, no exceptions, no matter what.
That wasn't even what I was talking about.
I suspect the former to be automatically done by some Mastodon smartphone apps.
The latter may automatically be done by other Mastodon smartphone apps. And I know for a fact that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) do it if you attach images to posts as files "the Mastodon way". You have to embed images "the blog way", manually edit the embedding code and add your own alt-text to prevent this from happening.
But I was talking about something different.
I was talking about, on the one hand, people saying, "Just write some alt-text. It's done in, like, 30 seconds even on a phone. Any alt-text is better than no alt-text."
And on the other hand, other people come with alt-text guides for all kinds of stuff that isn't Mastodon and imply that these guides have to be followed to a tee, full stop.
In addition, there are people who want even more stuff in Fediverse alt-text than what's written in any of the "how to alt-text on your website/blog" guides.
So on the one hand, you have those whose goal it is for all pictures posted in the Fediverse to at least have some halfway useful alt-text.
On the other hand, you have those whose goal it is for all these alt-texts to be of higher quality and with a higher level of detail than any alt-text on any professional scientific Web site.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
First of all, each one of the images contains three images in turn, all three of which must be described.
Furthermore, all text in an image must be transcribed verbatim. No exception. Each one of the images contains 18 individual pieces of text. The first image alone has over 600 characters to transcribe:
- Login
- You are logged in via OpenWebAuth - welcome!
- Jupiter Rowland
- jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu
- You are known by the following identifiers:
- UID:
- 2c22c620-d41b-4613-92c1-9f92d33c4bad
- The primary ID that this site has assigned to you.
- Fediverse ID:
- jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu
- Your unique ID across the Fediverse.
- Actor ID:
- https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiterrowland
- Your identity on the OpenWebAuth network.
- Log out
- What is this site
- It's an experiment with Single Sign-On for the Fediverse and other "open social web" projects.
- For more information, see the discussion thread here.
And this time, all text is actually readable. This is not another case of countless microscopically tiny pieces of text of which you wouldn't even know where they are in the image unless you paid close attention to the description.
The target audience of my post should not go far beyond:
- Fentiger, author of the start post, on Hubzilla
- Mike Macgirvin, who has commented in the thread, on (streams)
- Emanuel, who has commented in the thread, on Hubzilla
- Mario Vavti, who has liked the post, on Hubzilla
- Chris, who has repeated the post, on Hubzilla
Nobody on Mastodon will be automatically notified about my comment. Mastodon does not fetch replies to posts as unread content. And when I comment on a post, this comment is not delivered to all my followers. This is how Hubzilla works, in stark contrast to Mastodon.
This also means that the alt-texts are exclusively geared towards Hubzilla and (streams). They are too long for Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks. Mastodon will truncate the first alt-text in the middle of a word ("...a dark and slightly bluish grey nec") because that's the 1,500-character mark.
Of course, I can take into account the millions of Mastodon users who might find the post or one of the comments somewhere, then open the whole thread, then click on the start post, then go through actually the whole thread, provided all of it was forwarded to their Mastodon instance, and then discover my comment with two screenshots.
Have you ever encountered a single one of my image posts Especially in the past six months or so
Because if I took all these people into consideration as my target audience, I would have to take a similar effort as for my usual pictures which would result in even more describing characters and four separate image descriptions plus one preamble for two of them.
I would have to describe each image twice with a long, detailed, explanatory description in the post itself and with a shorter, probably purely visual description with no explanations and no text transcripts in the alt-text.
After all, if I included any possible Mastodon user into my target audience, I would have to take into account what they know and what they don't. And they know a whole lot less about these images than the five gentlemen who are my actual target audience right now. One out of four Mastodon users has never heard of Hubzilla, and my estimation is that every other Mastodon user thinks the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
I would start with the descriptions in the post. And I would start these with a common preamble for both descriptions.
I would explain what the site from which I'm posting screenshots is about.
I would explain that, no, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Hubzilla is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Friendica is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what Friendica is is required in order to understand the explanation of Hubzilla.
I would explain what a software fork is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what a software fork is is required in order to understand both the explanations of Friendica and Hubzilla.
I would explain what the streams repository is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what a software repository is because I can't assume it to be known, and because knowing what a software repository is is required in order to understand the explanation of the streams repository.
In fact, I would probably have to explain what source code is and what certain software licenses are because I can't assume either to be known, but it's necessary to understand software repositories and the streams repository.
I would explain what single sign-on is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what OpenWebAuth is because I can't assume it to be known.
I would explain what Zap was because I can't assume it to be known, and because that's a requirement in order to understand the history of OpenWebAuth.
I would mention early on that both images contain two almost identical variants of my profile picture.
In order for people to understand my profile picture, I would explain what OpenSimulator is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand OpenSimulator, I would explain what Second Life is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to further understand the description of my profile picture, which isn't necessary in reality because I don't mention where exactly I have taken it, but which would be necessary then because someone might want to know where exactly the image is from, I have to explain what the Wolf Territories Grid is because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand the explanation of the Wolf Territories Grid, I would have to explain what grids are and why Second Life's world and the worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because I can't assume it to be known.
In order for people to understand that, I would have to explain regions and sims in the Second Life and OpenSim context because I can't assume it to be known.
The preamble alone might be longer than my longest image description so far, and my longest image description so far is over 60,000 characters long.
Then I would describe the first image in the post.
Then I would describe the second image in the post, assuming the description of the first image to already be known.
Then I would write a separate, shorter, purely visual image description for the alt-text of the first image. I would not assume any of the other image descriptions to be known and write it as a stand-alone description. The alt-text would also mention that there is a longer, more detailed, explanatory image description with text transcripts in the post, that the users of Mastodon, Misskey etc. etc. can find it hidden behind the content warning which reads, "<Insert full quote of the summary with all content warnings here>", and that the users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can find it in the post they are reading right now, right after the second image.
Then I would write a separate, shorter, purely visual image description for the alt-text of the second image. I would not assume any of the other image descriptions to be known and write it as a stand-alone description. The alt-text would also mention that there is a longer, more detailed, explanatory image description with text transcripts in the post, that the users of Mastodon, Misskey etc. etc. can find it hidden behind the content warning which reads, "<Insert full quote of the summary with all content warnings here>", and that the users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can find it in the post they are reading right now, right after this image.
I wouldn't be done before Monday.
And I still wouldn't be able to satisfy everyone. Some would demand my alt-texts to be no longer than 200 characters each while still being sufficiently descriptive. Others would dislike the total lack of text transcripts in the alt-text, regardless of the text transcripts plus necessary image description elements would have inflated the alt-texts to lengths that Mastodon could impossibly hold. And then there would be those who are enraged because I have the audacity to put over 500 characters into one post, something that should be forbidden Fediverse-wide.
The only choice I have not to throw anyone in front of the bus is by not posting these images at all.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility #AccessibilityMatters Find the latitdue and longitude of any place I'm keeping my word. I describe every single last image I publish anywhere. Even when I'm quite certain that the image in question will only be encountered by a small handful of users on Hubzilla and (streams), none of whom needs image descriptions. Just like this time: I'm describing two images in a comment on a Hubzilla post which will not be automatically forwarded to anyone on Mastodon. Mastodon users will only come across that comment if they check the whole thread.
The exception I'm making this time is that I'll only describe the image once. In the alt-text. With no explanations. The target audience doesn't need to be explained what Hubzilla is, what (streams) is, what OpenWebAuth is, what single sign-on is, and they probably don't care enough about what OpenSim is to expect an explanation either. In fact, neither Hubzilla nor (streams) has alt-text and image descriptions as part of their culture.
So there will only be the image descriptions in the alt-texts and not a set of full, detailed image descriptions in the post plus one image description shortened to under 1,500 characters in the alt-text of each image.
Still, although the image is a screenshot and far from being the most complex screenshot I've ever described, the image description will be several thousand characters long. That's halfway okay because Hubzilla and (streams) have no character limits for alt-text either, apart from how much the Web interface can show at once on any given output device. But even if the Web interface can't show an alt-text to its full extent, a screen reader should still be able to read it all. And sighted Hubzilla and (streams) users can take a look at the source code of my comment.
Part of the length comes from describing my profile picture in each one of the screenshots, but there are also lots of pieces of text to describe and transcribe. To keep it "brief" this time, I won't mention and describe the typefaces, though.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits
Dolphins in Depth: Cause for concern on offense surfaces against Falcons
NorVeganJust to make sure I understand correctly, embedded inline images are not remeved all together, but rather moved to the bottom of the post ...but only 4 images, the rest is actually removed. Did I get that right
What actually happens is that Mastodon's "code sanitiser" strips everything out that Eugen Rochko doesn't deem old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-like microblogging. Except a little text formatting since Mastodon 4. But this includes in-line images which Mastodon removes.
In order for images in posts to make it to Mastodon in some way, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) make copies of inline images as file attachments because Mastodon does not strip file attachments away. File attachments are how Mastodon does images.
But even then, Mastodon only supports a maximum of four file attachments, even in incoming posts. Everything that goes beyond that is discarded entirely.
I've set my channel up in such a way that I have to confirm all new connections.
How do you do this
It's a default setting in Hubzilla. It can be found in the privacy settings. Or rather, the opposite can, namely that anyone can follow your channel just like so, without your explicit consent.
So if you manually confirm new connections, it'll appear to them like you follow them back, but if they're confirmed automatically it will not appear that way
It doesn't just appear so.
If someone tries to follow me, all that happens is that I receive a notification. But they don't actually follow me. They aren't permitted anything, not even to receive my posts.
In order for them to actually follow me, I have to confirm their follow request. But in doing so, I automatically follow them back.
Hubzilla doesn't do that Twitter/Mastodon shtick of having followers on the one hand and followed on the other hand, and these are two different things, and if you follow one of your followers, congrats, you're mutuals.
Normally, Hubzilla works like Facebook. You're connected bidirectionally, mutually, or you aren't connected at all. Only that Facebook calls it "friend", and Hubzilla calls it "contact" or "connection".
Okay, but there's still that switch that I've mentioned above. It allows others to follow you without your consent. I've never tested this switch. None of my Hubzilla channels is experimental enough for me to try it. But thinking about it, I guess it should establish a bidirectional connection, too. Again, I don't know for sure.
This switch does not make much sense for a personal channel. It's much more useful for a public, anyone-can-join forum channel.
Now comes the extra trick that I've pulled, the thing that I mean with "I don't actually follow you back".
Most of my connections are Mastodon users who have absolutely nothing interesting to say. Not within the scope of my channel (primarily OpenSim, secondarily the Fediverse beyond Mastodon).
Some followed me because they took me for a Fediverse guru and nothing else because they had judged me by that one single post or comment they discovered from me. Others, especially from 2023 on, followed me because they found me on the federated timeline on mastodon.social, and they followed everyone whom they found there so they had their timeline abuzz with uninteresting cruft just like on Twitter.
If I actually followed them back like you'd expect me to follow them back, they'd completely and utterly soak my stream with what I consider totally uninteresting cruft, completely drowning out the interesting posts, even more so if I even let their boosts through.
On the one hand, I want to let them follow me. On the other hand, I don't want them to drown me in all that off-topic rubbish.
I tried filtering when the channel was new. All of a sudden, my stream was nicely quiet. Problem, however: Hubzilla can't apply a per-connection whitelist filter including a keyword list only on posts and neither on comments nor on DMs. At least once, I haven't received a DM because the filter blocked it, because it didn't contain any of the keywords that were required for any content to come through.
So what I did was:
- I edited all my contact roles and explicitly allowed sending me posts in them.
- I made two new contact roles that don't allow sending me posts.
- I assigned these new contact roles to all contacts that I didn't expect to post anything interesting.
- Lastly, I edited my channel role and turned off the permission to send me posts.
Step 1 ensured that everyone who had one of my old channel roles assigned was still allowed to send me posts even after step 4. Step 2 and 3 made sure all those whom I wanted silenced were silenced when step 4 happened, and those were the majority of my connections.
Again, my stream was not nearly as busy as it would have been if everyone was permitted to send me their posts.
To reduce the cruft even further, I applied boost filters to those whose posts I allow, but who boost a lot of rubbish. And I also try to filter out specific uninteresting things from very busy connections which, at the same time, are unlikely to send me DMs by blacklisting certain keywords.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Filters #Permissions This is close to what I already do.
In fact, when I have an idea for a picture, I go through the image description in my head, then I look at the scenery, then I go through the image description in my head again with the scenery before my eyes. And when I hit obstacles while trying to describe the scenery in my head, I decide against both creating the image and writing the image post in the first place.
This is why I usually try my best to avoid e.g. having buildings in my images, especially, but not only realistic buildings. Having to describe them is actually worse than having to describe space nebulae, and I have described space nebulae before. I avoid space pictures in my images now as well.
For me, it isn't about having some alt-text for an image because any alt-text is allegedly better than none. It's about having a pair of descriptions for each image that are as informative, accurate and thus useful as I can possibly write them.
#Long #LongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
On the fairy back to civilization it became rainy and windy, so it became time to get the boat/ bus/ train/ train (change at Babylon) home to Manhattan.
to
Ich habe nmlich weder eine Benachrichtung bekommen, noch bist du unter meinen Verbindungen als unvollstndig gelistet.
Hoffentlich hat Mike nicht gerade jetzt Urlaub. Und hoffentlich sieht das auch mein Admin.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams)
tldr: Why you should block me now
First things first, reasons why you should block me rather than following me:
- In general, I don't behave like I'm on Mastodon. That's because I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on something that's very much not Mastodon, and that's older than Mastodon.
- I regularly post over 500 characters at once. And I usually refuse to cut long posts into threads. I don't have to. My character limit is practically infinite. Also, people who hate threads are closer to me than people who demand threads.
- I use text formatting.
- I do other things that are impossible on Mastodon such as embedded links.
- I usually use a lot of hashtags. I do so to trigger other people's filters. Filter-generated CWs are the norm where I am.
- I summarise my posts in your CW field. That's because your CW field has always been my summary field, and that's since long before it was your CW field.
- I can't add Mastodon-style CWs to replies.
- My mentions use long names rather than the short names used by Mastodon. This may be disturbing. But I can't switch it off. It's hard-coded.
- I post a lot of Metaverse-related things. And I don't denounce "the Metaverse" as being dead or stillborn. I'm not a crypto shill, though the kind of metaverse I write about has been in operation since many years before the concept of blockchains was invented.
- My non-Metaverse posts are about the Fediverse. They don't make Mastodon look good. And they tend to be technical.
- My image descriptions in alt-text are always fairly long. And they're my short image descriptions.
My long image descriptions are in the post. And they're usually well over 10,000 characters long.
What this is, and what this is about
This is not someone's single, general, all-purpose, personal Mastodon account. This channel (not account) was created to specialise in the topics of virtual worlds in general and, more specifically, those based on OpenSimulator. You can consider me not much more than an OpenSim avatar.
Since most of you have probably never heard of OpenSim, and you're wondering what I'm talking about: And
In a nutshell, OpenSimulator is a free, open-source and decentralised server-side re-implementation of #SecondLife, created around Second Life's own viewer API after Linden Labs made the official Second Life viewer open-source. It was launched in January, 2007, and most OpenSim-based world, usually called grids, have been federated with one another since the introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008. One could say that it is to Second Life what Mastodon is to Twitter, what Pixelfed is to Instagram, and what Lemmy is to Reddit, only that the UI can be almost identical.
I've been in OpenSim since April 30th, 2020. By the way, I'm not in Second Life, and I've never been there.
I occasionally post about the Fediverse with which I mean the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. That's when I have to say something that nobody else says.
. Sometimes it's easier to express something in one image macro than in 5,000 words. New meme posts shall go elsewhere in the Fediverse see below.
I don't post about real life. I may occasionally comment posts about real life, but I don't post about it. This channel is not about real life.
Where I am in the Fediverse
Those of you who come across my channel in their Web browsers in search of my profile (which is , by the way), will most likely see it right away. But those who see this post in their Mastodon timelines won't, although the text formatting should be a dead give-away. So it's only fair to mention it here:
I'm not on Mastodon. Yes, I'm someplace that's connected to Mastodon, but I'm not on Mastodon proper. So some of you might learn it from this post: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
Instead, I'm using a project named ). It has tons of features that Mastodon doesn't have, including some that are highly requested on Mastodon such as full-text search, quotes, quote-posts, text formatting , magic single sign-on and nomadic identity. It practically doesn't have any character limits at all.
Also, Hubzilla is older than Mastodon. It had its 1.0 release in December, 2015, more than half a year before Mastodon, and it was renamed from a project named the Red Matrix that was launched as early as 2012, about four years before Mastodon. For as long as Mastodon has existed, it has continuously been connected to Hubzilla. Oh, and by the way: Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub in September, 2017. The first one, two months earlier, was Hubzilla.
Other channels
My little in-world sister Juno has her own Hubzilla channel. It's even more specialising in OpenSim from her point of view.
Juno Rowland
In addition, I have another channel on an instance of a nameless Fediverse server application that can be found in , a descendant of Hubzilla by Hubzilla's creator. I have launched that channel to be able to post images that may be sensitive in some way, e.g. that show faces which means eye contact. Hubzilla can't make Mastodon blank them out (streams) can. Again, this channel is in the Fediverse, and you can follow it from Mastodon and anywhere else in the Fediverse.
Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet
On the same instance, I have a channel that specialises in posting self-made memes about the Fediverse, based on established and more or less well-known meme templates. This should be clear, but I'd like to mention it anyway: These memes don't suppose that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, nor do they treat Mastodon as the centre of the Fediverse.
fedimemesonstreamsstreams.elsmussols.net
Lastly, I have a blog about OpenSim in German on WriteFreely that's somewhat dormant currently, but I still have a lot to write and post about. is basically Medium in the Fediverse. Again, if you understand German, you can follow the blog from anywhere in the Fediverse. But you can't reply to my blog posts WriteFreely doesn't support comments.
What it means that I'm on Hubzilla
Next to my hashtags and mentions looking weird in comparison to what you're used to on Mastodon, the biggest "side-effect" of this is that my posts can grow truly massive for Mastodon standards. Where Mastodon has a hard-coded limit of 500 characters, Hubzilla does not have any real character limit at all. It has never had one, and its predecessor, Friendica, has never had one either. Thus, character limits of any kind are not part of Hubzilla's culture which is very, very different from Mastodon's culture in many ways.
This means I don't do threads when I have to write a lot. I don't have to. I can put everything I want to post into one single post. Long posts are fortunately still something that Mastodon displays correctly even if you can't write them on most Mastodon instances. As far as I know, it's only above 100,000 characters that Mastodon rejects posts completely. And on Hubzilla, you can even post many times more characters than that.
This post, for example, is longer than 42 Mastodon toots, and as you can see, I didn't break it down into a thread of well over 50 single posts.
That is, if I really have to write something that's akin to a blog post with more than four embedded pictures, while I can do that as a regular post, I'll do it as a long-form article that doesn't federate and then link to it. I know that some of you mobile app users don't like your Web browser popping open, but trust me when I say it's the best solution, also due to what Mastodon does with embedded images which it can't display as such. Besides, I don't force you to tap that link to my newest article.
It's highly unlikely that I'll post anything with that many images, though, because describing each image would be extremely tedious, and the image descriptions would take up horrendous amounts of room in the post. I'll come back to that again further down.
How I handle images
Which takes us to images. It's here where I do acknowledge some of Mastodon's limitations, seeing as well over 90% of the recipients of my posts are on Mastodon, what with how many newbies indiscriminately follow everything they come across to get their personal timeline busy, and others following me with the belief that I'm a Fediverse guru first and foremost.
I no longer post more than four pictures at once in anything that federates into other people's or instances' timelines, streams or whatever. That's because Mastodon can't handle more than four file attachments, and Mastodon removes all embedded inline images from posts.
I still embed the pictures someplace in my posts that is not at the bottom. The bottom is for hashtags which I haven't already used in the text. Yes, I make a lot of use of hashtags for everyone's convenience, and I always write them in CamelCase when appropriate and/or necessary. As for the embedded pictures, sometimes I explain in my posts where which picture that you'll find at the bottom of the post should be where in the text, but I don't always do that.
How I handle alt-text and image descriptions
I'm very serious about image descriptions, so I've been describing all my images for over a year.
However, the topic I post pictures about, virtual worlds based on OpenSim, is very, very niche and very, very obscure. Probably only one in every over 200,000 Fediverse users has even heard of the general topic. This is not even close to common knowledge. So I have to assume that the vast majority of my audience needs it explained, needs everything in my images explained extensively to understand it.
The topic of 3-D virtual worlds is a very visual topic, so it might not be interesting for blind or visually-impaired people. On the other hand, however, they may be excited about the discovery that the Metaverse is not dead, and that free, open-source, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds exist right now and have been since as long ago as 2007. Of course, they'll be curious, and they'll want to explore my images like someone would who can see them. To make that possible and satisfy their curiosity, I have to describe my images at extreme detail.
In fact, I often have to do so anyway when a picture doesn't focus on anything specific.
There is also the rule that any text within the borders of an image must be transcribed 100% verbatim. My images may contain a whole lot of bits of text. And this rule does not explicitly include or exclude text that is not fully readable for whatever reason. So I also transcribe text that can't be read in the image to be on the safe side. This means that my image descriptions may contain lots and lots of text transcripts.
My full, detailed, explanatory image descriptions always go into the post text body, right below the images themselves, and not into the alt-text. They do so for two reasons.
One reason is because they contain explanations and other things that may be useful for anyone, not only for blind or visually-impaired people. But not everyone can access alt-text. Some people can't handle a computer mouse steadily enough to make a mouse cursor hover above an image so that the alt-text shows up. Other people can't use pointing devices such as mice, trackballs, touchpads, trackpoints or the like at all. For example, they may use a pen in their mouth or a headpointer strapped to their forehead with which they can press the keys on the keyboard. These people can't access alt-text either.
For those who can't access alt-text, any information exclusively available in alt-text and nowhere else is completely inaccessible and lost. If it's in the post itself, however, they can access it.
The other reason is because my image descriptions are extremely long. If you as a Mastodon user think 800 characters are tremendously long, think again: My record for the description of one single image is . In words, over sixty-thousand. This is not a typo.
But Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks such as Glitch, Hometown, Ecko, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey or Catodon have a hard limit of no more than 1,500 characters for alt-text. Unlike the character limit for posts, they enforce this limit on external content by truncating it and removing all characters beyond the 1,500-character mark. I can post alt-text with 60,000 characters, but Mastodon will chop 58,500 of them off and throw them away. And even Hubzilla's Web interface is limited in how much alt-text it can show at once because it can't scroll through alt-text.
Thus, my long image descriptions always go into the post itself.
Nonetheless, I always write another image description for the alt-text. I have to satisfy those on Mastodon who absolutely demand a useful image description in the alt-text, no matter what. They may not care for there already being an image description in the post. In fact, I always hide these posts behind content warnings (see below), so they don't even see at first glance that there's an image description in the post unless I mention that in the content warning. To keep them from lecturing or sanctioning me for not adding alt-text to an image, I describe all my images twice.
However, due to alt-text being limited in length, I can't make the description in the alt-text as informative as the one in the post. I never explain anything, and I often don't transcribe any text either if it's too much. But the alt-text always mentions the long description in the post, what it contains (explanations, transcripts) and where exactly to find it.
How I handle sensitive content and content warnings
First of all, Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in this regard. Mastodon is a Twitter clone from 2016 that has introduced the use of the StatusNet summary field for content warnings in 2017. Hubzilla is from 2015, and it was created by renaming something from 2012 which, in turn, was a fork of a Facebook alternative from 2010. Hubzilla has never been developed against Mastodon, and it has never tried to mimic Mastodon. It was there long before there was Mastodon. And both its creator and its current maintainer don't want it to ape Mastodon.
This means two things.
One, the summary field which Mastodon has repurposed as a content warning field in 2017 is still a summary field on Hubzilla. It doesn't make sense to give a summary for 500 characters or fewer. But it does make sense to be able to give a summary if you're theoretically able to post millions of characters at once.
So Hubzilla doesn't have Mastodon's CW field, at least not labelled "CW". And Hubzilla's culture was fully fledged and developed when Mastodon was launched in 2016, more so when Mastodon introduced the CW field in 2017, and even much more so when Mastodon exploded with Twitter refugees in 2022.
Putting writer-side content warnings into the summary field (which, again, is labelled "CW" on Mastodon, but not on Hubzilla) is not part of Hubzilla's culture.
Still, I do add Mastodon-style content warnings where I deem them appropriate. Apart from the usual suspects, of which I know hundreds, I add them for:
- long posts (absolutely everything over 500 characters)
- Fediverse meta (whenever I post about the Fediverse)
- Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta (when I post about Mastodon as well as the non-Mastodon Fediverse)
- non-Mastodon Fediverse meta (when I only post about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, but not about Mastodon)
- hashtag meta (whenever I post about hashtags)
- alt-text meta (whenever I post about alt-text specifically)
- image description meta (whenever I post about image descriptions in general)
- content warning meta (whenever I post about content warnings)
Two, Hubzilla has its own way of handling content warnings. It is called "NSFW". That's basically a simple word filter which can optionally activated that automatically hides posts behind content warning buttons, depending on the keywords in its word list. The word list is customisable, so everyone can get all the content warnings they desire, given sensitive posts have the necessary keywords or hashtags, and nobody has content warnings forced upon them they don't need.
Hubzilla has had this feature since years before Mastodon introduced its CWs, and Hubzilla has inherited it from Friendica which has had it for even longer.
But in order for these filters to be triggered successfully, a post needs to have the appropriate keyword or keywords in it. This works best with hashtags. This means that I have to double all my Mastodon-style content warnings with matching hashtags. However, in many cases, there is not only exactly one hashtag for the same kind of sensitive content that is universally used by everyone, not even in filters. Thus, there are often multiple hashtags going with the same content warning.
In combination, this leads to masses of hashtags at the bottom of most of my posts as I add hashtags for almost all my content warnings. I know that some Mastodon users have a problem with more than four hashtags in one post, but warning people about sensitive content and triggering their filters to remove or hide said sensitive content is more important than coddling Mastodon users who still have Twitter on their brains.
As for sensitive images, I have recently stopped posting any kinds of images of which I'm certain they're sensitive or triggering to someone on this channel. It is for these images that I've created (streams) channels for (see way above). (streams) can make Mastodon blank sensitive images out. Hubzilla can't do that.
What it means when I follow you back
Most of the time, it means nothing. It means that I let you follow me. It does not necessarily mean that I actually follow you back.
This is due to a technical limitation on Hubzilla. I've set my channel up in such a way that I have to confirm all new connections. However, being a fork of a Facebook alternative, Hubzilla does not treat followers and followed as two separate things. Just like on Facebook, a connection is usually mutual by default. In practice, this means that when I confirm a new follower connection, I automatically "follow them back", i.e. create a mutual connection. This is hard-coded. I can't change it, not unless I let everyone follow me automatically without my consent.
But this does not mean that all your posts actually appear on my stream. If you don't write anything that's within the scope of this channel, I won't allow you to deliver your posts to my stream. Hubzilla has an absolutely staggering set of fine-grained permission controls that makes it possible for me to deny other users the permission to send me their posts.
If you write about OpenSim, I will allow your posts.
If you write about Second Life, I might allow your posts.
If you write about another virtual world that might be interesting for me, I might allow your posts.
If you write about the Fediverse, and you don't reduce the Fediverse to only Mastodon, I might allow your posts.
If you're an in-world acquaintance of mine who doesn't post about OpenSim, I very likely will allow your posts.
If none of this applies, I won't allow your posts. I'll let your comments on other posts through, I'll let your direct messages through, but I won't let your posts clutter my stream.
If I let your posts through, this doesn't necessarily mean I'll also let your boosts through. I can block boosts individually per connection. So unless your boosts are mostly interesting to me, I will block your boosts.
If Hubzilla should ever improve their filters, and I let your posts through, I may still apply a filter that only lets through what I want to read if you post a lot of stuff that I don't find interesting within the scope of this channel.
Finally
If you aren't okay with any of this, feel free to block me now before it's too late. I don't care how many people follow me or can read my posts as long as the right ones can. But I will not change the way I post to make it more like Mastodon, especially not if I can't because something is hard-coded.
Thanks for your patience.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Introduction
When researchers gave healthy mice antibodies from patients with , some of the animals began showing Long COVID symptoms
specifically heightened pain sensitivity and dizziness.
It is among the first studies to offer enticing evidence for the .
The research was led by , PhD, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
We believe this is a big step forward in trying to understand and provide treatment to patients with this subset of Long COVID, Iwasaki said.
Iwasaki zeroed in on autoimmunity in this study for several reasons.
First, Long COVIDs persistent nature suggested that a chronic triggering of the immune system might be at play.
Second, women between ages 30 and 50, who are most susceptible to autoimmune diseases, are also at a heightened risk for Long COVID.
Finally, some of Iwasakis previous research had detected heightened levels of antibodies in people infected with SARS-CoV-2.
From what I've read, colours are best described using basic colours and extra attributes describing brightness and saturation. Even if a colour is explicitly named in the image or otherwise officially named, it's best to use the name and then describe the colour.Direct quote from my latest image description which I hope is acceptable: "The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green."
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta As long as neither the Fediverse as a whole nor Mastodon specifically is owned by a NASDAQ-listed Silicon Valley gigacorporation, it seems not worth publishing anything about it.
The novelty from late 2022 has worn off, too, and the typical Heise reader thinks Mastodon has vanished into thin air anyway, so why should any commercial news outlet be bothered to publish anything about it
Even if it has its own Mastodon instance
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFedi #CWFediverseMeta I'm not a friend of image-describing AIs.
I regularly see them mess up descriptions of something as simple as a cat photo. When it comes to images that show something more obscure that requires more descriptive effort, more niche knowledge and more explanation, AI fails almost spectacularly.
I've compared AI descriptions with my own ones. No comparison, in fact. Those were the only times I've ever used an AI to have any of my images described.
As long as people have to use external AIs to describe their images, there's still an obstacle that makes the use of AIs to describe images somewhat inconvenient. As soon as the Mastodon Web interface gets a button for a one-click, fire-and-forget AI image description, nobody will write image descriptions themselves anymore. And people will still not check what rubbish the AI produces. As I've said, fire and forget.
As for Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon, they won't integrate image-describing AIs anyway. Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that has image descriptions as an integral part of its culture.
What I want to see even less is any Fediverse project not only integrating an image-describing AI, but completely removing the possibility for users to describe their images themselves. I mean, I'm probably safe on Hubzilla and (streams), but I'm not the only one who prefers describing images themselves over having them described by an AI.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI I'd be very careful with involving the Lindens. For Linden Lab and Second Life, OpenSim is a direct competitor. A competitor that can become very dangerous even because it's actually unfair competition.
The Lindens won't play nicely with OpenSim if it starts growing too much, and they'll support OpenSim even less. They'll rather put rocks in OpenSim's path in some way, either out of their own will, or they'll be urged to do so by the three investors who own Linden Lab now. For these three, OpenSim siphoning a substantial amount of users off Second Life would mean less revenue for Second Life which, in turn, would mean less return of invest for them. So they'll put the proverbial guns on the Lindens' chests and tell them to stop this, no matter how, or they'll drop Second Life like it's hot.
Ill check out hubzilla!
Fair warning ahead: It's more than just a handful for a Mastodon newbie. It's basically the polar opposite of Mastodon, it works nothing like Mastodon, it handles nothing like Mastodon, and it's the most feature-rich Fediverse project of all.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds Hardly. I can't really schedule anything.
Also, if you need someone to join in on your project, I'm generally not available for anything like this at all. I do my stuff, and I do things my way. Also, I'm already on two grids, quite high-ranking on one of them, and maintaining yet another avatar on yet another grid would be too much.
By the way, if we weren't connected, you'd be very very lucky that I've caught this post of yours.
Mastodon users are always notified by default when someone whom they don't follow mentions them unless the mentioning post doesn't make it to their home instance.
Hubzilla users, by default, aren't. And most actually aren't. I'm a rare exception.
In general, if you want to talk directly to a Hubzilla user, don't just mention them out of the blue in a public post. They won't notice. Always send them a DM and hope they allow these. Same goes for Friendica and (streams) users.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds
. , .
: #44.912297
: #38.13998
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#12 - #500 / - & - #" "
for Bryan, , , , , , , , , , : National Weather Service: A FLASH WARNING is in effect for this area until 1:30 AM EDT. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order. Source: NWS Charleston SC ** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIA
for Bryan, , , , , , , , , , : National Weather Service: A FLASH WARNING is in effect for this area until 11:30 PM EDT. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order. Source: NWS Charleston SC ** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICI
for Bryan, , , , , , , , , , : National Weather Service: A FLASH WARNING is in effect for this area until 11:30 PM EDT. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order. Source: NWS Charleston SC , , , ,
for Bryan, , , , , , , , , , : Flash Flood Warning issued August 5 at 5:32PM EDT until August 5 at 11:30PM EDT by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC , , , , , , , , , , ** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOUR
If only this worked in 100% of all cases...For me, it usually doesn't. Now, I'm not a professional Web developer or designer, not even an amateur, and I'm not a commercial blogger either. I'm just a Fediverse user who wants to make his image posts as accessible to as many people as possible.
But what my images show is such an extremely obscure niche that I had to find my own way of describing images. It includes describing each image twice. One description is sufficiently detailed for even the most curious audience members, it's hopefully explanatory enough for everyone to understand the image with zero prior knowledge, and it contains all transcripts.
It goes into the post text body because that's the only place where explanations should go, for not everyone can access alt-text. Also, I've got more room in the post: Mastodon chops long alt-text from outside off at the 1,500-character mark, but I think it's only above 100,000 characters when Mastodon rejects overly long posts. And even that is only a tiny fraction of how many characters I could theoretically post at once.
The other description is for the alt-text. It's purely visual, it doesn't explain anything, and depending on how much I have to describe and transcribe, it may even lack transcripts. You can only do so much in 1,500 characters, and I often need more than 1,500 characters only to explain where I've made an image.
The alt-text also tells people where exactly the full, detailed description of the self-same image can be found, and that it contains explanations and transcripts.
So first of all, this means no explanation to "help the understanding" in the alt-text. Not everyone can access it there, 1,500 characters aren't nearly enough for explanations, and if I exceeded them in alt-text, it'd be useless for everyone on Mastodon, Glitch, Hometown, Ecko, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon and all the other Mastodon and Misskey forks because they'd get it truncated.
Besides, often enough, my images don't focus on anything specific. They may actually show an entire scenery as such. So no "important things". And the "most critical information" are the extensive explanations necessary to be able to understand anything in the image.
But even if the images focuses on something specific, the nature of the topic may make people curious about the image, but these people know exactly zilch about it. If they were sighted, they wouldn't concentrate on that one thing in the image that's important. Instead, they would let their eyes wander around the completely unimportant scenery, discovering a whole new, previously completely unknown world.
However, they aren't necessarily sighted. So in order to let them experience my images in the same way as someone sighted, I have to describe the whole image with absolutely everything in it and explain everything in the image that may be unfamiliar because it doesn't exist in real life.
In fact, I don't describe my images themselves as I post them at the resolution at which I post them. Having to write that something is impossible to identify due to its size in combination with the image resolution feels like laziness and weaseling out, especially since I know what it is.
So instead, I describe what I see when I look at not the image at the image's resolution, but the real deal at near-infinite resolution. All of a sudden, I can transcribe microscopically tiny text. And a 2-by-2-pixel blot becomes a strawberry cocktail and reason enough to flag the image sensitive and slap an alcohol content warning on the whole post.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
some of my three fav. Ashley Lust/ashleylust's on as
feat. hair ofc
' outfit on also some scenes in that
hair of -moment highlighted 'n let loose of in a includes side
1First Comics Announces Love Town Long Take Oneshot
1First Comics has been in the comics business for over forty years, publishing creator-owned titles that have constantly and consistently pushed the boundaries on the industry and the medium. From our early days publishing titles such as Badger, Warp, American Flagg!, and GrimJack, 1First Comics has always sought to give...
Comics town take
Dolphins in Depth: After Tyreek Hills deal, whats next for the Dolphins
This would only work Fediverse-wide if the whole Fediverse was only Mastodon. Which it isn't and has never been.Different Fediverse projects may have different ways of adding images to posts and alt-texts to images. Sometimes, they don't translate to Mastodon, so Mastodon users don't even notice.
The best examples would be Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Their preferred way of adding images to posts is the website/blog way: Upload the image to the file space integrated in your account/channel, then embed it in the post, inline, using markup code. However, Mastodon doesn't support inline images and "sanitises" them away, so these three have to convert the inline images into file attachments just for Mastodon.
If it was possible to add alt-text to someone else's pictures, Mastodon would not only have to send the alt-text back to the source, but Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) would then have to remember where the particular image is embedded in the post (there's no limit for how many pictures you can embed in a Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) post, by the way) and weave the alt-text into the markup code in the post.
This means that anyone on Mastodon would be granted permission to at least try and alter other people's posts, even if it's only indirectly. Not to mention that this would require modifications to Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) as well, and how very complicated the whole process would be.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Dolphins in Depth: Can Jaelan Phillips gain the clearance he needs to practice
Sen. (I-Vt.),
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP),
today introduced legislation to address the
that is affecting more than 22 million adults and 1 million children across the United States
and millions more around the globe.
The Long COVID Research Moonshot Act of 2024 provides $1 billion in mandatory funding per year for 10 years to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
to support long COVID research,
the urgent pursuit of treatments,
and the expansion of care for patients across the country.
Joining Sanders on the legislation are Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt)
This legislation is endorsed by more than 45 organizations,
including:
Mount Sinai Health System,
Infectious Diseases Society of America,
National Partnership for Women and Families,
Solve M.E.,
Long COVID Alliance,
,
Body Politic,
Patient-Led Research Collaborative,
COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project,
and Marked by COVID.
A comes a
Good thing Friendica, Hubzilla and the streams repository work so much differently.For starters, unlike Mastodon, Pixelfed and probably others, the instance cannot force-delete your content against your will. Not your posts and not the images and other files in your file storage either. You and you alone decide what's being deleted when, if at all.
Posts and DMs from outside are being deleted after a certain period. You can shorten it for yourself. But when you have interacted with something (replied to it, liked it, starred it, repeated it, saved it in a folder), it will not be deleted.
Comments from outside are only automatically deleted along with the posts they comment on. On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), you are the owner of the whole thread following any of your posts, all comments included, and you decide what'll happen to the comments. If you don't delete the post or have it automatically deleted, all comments will persist along with the post unless you manually delete them independently from the post, one by one.
Unfortunately, this does not translate to Mastodon which entirely relies on downloading and caching everything. So even if you keep your posts and your pictures and everything indefinitely, Mastodon instances will eventually purge them from their caches.
Vice-versa, while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) keep copies of posts, comments and DMs, they don't cache images and hotlink them instead. So when an image is purged from a Mastodon or Pixelfed instance, they can't show it anymore either because it's gone at the source.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Das ist eben eine fiese Kombination.
99% der Fediverse-Neuzugnge der letzten zweieinhalb Jahre wurden einfach mit einem Link auf eine Instanz nach Mastodon geholt, ohne da ihnen erklrt wurde, was das ist. Auer "literarisch Twitter ohne Musk" oder so. Die wuten doch zu dem Zeitpunkt nicht mal, da es das Fediverse gibt.
Nicht wenige wissen bis heute nicht, da das Fediverse mehr als Mastodon ist. Andere werden sich wohl nie dran gewhnen, weil sie es erst erfahren haben, als sie sich schon zu sehr an ein Nur-Mastodon-Fediverse gewhnt haben.
Und dann kommt eben dazu, da Mastodon-User nicht erkennen knnen, woher ein Post kommt. Ich meine, selbst dann, wenn man einen Post an seinem Ursprung aufmacht, sofern das eigene Frontend das kann, ist es nicht immer sofort klar, was da am Ursprung luft. Nicht alles reibt einem das unter die Nase wie Misskey oder einige Forkeys.
Und so hast du haufenweise Leute, die "Fediverse" und "Mastodon" gleichbedeutend und austauschbar benutzen und nichts dabei sehen.
Du hast Leute, die sich alles Mgliche an Fortschritten fr "das Fediverse" wnschen, damit meinen, die sollen nur in Mastodon implementiert werden, und sich einen Dreck darum scheren, ob das auch mit dem Rest des Fediverse kompatibel ist.
Du hast sagenhaft viele Leute, die mit absoluter Sicherheit sagen knnen, da das Fediverse jetzt im Moment keine Quote-Posts kann. Und die Ziegelsteine kacken drften, wenn du sie daraufhin quote-postest, und nervse Zuckungen in Richtung Block-Button bekommen.
Du hast sehr wohl Leute, die in einer reinen Mastodon-Blase leben. Aber du hast auch Leute, die genau das nicht tun, es aber gar nicht wissen, weil sie's nicht merken, weil selbst ihre Misskey- und Friendica-Kontakte aus unerfindlichen Grnden nicht aus dem Rahmen fallen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon
From 18 Jul: Long COVID rates have declined, especially among the vaccinated, study finds - Enlarge / Long covid activists attend the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Hea... -10-vaccines -19 -covid -cov-2
Dolphins in Depth: Can the Dolphins become the bullies of the AFC
jayrope That's because Mastodon users were generally promised paradise when they were still on the Birdsite. And they got used to being mollycoddled all around.Give them tools of self-empowerment, and they won't use them and demand to be coddled some more. I mean, it isn't like Mastodon gives you no means of self-defence at all. But some people don't even seem to be able or willing to mute or block anyone. And I'm not convinced that they're all stuck with a mobile app that only offers the absolute bare basics.
And then there are those who came via Friendica to Hubzilla or (streams). Give them a dozen permission settings and a half, and they'll go to the code repository and ask for more.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #PermissionsLooks like a purely Mastodon solution for racism and harassment on Mastodon is being sought in this thread.
On the one hand, I think such threads need some more insight from outside Mastodon.
On the other hand, I think nobody in this thread really wants to know how things are outside Mastodon. Or, in fact, outside their own instance. They want solutions for Mastodon, for the instances they are on right now themselves. Without having to take the rest of the Fediverse into consideration.
Just to state the obvious:
Any moderation system like Mastodons that regularly lets through the kind of sewage that has been highlighting is a moderation system that is failing.
Failing.
Full stop.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Racism #CWRacism #Harassment #CWHarassment #QuotePost #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #FediverseSafety Allow me to answer with another question for clarification:
What kinds of counter-measures would be acceptable
If you asked me, which no-one has yet and probably no-one ever will, I'd say, "Forget Mastodon and look at other places in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon."
I tend to get a whole lot of backlash for this alone. If people don't want to ditch the Fediverse altogether, they tend to cling to Mastodon for their dear lives. No matter how racist Mastodon itself turns out to be, no matter how much racist harassment comes from within Mastodon, the typical assumption is that everything else out there in the Fediverse is even worse.
It's next to impossible to argue against the existence of Nazi instances on Pleroma. Even though Pleroma isn't even that big in the Fediverse. And even though not everyone on Pleroma is a Nazi.
Also, whatever I'd suggest doesn't do what I guess many see as the minimum feasible solution: purge any and all racism from the Fediverse for all time. I'm being realistic here: That won't happen. Not until racism is purged from this entire ball of rock once and for all.
So anything I could possibly suggest is something that helps shield members of marginalised groups from hate-speech against them. Or rather helps them shield themselves. That doesn't coddle them, but that empowers them. And that does so a lot better than Mastodon.
Still, this is difficult because what I'd suggest is very obscure. And again, what marginalised people don't know, they don't trust.
It's hard enough already to put trust in help offered by a middle-aged white cis-het male, especially when you're under attack so much that you've come to the conclusion that the concept of allies doesn't exist.
In fact, I expect this post to drive a few more Mastodon users to block me or even the entire instance that I'm on.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #FediverseSafety Es gibt ja ein , in dem so einiges steht, auch Technisches.
Das IndieWeb zhlt auch Fediverse-Protokolle und -Projekte zu sich, verwendet aber primr eigene Standards.
Wer allerdings eine Facebook-Alternative sucht, ist aktuell ziemlich gut auf Friendica aufgehoben, das ist schon seit 14 Jahren im Fediverse.
Oder man probiert (streams), das ist vom Friendica-Erfinder, am Ende einer langen Reihe von Forks und Friendica ganz hnlich, aber fortschrittlicher und andererseits nicht mit Friendicas vielen Verbindungsmglichkeiten.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Streams #(streams) #IndieWeb
With Tuas contract drama behind it, Dolphins focus needs to be defense
Such safety improvements cannot and must not come from within Mastodon.For if they did, it would be non-standard, proprietary, undocumented, Mastodon-exclusive solutions that anything that isn't vanilla Mastodon or a soft fork would hardly be able to adopt themselves and oftentimes not willing either. Fediverse devs are turning away from allowing Mastodon to take control over the development of the Fediverse by introducing more and more non-standard, Mastodon-exclusive stuff.
Even worse: If these were Mastodon-only solutions, they might lead to two possible outcomes. One, since the rest of the Fediverse won't support them, the rest of the Fediverse would easily be able to circumvent them. Routinely even. See "quote-toot opt-in". Remember that almost everything in the Fediverse that's an alternative to Twitter and/or Facebook has quote-posts readily available and can quote-post any Mastodon toot right now.
Two, an unbridgeable rift through the Fediverse as Mastodon splits
For these reasons, such safety advancements must never be Mastodon developments.
Instead, they must come from the ActivityPub side. And there are things in development right now which, if actually implemented, will increase security in the Fediverse tremendously.
Specifically, what I mean is what Mike Macgirvin is working on right now, the guy who invented Friendica, nomadic identity and Hubzilla, and who has created and is maintaining https://codeberg.org/streams/streamsthe streams repository/url which contains the probably most advanced Fediverse server application of all.
He wants to bring not only nomadic identity to native ActivityPub, but also (streams)' extensive, fine-grained, powerful system of permissions which would then be understood not only amongst (streams) and Hubzilla, but all across the Fediverse amongst those projects that implement them.
Imagine being able to post only to the members of a specific list. Imagine these posts being unable to ever leave the list, save for copy-pasting or screenshots.
Imagine being able to choose which ones of your connections shall be allowed to see your posts. Or send you posts. Or reply to your posts. Or send you DMs. Or see your followers and followeds.
Imagine being able to define permission roles, pre-configured sets of permissions, and assign one of these to each one of your connections.
Imagine being able to set your entire account to post only to your followers by default.
Imagine being able to deny everyone the permission to reply to a certain post of yours. Imagine being able to only allow your connections to reply to a certain post of yours. Imagine being able to limit the timespan within which a post of yours can be replied to. Only if that post isn't a reply itself, but still.
Imagine being able to wall up your account, but without walling it up against everyone by only walling it up against certain people.
Sounds like utter science-fiction. But all this is available on (streams) right now.
Granted, it does not provide absolute, 100% water-tight safety against everything. Like comparable with a shielding that wouldn't even let one neutrino through in ten billion years. But as much such perfect security is desired, as impossible it is. Not unless e.g. the Black community creates an exclusive, walled-garden safe space whose aspiring members must be validated by meeting an admin or moderator in real life, eye to eye, to prove that they're actually Black. Sorry, but everything else can and will be circumvented to attack and harass them.
Also, yes, this permission system is not as easy-peasy to handle as the official Twitter mobile app. And it currently comes with a fairly cumbersome UI. That's because, as of now, it only works with (streams)' Nomad protocol and, within certain limitations, the Zot6 protocol used by Hubzilla which has a similar set of permission controls.
I mean, I'd love to see a "Black (streams)" come into existence with a bunch of instances of its own and flourish. For one, (streams) has better chances to be a (fairly) safe haven than Mastodon. Besides, this would give (streams) the publicity it so much needs, especially if Black (streams) started thriving after Black Mastodon has failed so spectacularly.
But let's face it, it's more cumbersome to use in comparison with Mastodon than Mastodon is in comparison with Twitter, also because (streams) is the descendant of a Facebook alternative rather than a Twitter clone. And if you're on a phone, it's either a PWA or a Web browser because there's no (streams) app.
Good news, however: As far as I can see, Mike's goal is to implement all this in ActivityPub with FEPs so that any pure ActivityPub project can adopt it. Friendica can adopt it, fairly easily even because Friendica is (streams)' earliest predecessor. Misskey and its forks can adopt it, and these projects are chock-full of LGBTQIA+ people. Everything can adopt it.
Unfortunately, implementing it in ActivityPub so it works nearly the same as on (streams) will be easier than pressuring Mastodon into implementing that stuff.
Lastly, there's one feature of Hubzilla and (streams) that won't make it to ActivityPub because it can't. And that's the ability to turn ActivityPub support off altogether, both for users at channel level and for admins at instance level.
One flick of a switch, and the entirety of Mastodon is blocked. All of it. As is Threads. As are the various Mastodon forks, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Misskey forks, Mitra, micro.blog, Socialhome, Pixelfed, the entire Threadiverse etc. etc., and if you're on (streams), even Friendica and GoToSocial.
But if you are on ActivityPub, that wouldn't make any sense to be able to do.
CC, FYI because you've participated in the thread:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #ActivityPub #Permissions #FediverseSafety
I can See the Text, But not the images. Instead: access restricted.
Should be fixed now.
I also have no idea how to follow the Account from Mastodon
Before following me, notice this:
My (streams) channel is strictly limited to OpenSim image posts in topic.
I won't post about the Fediverse, and I won't post about real life either, only OpenSim. Probably mostly portraits and memes.
So here's how you could follow it:
If you're on a mobile app, there probably is no one-tap or two-tap follow from a (streams) channel in your browser to whatever app you're using.
You could do as follows:
- Turn your phone into landscape orientation.
- Switch to your browser with the page with the post open.
- Reload the page if you don't see any sidebars in the browser.
- If you do see sidebars, look to the left where the profile picture is.
- Below the picture, there's "Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet" written.
Below that, there's the ID, "jupiterrowlandstreams.elsmussols.net".
Next to the ID, there's an icon. Tap it, and the ID will be copied into your phone's clipboard. - Switch to your Mastodon app.
- Paste the ID into the search.
- Tap the beginning of the search field and add an .
- Start the search. Mastodon should be able to find it.
If that should fail, here are the address and the ID as raw text for you to copy and paste:
https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/jupiterrowland
jupiterrowlandstreams.elsmussols.netIf that should fail, too, here's my (streams) channel mentioned:
Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet
In case even that fails, here's my (streams) channel mentioned, but the mention is hacked to look like a Mastodon mention (may be less likely to work):
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams)OSgrid is celebrating its 17th birthday, and I took the opportunity for a first image post on my (streams) channel, showing two pictures of my in-world sister, Juno Rowland.
This time, for experimental purposes, I'm going to link directly to the post. I may link to my channel instead next time. I'll have to find a way of notifying Mastodon users of new posts on (streams) without Mastodon generating a preview image without eye contact.
However, as long as nobody on Mastodon is following my (streams) channel, I can't test what Mastodon does with my (streams) posts themselves. (Beware if you want to follow my (streams) channel: It is limited in topic to OpenSim. No Fediverse stuff, no real-life stuff, only OpenSim.)
(Content warning: eye contact)
Happy 17th birthday, OSgrid!
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #GridAnniversary #OSgrid #OSG17B
Mastodon has a limit of 1500 Charakters for Image descriptions and that is a Hard limit.
I know from personal experience.
I know that Mastodon truncates longer alt-text at the 1,500-character mark and throws the excessive characters away for good.
But this limit only applies to alt-text.
And this may come as a total surprise to you, but: You can put an image description elsewhere than the alt-text. For example, in the post text body itself.
That's difficult on vanilla Mastodon with its 500-character limit. But everywhere else, you have either a higher character limit for posts than for alt-text or no character limit at all.
So my strategy is:
- Write a full, detailed, explanatory image description with all bells and whistles, no matter how long it gets. And it can get tens of thousands of characters long.
- Put this image description into the post. I don't have a character limit. I've once posted a single image description that's over 60,000 characters long, and I've also posted three image description with a combined over 75,000 characters.
Mastodon does not truncate posts over 500 characters. It shows them at their full length. - Whittle the full, detailed description down to something that fits into the alt-text. This short description has to do away with explanations and text transcripts.
- Put the short description into the alt-text.
- Add to the alt-text a note that tells people a full description is in the post. For example:
A full, detailed description of this image can be found in the post. If you are on Mastodon or another microblogging project in the Fediverse, you can find it by clicking the content warning that includes, "CW: long (65,432 characters)". If you are on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Pleroma or Akkoma, you can find it right below the images.
This way, I have a full, detailed image description that should satisfy everyone's needs for information in the post. And I have a separate, different, shorter image description in the alt-text to try and satisfy those who demand there always be a sufficiently useful image description in the alt-text, no exceptions, no matter what.
There are basically two types of "Image description" that are not only useless But Actually offensive: copying the Text of the toot as the Image description and using the File Name of the Image as Image description.
That wasn't even what I was talking about.
I suspect the former to be automatically done by some Mastodon smartphone apps.
The latter may automatically be done by other Mastodon smartphone apps. And I know for a fact that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) do it if you attach images to posts as files "the Mastodon way". You have to embed images "the blog way", manually edit the embedding code and add your own alt-text to prevent this from happening.
But I was talking about something different.
I was talking about, on the one hand, people saying, "Just write some alt-text. It's done in, like, 30 seconds even on a phone. Any alt-text is better than no alt-text."
And on the other hand, other people come with alt-text guides for all kinds of stuff that isn't Mastodon and imply that these guides have to be followed to a tee, full stop.
In addition, there are people who want even more stuff in Fediverse alt-text than what's written in any of the "how to alt-text on your website/blog" guides.
So on the one hand, you have those whose goal it is for all pictures posted in the Fediverse to at least have some halfway useful alt-text.
On the other hand, you have those whose goal it is for all these alt-texts to be of higher quality and with a higher level of detail than any alt-text on any professional scientific Web site.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Last updated: 2024-08-08
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