Hundreds of doctors to sue NHS
Just FYI: At least Hubzilla has the built-in functionality to add a geographic location to each post, and you can optionally even enter a default location into your channel settings. There's an optional app named that can show the post location or any other place in OSM. There's also an optional app named that can be used to plan meetings using OSM as the map provider.
Both and have similar OpenStreetMap add-ons, but they don't have anything like Rendez-vous.
Granted, it all dates back to before Mastodon, so it isn't geared towards working with Mastodon. Also, it isn't built against ActivityPub primarily but against DFRN (Friendica), Zot6 (Mastodon) and Nomad ((streams)). But maybe it's worth checking out.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenStreetMap (streams) has always been a fully-fledged Fediverse server application capable of working as a decentralised social network, only that it has been slimmed down in extra features in comparison to Hubzilla to be easier to maintain. Its federation is reduced to Nomad, Zot6 and ActivityPub, and apps like Calendar, Articles, Webpages and Wiki are gone, too, while it got to keep WebDAV, CardDAV and now-headless CalDAV. On the other hand, its ActivityPub connectivity has been improved.
Its original intention was not to be built into other projects, but other projects to be built around/on top of it by developing add-ons for it and giving it a name. (streams) itself doesn't have a name, doesn't have a brand, doesn't have a logo and isn't actually even a project, only a software repository. But if you take what's in that software repository and install it on a Web server, you still get something that blows Friendica out of the water in all but cross-protocol federation, calendar and maybe fancy UI elements.
Its main "issues", apart from not handling anything like Mastodon either, are that it has precious few public instances with open sign-up, and that its very concept (it doesn't have a unique identifier for its instances, and it's being kept away from all instance listing websites) makes its instances next to impossible to find unless you already know one.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
It still isn't nomadic identity style.
Imagine you move from foo.social to bar.social. Your whole account, just without the instance-specific login credentials, moves along with you. Including all your posts.
Now it comes: Your posts don't re-appear on everyone's timelines as new, unread posts as they normally would. They don't appear as read double posts either. Your whole backlog of existing posts on everyone's timelines all over the Fediverse are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social as the author.
Also, nobody has to re-follow you. All your followers and all your followed are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social, too, without having to do anything themselves.
Also, your account on foo.social is completely wiped and ceases to exist.
Afterwards, everything looks like you've always been on bar.social.
That would be nomadic identity style.
That's because the main gateway into the Fediverse is not or . It's rather or which nudges everyone to mastodon.social, too. Or for Japanese users, it's .
Justifiedly so. If you tell people who want to get away from Musk that they first have to choose one out of dozens of Fediverse projects and then one out of dozens or hundreds or thousands of instances without even knowing what either is, they'll nope out because that's way too complicated.
If you railroad them to mastodon.social and leave them to figure out everything themselves when they're ready for it, they'll bite because that's easy enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Yes, because moving is so inconvenient. And a full, nomadic-identity-style move from Mastodon to anywhere is technically impossible. But many won't do less than that.
Yes, because 99% of all Fediverse newbies are railroaded to Mastodon without being told what else there is in the Fediverse because that'd just confuse them. People usually take three to six months to even only discover that there are alternatives to Mastodon in the Fediverse, at which point they've fully settled into Mastodon.
The newbies don't hate Mastodon for not being as powerful as e.g. Sharkey. They love it for not being . And they've never even heard of Sharkey at that point, so they can't and won't compare Mastodon to Sharkey.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Three reasons.
One, you can't move from Mastodon to any other Fediverse project with all your content, all your posts, all your settings, all your connections just like so, just like you can move from Hubzilla to (streams).
Two, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project with full, extensive, guaranteed iOS app support. Most "Fediverse" apps are built against Mastodon first and foremost or against Mastodon only. And almost everyone on Mastodon is on phones, mostly iPhones.
Three, coming from Twitter and adapting to Mastodon was hard enough already, and some still haven't recovered from that. You can't expect them to move and learn something new again.
And thus, everyone stays on Mastodon, waiting for features that are perfectly standard pretty much everywhere else to be introduced to their home instance.
And I'm not even counting those who aren't aware what the rest of the Fediverse can do. Or those who simply don't know that there is such a rest of the Fediverse because they think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Well, everyone and their dog believes that Zuckerberg's virtual worlds platform is officially named "The Metaverse". ("Metaverse" and "The Metaverse" are registered trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.") And both mainstream media and tech media spew out the same non-sense. The only exceptions are tech media specialising in virtual worlds.
Also, as I've already written, Second Life started to officially refer to itself as a "metaverse" in 2022 as a "Hey, we're still here, too, and we're still relevant" publicity stunt. And Second Life has always been a commercial walled garden.
Its API is only public insofar as it was reverse-engineered from the source code of the official viewer after the latter was made open-source in 2006. And that's only a viewer API, a client API, that's used to develop third-party viewers. "Compatibility" with other virtual worlds Well, there's OpenSim which was then built against the other side of the same API and the already existing third-party Second Life viewers and launched in 2007. But while it uses largely the same API and the same formats and the same standards, and while it's decentralised and federated within itself, it can't connect to Second Life. Even the 2008 "Six Lindens manage to teleport from Second Life to OpenSim" publicity stunt was bogus and faked.
I think I might write an article about the latter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #VirtualWorlds #Meta #MetaMeta #Horizons #Secondlife #Metaverse
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #VirtualWorlds #Meta #MetaMeta #Horizons #SecondLife #OpenSimulator #Decentraland #Roblox #VRchat #ThirdRoom #Vircadia #Overte #TheMetaverse #Metaverse
...where "Fediverse" is synonymous for "Mastodon", I guess.
I can't boost. Hubzilla doesn't have that feature. Hubzilla "quote-tweets" instead. It has done so since before there was Mastodon. You don't want me to do that instead, do you
Okay, I can do that. But from your typical Mastodon and formerly Twitter user's point of view, I guess I use way too many because I also use them to trigger filters. So I use a whole lot of them.
Hubzilla can't follow hashtags either.
First of all, there isn't a single Guppe group that even remotely covers the primary topic of this channel. There is a Lemmy community for that topic, though, and I'm connected to it.
Besides, I'm connected to various Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) forums/groups which blow gup.pe clean out of the water feature-wise.
Right, I don't read them. Because they're all so Mastodon-centric it hurts. Almost none of them can be sensibly carried over to here.
Not to mention the edge-cases I have to deal with that FediTips don't cover, for example when it comes to describing images. I don't have to put everything into the alt-text. I don't have a 500-character limit that prevents me from describing stuff in the post text body and forces me to use only the alt-text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #NotOnlyMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediverseIsNotMastodon
I almost always put my image descriptions into the post text body for two reasons. One, they contain explanations and other information neither available in the actual post text nor for sighted people in the image itself. Two, they're way too long. They exceed 1,500 characters multiple times, sometimes multiple dozen times. I don't have local character limits to worry about, but at least Mastodon, Misskey and all their forks chop alt-text over 1,500 characters off at the 1,500-character mark.
In addition, I always mention in alt-text where exactly this image description can be found. Not only in the post text body, but I add stuff like "above the image and hidden behind a content warning if you're viewing this post on Mastodon and right below this image if you're viewing this post on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams)".
More recently, however, I started adding a short description of the image to the alt-text. It actually doesn't even begin to describe the actual contents of the image. It's only there to satisfy the "alt-text must describe the image or else" crowd. I may have alt-texts well beyond the 850-characters mark nonetheless.
And still, I think the only reason why nobody complains about the lack of image description in my alt-texts is because too many Mastodon users or entire instances have muted or blocked me for not acting "Mastodon-like" enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Weil es zu fast allen Themen Leute gibt, die sich darber aufregen, da die nicht hinter einer CW versteckt werden. Ja, auch Katzenbilder (CW: cats).
Deswegen bin ich dafr, da Mastodon mal den umgekehrten Weg geht. Zur Abwechslung mal nicht dem ganzen Fediverse seine eigene Kultur aufzwingt, die geprgt ist durch technisch ungerechtfertigte Beschrnkungen, Neuerfinden von Rdern und Walled-Garden-Denken. Statt dessen mal was nicht nur technisch, sondern vor allem in seine Kultur bernimmt, was im Fediverse vor Mastodon der Standard war:
Content Warnings aus Filtern. Automatisch generiert fr jeden Leser individuell.
Das kann Mastodon auch, und zwar seit Version 4.0, also seit letztem Jahr. Nur nutzt das keiner, und zwar aus einer ganzen Reihe an Grnden:
Erschwerend kommt hinzu: Viele Projekte, die nach Mastodon als Alternativen zu Mastodon gestartet wurden, wurden nicht nur auf Mastodons Technik, sondern auch auf Mastodons Kultur zugeschnitten. Entweder haben die gar keine Filter, oder die haben bis heute keine Mglichkeit, per Filter CWs zu generieren.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta Find the latitdue and longitude of any place Okay, here's a bit more. And I'm trying to write this from a Mastodon point of view, but as someone who has got experience outside of Mastodon.
If you're on Mastodon which you probably are, get used to the lingo.
This may come as a surprise, but the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are many other projects in the Fediverse which are connected to Mastodon. Some of them have actually already been around before Mastodon. And they have features that Mastodon doesn't have. So don't freak out if you see a post with over 500 characters. Or with italics. Or with bold type. Or with a
Double your content warnings with hashtags. Some projects in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon use text filters to automatically generate individual content warnings for those who need them. And Mastodon can do that, too, so even some Mastodon users do it.
If a post with content that you may deem sensitive has only got these hashtags but no actual content warning, this is not necessarily due to ill intent or neglect. Some Fediverse projects outside of Mastodon can't do content warnings the Mastodon way. Hubzilla can only do them in first posts, but not in replies. On Friendica, they're generally very difficult to do. So don't immediately call for moderation.
Actually describe your images in alt-text. And do only that. No hashtags in alt-text. No links in alt-text. No SEO keyword spamming in alt-text.
If there's text in your picture, transcribe it in alt-text word by word.
Don't forget: Different instances have different rules. So don't report someone on another instance for not adding a content warning that's mandatory on your instance but not on theirs or the like. And don't forget either: Different projects have different capabilities and different cultures of using them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #Hashtag #Hashtags #AltText
Da gibt es leider keinen wie auch immer gearteten Konsens, auch wenn einige behaupten, den gbe es. Genau wie mit der Lnge und Ausfhrlichkeit von Bildbeschreibungen.
Die einen Blinden wollen Bildbeschreibungen gern kurz und prgnant. Die anderen wollen sie ausfhrlicher. Z. B. lassen sie sich nicht damit abspeisen, da du Elemente in einem Bild erwhnst, sondern sie wollen auch wissen, wie das alles jeweils aussieht.
Wenn du jegliche Bildbeschreibung in den Alt-Text packst, bringt das fr Blinde noch einen weiteren Nachteil mit sich: Screenreader knnen Alt-Text nicht navigieren. Das heit, die knnen nicht innerhalb des Alt-Text an eine bestimmte Stelle zurckspringen, sondern nur wieder ganz zum Anfang, um dann alles wieder von vorne durchzurattern.
Das ist einer von diversen Grnden, warum ich z. B. meine ausfhrlichen Bildbeschreibungen immer in den Post selbst packe. Ein anderer ist, weil sie meistens weit lnger als 1500 Zeichen werden, aber zumindest Mastodon, Misskey und die Forkeys schneiden Alt-Text an der 1500-Zeichen-Marke hart ab.
Allerdings poste ich im allgemeinen Bilder zu einem sehr obskuren Nischenthema. Die meisten Leute brauchen sehr, sehr viel Erklrung, um die Bilder zu verstehen. Und gerade meine eigenen Bilder sind manchmal ziemlich komplex, auch wenn ich versuche, das zu vermeiden.
Wie gut meine Beschreibungen ankommen, wei ich nicht. Ich habe bisher mehr Bilder beschrieben als Feedback dafr bekommen, und zwar inklusive Feedback von Leuten, denen ich ausdrcklich meine Bilderposts als Beispiele fr lange, detaillierte Bildbeschreibungen gezeigt habe. Ungefragtes Feedback hatte ich bisher nur einmal, auch wenn das positiv war.
Nicht jeder, der blind ist, wurde blind geboren. Wer irgendwann in seinem Leben erblindet ist, hat frher mal Farben gesehen, also auch einen Begriff von Farben.
Auerdem ntzen Bildbeschreibungen nicht nur Blinden, sondern auch Sehenden, die mieses Internet haben, wo die Bilder berhaupt nicht laden.
Ich wrde Farben immer erwhnen.
Die meisten, die es gibt, sind nur fr professionelle/kommerzielle statische Websites oder vielleicht noch professionelle/kommerzielle klassische HTML-Blogs. Die meisten, die Social Media behandeln, sind nur fr kommerzielle Social Media, also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn usw. Und die paar, die tatschlich das Fediverse behandeln, sind nur fr ganz normales Vanilla-Mastodon und gehen felsenfest davon aus, da Posts nicht lnger sein knnen als 500 Zeichen.
Die Sonderflle "Zeichenlimit deutlich ber 500 Zeichen" und "Social-Media-Post mit Bild, das viel Beschreibung und/oder Erklrung braucht", sind noch nie in so einer Anleitung abgedeckt worden.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch "MIA" means "missing in action".
I don't know all the details, just so much: The last time Kainoa was seen contributing to the Firefish repository was in June or July. Around that time, I guess, was also the last time that Kainoa was seen taking care of firefish.social. Kainoa is still alive and well and has posted something not long ago. Could be busy, nobody knows.
Anyways, fast-forward to December, 2023/January, 2024. Due to literally no maintenance whatsoever because the only admin hasn't shown up in a while, firefish.social has become entirely unresponsive. Nothing works anymore.
Also, Firefish is badly lagging behind Misskey's development. Not only no new features, but also no bug fixes, no security fixes, no nothing.
So the Firefish community took matters into their own hands. Just to mention three new forks:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon
Web interfaces could get switches like these, too, and ideally, admins could add their own switches, depending on the target audience of an instance. Ideally, apps could recognise these custom, instance-specific switches and add them to their UI.
On the posters' side, it'd still require discipline because they'd have to add appropriate hashtags, and these hashtags would have to be standardised, otherwise each filter would have to cover each trigger with half a dozen different hashtags per language or so. Dedicated apps could assist in this by adding checkboxes to the post editor which have the app automatically add appropriate standard hashtags for certain topics to the "hashtag line" at the end.
This could actually start in apps without breaking standards, and it could nudge Mastodon itself into adding it to its Web UI. In fact, I can see at least some Forkeys being quicker at introducing it.
The best part: This would move the Fediverse away from something Mastodon-specific and towards something more standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta
Even if Mastodon won't introduce the creation of quote-posts, Misskey, the various Forkeys (Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon etc. etc.), Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can quote-post just about any Mastodon toot out there with no resistance whatsoever. They always could, even when Mastodon wasn't able to display quote-posts halfway appropriately.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta To be fair, this doesn't apply to all the Fediverse. Mastodon, yes, but not the entire Fediverse.
I dare say there are two projects which handle this marvellously: from 2015 and a fork of a fork... by Hubzilla's own creator, commonly referred to as while technically being nameless. While both can "talk ActivityPub", they are based on different protocols which give them a feature that Bluesky tries hard to make everyone believe that they're working on inventing: .
First of all, Hubzilla and (streams) don't put your Fediverse identity directly into your account. Your account only grants you access. Your identity, your connections, your posts, your settings, your content etc. etc., all that resides in a , a kind of container. You can have multiple channels on one account, so you can also have fully separate identites on the same instance without having to log out and back in.
Nomadic identity itself can do two things. One, it takes care of moving a channel to another instance. And I mean actually moving it, not creating a dumb copy and leaving a dead account behind.
Two, and this is the actual killer feature, it can clone your channel to another instance. Again, not create a dumb copy. The clone is always synchronised with the original and vice versa. If one goes down, you've got the other readily at hand, so you're even safe from spontaneous shutdowns. And you can have more than one clone for each one of your channels.
Basically, moving is cloning light. Moving creates a synchronised clone, declares the clone the new main and the old main a clone, then deletes the old-main-gone-clone, and if there aren't any other channels on your old account, deletes that account.
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by who also created Hubzilla, now maintains (streams) and, in 2010, had created which was named Friendika back in 2011. Public Friendika nodes closing down had become a serious issue already, regardless of whether the shutdown was announced or came out of the blue. Early on, whenever this happened, all users on the node lost everything and had to start over from scratch.
Friendika eventually introduced moving from node to node by exporting and importing your account, but real resilience would have been different. Thus, nomadic identity was conceived. The Zot protocol was written around it because it couldn't be introduced to Friendika's DFRN protocol. In 2012, Friendica was forked and its backend re-written against Zot, becoming the Red Matrix, direct precursor of 2015's Hubzilla.
In a perfect Fediverse, everything would feature nomadic identity. But as it stands now, everything that isn't these two projects doesn't even understand nomadic identity and is easily confused by nomadic moves or someone posting from their clone instead of their main.
Unfortunately, nothing will change about this anytime soon. Mike Macgirvin has already proposed extensions for ActivityPub that'd introduce nomadic identity, albeit not in exactly the same fashion as on Hubzilla and (streams), but probably somewhat compatible. However, they have all been rejected.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity This might be a case of Chinese whispers.
What really increases accessibility when it comes to hashtags is how they're written if they consist of multiple words.
Always write multiple-word hashtags in "camelCase" (every word after the first one starts with a capital letter) or, better yet, "PascalCase" (every word starts with a capital letter). Screen readers used by blind or visually impaired users can't tell with certainty otherwise where a word ends and the next one starts.
Also, stop using Mastodon like Twitter and put all hashtags at the end of the post instead of into the text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Hashtag #Hashtags #Accessibility #A11y #camelCase #PascalCase
What do you mean would cause an instant ban The use of quote-posts for harassment or the use of quote-posts in general
I don't know if you've read the whole thread. I've already posted in it. If not: Lots of Fediverse projects have quote-posts regularly implemented. Two of them, Friendica and Hubzilla, have had them before Mastodon even existed, and it was Mastodon which federated itself with them and not the other way around. They call them "shared posts" and use them for the same purpose as Mastodon uses boosts: to forward posts.
They also both had quotes like the one above since their respective inception.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Have there ever been any specific promises how ease-of-use could be improved
I can't see anything that could be done without cutting features and betraying the Fediverse's principles except everything from Mastodon to Hajkey mimicking Twitter's default immediately-pre-Musk UI/UX. And maybe railroading newbies even harder by not even telling them that Mastodon is decentralised and taking instance selection away entirely and an AI that increases the mollycoddling by hiding Mastodon's decentrality and all contents coming in from the rest of the Fediverse until it decides the user is "ready".
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Well, is writing about static websites and long-form blogs and not about the Fediverse, especially not about Mastodon.
On Mastodon very specifically, everything that describes and/or explains an image always goes into the alt-text. Unlike all other *blogging projects in the Fediverse, Mastodon with its tiny character limit doesn't leave you much of a choice. So people got used to it and see it as a set-in-stone Fediverse standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #Caption #Captions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Man darf sich aber nie der Illusion hingeben, da KI jedes, aber auch jedes Bild auf Anhieb perfekt akkurat und informativ beschreiben kann.
Ich will's mal so sagen: Einfache Katzenbilder bekommt KI beschrieben. Fr reine Text-Screenshots braucht es keine KI, da reicht OCR.
Aber wenn die Bilder a) hochkomplex sind, b) extrem nischiges Unbekanntes zeigen und c) gerade deshalb sehr detailliert beschrieben und umfassend erklrt werden mssen, damit das Publikum sie versteht, und wenn an die Beschreibungen hohe Ansprche gestellt werden, das wird KI nie so gut hinbekommen wie ein entsprechend kompetenter Mensch.
Generell sollte man KI-Beschreibungen nie aus Bequemlichkeit ungesehen copy-pasten, sondern immer gucken, ob das Geschriebene so stimmt, und gegebenenfalls hndisch nachbessern.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #KI #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen So you're finally no longer allowed to reply to a post that was written neither by a follower nor in response to a follower
Or, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), to a post that wasn't started by one of your followers because these three don't serve you single comments from within threads which didn't appear on your stream from the very beginning
Well, that makes showing Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon much more difficult. Or that Mastodon's "rules" for how and where to describe images are not necessarily set in stone for the whole Fediverse because everything that isn't Mastodon doesn't have Mastodon's limitations.
Or that the first time the term "Metaverse" was used for an actual, real 3-D virtual world was not in 2021 by Zuckerberg for something he planned, but in 2007 for something that already existed and still exists.
I'd wonder if you're already a reply guy if you reply to a post in your local or federated timeline. But I don't have either.
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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostBisher wei man wenig ber Long Covid bei Kindern und ob impfen dagegen hilft. Daten von ber einer Million Kindern und Jugendlichen zeigen nun moderaten Schutz durch die Impfung.
"The Metaverse" as in new 3-D virtual world projects of the 2020s in general
Or "The Metaverse" as in...
...as in "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" as in "Facebook's Metaverse" as in "Meta's Metaverse" as in Horizons
Can everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Oh, and by the way, a finding of mine for those who still think Zuck was the first to slap "Metaverse" on an actual real 3-D world:
Something for those who think Mark Zuckerberg has invented the term "Metaverse" in 2021.
, the oldest grid (est. 2007), is referring to itself as "The Open Source Metaverse". Guess what It has taken over that slogan from OpenSim itself, and .
Metropolis, the first German grid (est. 2008), boldly used the full name "Metropolis Metaversum" until it was officially shut down in summer 2022. .
Since I started out in Metropolis on April 30th, 2020, I was in something called Metaverse almost a year and a half before Zuckerberg used that term.
Another fun fact: The virtual worlds/virtual reality news site has named its OpenSim category "" as early as 2010.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Metropolis #OSgrid
For the record: Yes, I know it was Neal Stephenson who coined that term in 1991 already.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Part of the secondary topic of this channel is showing a very-much-non-Mastodon view on the Fediverse to the Fedizens out there. Lots of fresh Twitter-to-Mastodon converts started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because I was one of the few to explain the Fediverse outside Mastodon to Mastodon users.
This doesn't work anymore if my posts don't reach their recipients anymore.
And besides, triggering Mastodon users with non-Mastodon behaviour can have nasty side-effects. Yeah, some mute you. Some block you. Often even without also unfollowing you. Some complain to you about it and demand you don't use any features of your instance that vanilla Mastodon 3.x didn't support yet.
But then there are those who try to complain to your instance admin about you and try to have you sanctioned. Or they have their instance admins/mods complain to your instance admin about you. And this can escalate.
A Hubzilla admin would laugh that off. Most Hubzilla hubs don't even have rules, and the rules of any one Mastodon instance don't apply here either.
But in most cases, the complaints never reach their recipients. See, the average Mastodon user doesn't know anything about Hubzilla. So they try to complain the same ways as they would within Mastodon.
They use Mastodon's report feature, but Hubzilla doesn't have it implemented. They try to send your admin a DM, but finding the admin of your hub doesn't work like finding the admin of a Mastodon instance, and oftentimes, the admin's channel isn't linked anywhere at all. They publicly complain about you with a Mastodon admin hashtag, hoping that your admin will read it. But you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla, and even if you could, why would a Hubzilla admin follow a Mastodon-specific hashtag
So the admin and the "moderation" of your hub doesn't react. Conclusion for a Mastodon user who only knows Mastodon: Your instance is basically unmoderated. And what does Mastodon do with an unmoderated instance whose users misbehave for any definition of that word Block it. Like, the whole instance.
One Hubzilla user misbehaving in the eyes of Mastodon users can cause the whole hub to be blocked on thousands of Mastodon instances, maybe including mastodon.social.
Now you could say I should flip the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse the bird and turn Pubcrawl off for good. If I did that, I could just as well delete the whole channel because it'd lose its very purpose.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta The biggest cultural difference based on server software has to be between Mastodon on the one hand and the Mike Macgirvin creations Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other hand.
Not only do they have vastly different user bases, but they developed independently from one another. When the Mastodon culture developed, those who shaped it didn't even know the other side, so they couldn't adopt any of its culture.
Said other side's culture dates back to 2010 when Friendica was launched as Mistpark, and since that was almost six years before Mastodon, it couldn't be inspired by Mastodon's culture either.
Add to that that these respective cultures are greatly shaped by technical features and limitations or the lack thereof.
Mastodon's culture is largely built around its 500-character limit which is ample for your typical phone-wielding Mastodon user. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined character limit whatsoever, and its target audience is largely on desktop or laptop computers, often running Linux, with large screens and full-size hardware keyboards.
So it's the most normal thing in the world for them to write in one post as much as they want while Mastodon users debate whether threads are good, or you should always limit yourself to 500 characters or less.
Also, alt-text. Mastodon has many disabled users, including blind or visually-impaired users. And it has a dedicated alt-text field for each image. On top of that, it offers 1,500 characters for each alt-text which, in connection with the 500-character limit for toots, has people write detailed image descriptions and explanations and put them into the alt-text. That's often information that doesn't even belong in alt-text, but there's no room for it elsewhere.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have unlimited room, so putting stuff into alt-text because the post text is too limited seems ridiculous. But they don't have a vocal disabled community, so there's little interest in accessibility. And neither of them has a dedicated alt-text field. Alt-text is supported, but it has to be manually grafted into the image-embedding code in the post. And there's no official documentation for that, I think not even for Friendica which is the only one out of the three with actually useful end-user documentation.
It's similar with content warnings. On Mastodon, they're put into the repurposed summary field, and next to nobody knows that it's a repurposed summary field rather than invented for content warnings from scratch. So since Mastodon has a content warning field, writer-side content warnings are huge, but also cause for drama.
Mastodon 4.0 has introduced filters that can create reader-side content warnings, but hardly anyone uses them, even fewer people support them with keywords or hashtags, many don't even know this feature exists, and it's generally ignored because it's un-Mastodon.
The Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) complex doesn't have a content warning field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a summary field labelled as such. Friendica doesn't even have that it uses a pair of BBcode tags for that.
And within their own ecosystem, they don't even need it. They've got the "NSFW app" instead, an over-one-decade-old, optional, simple-as-anything substring filter that automatically hides entire posts with all media and everything behind content warnings if it finds one of the entered keywords or hashtags.
So they can't understand Mastodon's commotion about content warnings, and Mastodon users can't understand why they don't add Mastodon-style content warnings.
And then there are all the things that were or are being debated on Mastodon and whether or not it should introduce them. Especially the second-wave Twitter refugees are often staunchly against them.
Full-text search and quote-tweets are being actively used on Twitter to track down and harass members of minorities who have fled to Mastodon. Of course, they don't want Mastodon to introduce either. That is, in the case of full-text search, Mastodon has found a solution, but one that doesn't really federate to the rest of the Fediverse.
Quotes and text formatting are seen as bad, too. Many don't know quotes because Twitter doesn't have them, and so they think quotes could be used as tools of harassment. And both are seen as making Mastodon feel less like Mastodon and more complicated.
Friendica and Hubzilla had all this before there was Mastodon, and (streams) inherited it from its long line of ancestors. Their users have gotten so used to having all this that they don't understand what the problems should be, also because they're so detached from Mastodon's culture. So they keep on using these features unashamedly, even around Mastodon users.
Some differences are rather simple. Take mentions, for example. Friendica has always used long names for mentions, as does its offspring. Mastodon users may find that freaky. Meanwhile, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) users may find Mastodon's mentions cryptic because they use the short name. But even they matter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseCulture #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoost #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares #TextFormatting #FullTextSearchScott M. Stolz I'm not talking about the occasional, moderate use of stuff that Hubzilla can do that Mastodon can't.
I'm not even only talking about using such stuff all the time and not in moderate amounts.
I'm talking about things like "content warnings" that read, "Summary of the post CW: long (number of characters), stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta, more-stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta." And then forgoing content warnings altogether in replies.
Or having eight and more hashtags at the bottom of a post, some of which look totally weird because they're the same as another one of the hashtags, but with "CW" at the beginning. (I use them to trigger filters. See below.)
Or image posts with alt-text for the images, but the alt-text wastes over 800 characters barely even describing the image and mentioning that the actual detailed image description is in the post itself. WTF, nobody puts image descriptions in the post, they belong into alt-text and nowhere else!
Worse yet: The post is hidden behind a content warning. And the content warning says something about tens of thousands of characters. And then you click/tap the content warning. And then an utter wall of text jumps at you, way longer than 100 toots could ever be, all in one enormous chunk.
Last but not least, my constant jabs at Mastodon, Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, Mastodon culture...
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta You can't "quote-toot" tweets on Mastodon. In fact, you can't "quote-toot" toots on Mastodon. You can't "quote-toot" anything on Mastodon.
So unless you're on Misskey or one of its forks or on Friendica or one of its descendants, or unless you want to quote something outside the Fediverse, screenshots are the way to go.
That's also because next to everyone on Mastodon is on a phone. And copy-pasting text from e.g. the Twitter app to whatever Mastodon app you use and copy-pasting the URL of e.g. the tweet into that Mastodon app is very inconvenient because copy-paste is a pain on a phone with no separate pointing device and no hardware keyboard.
Add to this that Mastodon can't only not "quote-toot", it can't quote either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Use as many as you need. But don't abuse them. For example, there are people who slap #Mastodon on posts that aren't even about Mastodon or #Fediverse on posts that aren't about the Fediverse in general, just to try and increase their range. This is bad behaviour, this is what's counterproductive, and it's actually often being sanctioned.
Still, there shouldn't be an upper limit. Some Fediverse users have filters that are triggered by hashtags and either remove posts from their timelines or put them behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this is actually the default, and it has been since even before Mastodon existed, and neither of them has a dedicated "content warning" text field. Also, at least on the latter two projects, there is no means whatsoever to add a Mastodon-style content warning to a comment like this.
Thus, at least some users, especially from these three projects (although (streams) isn't a project), add hashtags for the purpose of triggering filters. As you'll see at the bottom of this comment, it'll cause a whole lot of hashtags for the standards of someone who's used to Twitter. But they're deeply ingrained in the culture of certain non-Mastodon projects. And they're useful for at least some Mastodon users.
So any reply you may get that tells you that nobody in the whole Fediverse can possibly want more than four or eight hashtags is simply false. Some don't want more than that. Others depend on them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta Okay, this one is going to be long. Don't let the length and the text formatting disturb you. That's how we do things over here on Hubzilla, and I'm glad Mastodon can at least display them now.
So let's see...
First of all, it's unusual to have multiple description of an image in the alt-text. I'd say it's redundant, but I myself give short descriptions in the alt-text and then much longer ones than yours in the post text body which the alt-text also references.
Pick only one. For technically speaking, alt-text is not a synonym for a short description. Alt-text is the whole thing you create when pasting the AI output into that text field for images. It's what stands in for the image when you can't see the image for whichever reason, and it's all of it.
And don't add "alt-text" to alt-text.
Next, please excuse the pun, but it looks like you put blind faith into AI, and you copy-paste its output into your alt-texts unread, not to mention unredacted.
In the description of the fourth image you've linked, it really goes to show that whatever AI you use (ChatGPT for detailed image descriptions) doesn't even recognise what's in the lower picture. It doesn't get the picture, so it doesn't get the meme, so it fails to explain the meme.
I would definitely have added the information that the lower picture shows Christopher Lloyd as Doctor Emmett L. Brown in the final showdown scene of the 1985 film Back To The Future, trying to reconnect the lightning conductor cable which is about to channel the lightning bolt that shall damage the clock on Hill Valley's town hall into the DeLorean time machine with Marty McFly inside and use the energy to send him back into his time.
That is, in practice, I would have chosen a different wording and added another bit more of information. But without it, the image description is half-useless because it doesn't mention what the meme references and hints at.
Yes, it's easier and more convenient to believe in perfect fire-and-forget recognition, identification, description and explanation of any image imaginable by AI. But if you really want your image descriptions to be informative and, above all, correct, read them. And redact them. Or, better yet, write them yourself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI
Both and have similar OpenStreetMap add-ons, but they don't have anything like Rendez-vous.
Granted, it all dates back to before Mastodon, so it isn't geared towards working with Mastodon. Also, it isn't built against ActivityPub primarily but against DFRN (Friendica), Zot6 (Mastodon) and Nomad ((streams)). But maybe it's worth checking out.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenStreetMap (streams) has always been a fully-fledged Fediverse server application capable of working as a decentralised social network, only that it has been slimmed down in extra features in comparison to Hubzilla to be easier to maintain. Its federation is reduced to Nomad, Zot6 and ActivityPub, and apps like Calendar, Articles, Webpages and Wiki are gone, too, while it got to keep WebDAV, CardDAV and now-headless CalDAV. On the other hand, its ActivityPub connectivity has been improved.
Its original intention was not to be built into other projects, but other projects to be built around/on top of it by developing add-ons for it and giving it a name. (streams) itself doesn't have a name, doesn't have a brand, doesn't have a logo and isn't actually even a project, only a software repository. But if you take what's in that software repository and install it on a Web server, you still get something that blows Friendica out of the water in all but cross-protocol federation, calendar and maybe fancy UI elements.
Its main "issues", apart from not handling anything like Mastodon either, are that it has precious few public instances with open sign-up, and that its very concept (it doesn't have a unique identifier for its instances, and it's being kept away from all instance listing websites) makes its instances next to impossible to find unless you already know one.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
"a full, nomadic-identity-style move from Mastodon to anywhere is technically impossible"
It really isn't. Moving your social graph is built in. The lack of content portability is a problem, but there's tool now that helps with that
It still isn't nomadic identity style.
Imagine you move from foo.social to bar.social. Your whole account, just without the instance-specific login credentials, moves along with you. Including all your posts.
Now it comes: Your posts don't re-appear on everyone's timelines as new, unread posts as they normally would. They don't appear as read double posts either. Your whole backlog of existing posts on everyone's timelines all over the Fediverse are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social as the author.
Also, nobody has to re-follow you. All your followers and all your followed are being automatically re-assigned from tokyo0foo.social to tokyo0bar.social, too, without having to do anything themselves.
Also, your account on foo.social is completely wiped and ceases to exist.
Afterwards, everything looks like you've always been on bar.social.
That would be nomadic identity style.
"99% of all Fediverse newbies are railroaded to Mastodon without being told what else there is in the Fediverse"
That's not really what happens, though. No one is strong-arming people to join Mastodon. It's just the one that's caught attention.
That's because the main gateway into the Fediverse is not or . It's rather or which nudges everyone to mastodon.social, too. Or for Japanese users, it's .
Justifiedly so. If you tell people who want to get away from Musk that they first have to choose one out of dozens of Fediverse projects and then one out of dozens or hundreds or thousands of instances without even knowing what either is, they'll nope out because that's way too complicated.
If you railroad them to mastodon.social and leave them to figure out everything themselves when they're ready for it, they'll bite because that's easy enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
The rest of your argument is self-perpetuating people use Mastodon because they hear about it, and they don't want to move, so they just wait for it to change
Yes, because moving is so inconvenient. And a full, nomadic-identity-style move from Mastodon to anywhere is technically impossible. But many won't do less than that.
So more and more people use Mastodon even though they hate it
Yes, because 99% of all Fediverse newbies are railroaded to Mastodon without being told what else there is in the Fediverse because that'd just confuse them. People usually take three to six months to even only discover that there are alternatives to Mastodon in the Fediverse, at which point they've fully settled into Mastodon.
The newbies don't hate Mastodon for not being as powerful as e.g. Sharkey. They love it for not being . And they've never even heard of Sharkey at that point, so they can't and won't compare Mastodon to Sharkey.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Three reasons.
One, you can't move from Mastodon to any other Fediverse project with all your content, all your posts, all your settings, all your connections just like so, just like you can move from Hubzilla to (streams).
Two, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project with full, extensive, guaranteed iOS app support. Most "Fediverse" apps are built against Mastodon first and foremost or against Mastodon only. And almost everyone on Mastodon is on phones, mostly iPhones.
Three, coming from Twitter and adapting to Mastodon was hard enough already, and some still haven't recovered from that. You can't expect them to move and learn something new again.
And thus, everyone stays on Mastodon, waiting for features that are perfectly standard pretty much everywhere else to be introduced to their home instance.
And I'm not even counting those who aren't aware what the rest of the Fediverse can do. Or those who simply don't know that there is such a rest of the Fediverse because they think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Hundreds of doctors to sue NHS because government PPE failings gave them Long Covid Vox Political
Health Service Protective Equipment #19 Sivier Political
"Walled garden metaverse" sounds like an oxymoron. If it runs entirely on the servers of one company and has no public API or any way to interact with users from outside a proprietary ecosystem, then what's really "metaverse" about it
Well, everyone and their dog believes that Zuckerberg's virtual worlds platform is officially named "The Metaverse". ("Metaverse" and "The Metaverse" are registered trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.") And both mainstream media and tech media spew out the same non-sense. The only exceptions are tech media specialising in virtual worlds.
Also, as I've already written, Second Life started to officially refer to itself as a "metaverse" in 2022 as a "Hey, we're still here, too, and we're still relevant" publicity stunt. And Second Life has always been a commercial walled garden.
Its API is only public insofar as it was reverse-engineered from the source code of the official viewer after the latter was made open-source in 2006. And that's only a viewer API, a client API, that's used to develop third-party viewers. "Compatibility" with other virtual worlds Well, there's OpenSim which was then built against the other side of the same API and the already existing third-party Second Life viewers and launched in 2007. But while it uses largely the same API and the same formats and the same standards, and while it's decentralised and federated within itself, it can't connect to Second Life. Even the 2008 "Six Lindens manage to teleport from Second Life to OpenSim" publicity stunt was bogus and faked.
I think I might write an article about the latter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #VirtualWorlds #Meta #MetaMeta #Horizons #Secondlife #Metaverse
- "The Metaverse". Actually named Horizons. Get that into your heads, dammit. And yes, I'm talking about Meta's worlds.
- Cryptobros' attempted get-rich-quick schemes that imply that "the Metaverse" inevitably requires a blockchain, a cryptocurrency (usually either Dogecoin or Etherium or something running on Etherium's blockchain) and expensive NFTs for everything including land. Not seldomly buggy as hell because in-world experience doesn't earn the world owners any money.
- More or less failed attempts by other huge gigacorporations to launch their own monolithic walled garden metaverses for as many use-cases as imaginable. Failed because they came too late.
- The industrial metaverse which is still only a vague idea and probably another buzzword like "the cloud" and "the blockchain".
- Second Life which has slapped the term "metaverse" onto itself in 2022, trying to stay relevant in spite of stagnating user numbers and showing the world it's still around. This actually had even less of an effect than the comparisons between Horizons' simplistic avatars and Second Life's near-photo-realistic avatars and its 20th birthday PR campaign last year.
- Roblox, VRchat, Minecraft etc. They don't even need to refer to themselves as "metaverses" because they're so popular with kids that not much more publicity is necessary.
- which is as decentralised as Decentraland implies to be but isn't. It has been using the term "metaverse" regularly since 2007, the year it was launched. But as it doesn't make a fuss about it, nobody outside its own community knows.
- ThirdRoom which was one of the first FLOSS virtual worlds to work in a standard Web browser rather than requiring a specialised client. Its future is unclear because all three devs are on an indefinite hiatus.
- Vircadia, a HighFidelity fork, and Overte, a Vircadia fork, both trying to build the decentralised next-generation open-source metaverses with some interesting ideas, but neither having a significant community, and both being every bit as obscure and unknown as OpenSim.
- The proposed decentralised, standardised, open metaverse for everyone. Which might not even come because the virtual worlds hype of 2020 is over for obvious reasons, and whoever else would be interested in it is probably busy in other virtual worlds already.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #VirtualWorlds #Meta #MetaMeta #Horizons #SecondLife #OpenSimulator #Decentraland #Roblox #VRchat #ThirdRoom #Vircadia #Overte #TheMetaverse #Metaverse
this guy, Im telling you
How to destroy the essential tools of our decentralized setup and there for the #fediVerse:
...where "Fediverse" is synonymous for "Mastodon", I guess.
* don't boost
I can't boost. Hubzilla doesn't have that feature. Hubzilla "quote-tweets" instead. It has done so since before there was Mastodon. You don't want me to do that instead, do you
* don't use #hashTags
Okay, I can do that. But from your typical Mastodon and formerly Twitter user's point of view, I guess I use way too many because I also use them to trigger filters. So I use a whole lot of them.
* don't follow #hashTags
Hubzilla can't follow hashtags either.
* don't follow groups a.gup.pe
* don't post to groups a.gup.pe
First of all, there isn't a single Guppe group that even remotely covers the primary topic of this channel. There is a Lemmy community for that topic, though, and I'm connected to it.
Besides, I'm connected to various Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) forums/groups which blow gup.pe clean out of the water feature-wise.
* don't read, understand or follow #fediTips
Right, I don't read them. Because they're all so Mastodon-centric it hurts. Almost none of them can be sensibly carried over to here.
Not to mention the edge-cases I have to deal with that FediTips don't cover, for example when it comes to describing images. I don't have to put everything into the alt-text. I don't have a 500-character limit that prevents me from describing stuff in the post text body and forces me to use only the alt-text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #NotOnlyMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediverseIsNotMastodon
Rory McIlroy Vs Micah Morris (Long Drive Contest)
If people actually let you get away with it... I mean, I expect some fundamentalists on Mastodon to demand a full image description in alt-text, no matter how, no matter what, full stop.I almost always put my image descriptions into the post text body for two reasons. One, they contain explanations and other information neither available in the actual post text nor for sighted people in the image itself. Two, they're way too long. They exceed 1,500 characters multiple times, sometimes multiple dozen times. I don't have local character limits to worry about, but at least Mastodon, Misskey and all their forks chop alt-text over 1,500 characters off at the 1,500-character mark.
In addition, I always mention in alt-text where exactly this image description can be found. Not only in the post text body, but I add stuff like "above the image and hidden behind a content warning if you're viewing this post on Mastodon and right below this image if you're viewing this post on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams)".
More recently, however, I started adding a short description of the image to the alt-text. It actually doesn't even begin to describe the actual contents of the image. It's only there to satisfy the "alt-text must describe the image or else" crowd. I may have alt-texts well beyond the 850-characters mark nonetheless.
And still, I think the only reason why nobody complains about the lack of image description in my alt-texts is because too many Mastodon users or entire instances have muted or blocked me for not acting "Mastodon-like" enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Weil es zu fast allen Themen Leute gibt, die sich darber aufregen, da die nicht hinter einer CW versteckt werden. Ja, auch Katzenbilder (CW: cats).
Deswegen bin ich dafr, da Mastodon mal den umgekehrten Weg geht. Zur Abwechslung mal nicht dem ganzen Fediverse seine eigene Kultur aufzwingt, die geprgt ist durch technisch ungerechtfertigte Beschrnkungen, Neuerfinden von Rdern und Walled-Garden-Denken. Statt dessen mal was nicht nur technisch, sondern vor allem in seine Kultur bernimmt, was im Fediverse vor Mastodon der Standard war:
Content Warnings aus Filtern. Automatisch generiert fr jeden Leser individuell.
Das kann Mastodon auch, und zwar seit Version 4.0, also seit letztem Jahr. Nur nutzt das keiner, und zwar aus einer ganzen Reihe an Grnden:
- Die Urgesteine und die Nutzer der ersten drei Migrationswellen (Februar 2022, November 2022, Mrz 2023) sind im Kopf immer noch auf anderen Mastodon-Versionen und haben von diesem Feature noch nichts gehrt.
- Newbies sind noch nicht so weit.
- Twitter hat sowas auch nicht, also kennt man das gar nicht. Vor allem nicht, wenn man Mastodon stur weiter wie Twitter benutzt.
- Fr technisch Unbedarfte sind die Filter viel zu kompliziert zu bedienen.
- Fr Mobilnutzer, also geschtzte 98% der heutigen Mastodon-Nutzer, sind sie unbedienbar. Ich glaube, keine einzige Smartphone-App hat Filtersteuerung eingebaut, also braucht es die Weboberflche. Und da gehen die meisten Mobilnutzer nie hin.
- Was ntzt es, Filter zu haben, wenn die Leute zu faul sind, Keywords oder Hashtags in ihre Posts einzubauen, die die Filter auslsen wrden
Erschwerend kommt hinzu: Viele Projekte, die nach Mastodon als Alternativen zu Mastodon gestartet wurden, wurden nicht nur auf Mastodons Technik, sondern auch auf Mastodons Kultur zugeschnitten. Entweder haben die gar keine Filter, oder die haben bis heute keine Mglichkeit, per Filter CWs zu generieren.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta Find the latitdue and longitude of any place Okay, here's a bit more. And I'm trying to write this from a Mastodon point of view, but as someone who has got experience outside of Mastodon.
If you're on Mastodon which you probably are, get used to the lingo.
- (Twitter) tweet = (Mastodon) toot or post
- (Twitter) retweet = (Mastodon) boost
- (Twitter) like = (Mastodon) fave
This may come as a surprise, but the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are many other projects in the Fediverse which are connected to Mastodon. Some of them have actually already been around before Mastodon. And they have features that Mastodon doesn't have. So don't freak out if you see a post with over 500 characters. Or with italics. Or with bold type. Or with a
code block. Or using the content warning for a summary. Or with a quote. Or with a "quote-tweet". Outside of Mastodon, all this is standard and perfectly normal. Get used to it.Use content warnings (CW) to make browsing the #Fediverse safer for all.
Double your content warnings with hashtags. Some projects in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon use text filters to automatically generate individual content warnings for those who need them. And Mastodon can do that, too, so even some Mastodon users do it.
If a post with content that you may deem sensitive has only got these hashtags but no actual content warning, this is not necessarily due to ill intent or neglect. Some Fediverse projects outside of Mastodon can't do content warnings the Mastodon way. Hubzilla can only do them in first posts, but not in replies. On Friendica, they're generally very difficult to do. So don't immediately call for moderation.
Use #AltText on *all* your pictures! Visually impaired people like memes too.
Actually describe your images in alt-text. And do only that. No hashtags in alt-text. No links in alt-text. No SEO keyword spamming in alt-text.
If there's text in your picture, transcribe it in alt-text word by word.
You can mute, block, and/or report people, depending on the severity of their actions. That said, most people here are pretty cool, so give 'em a chance unless they're being a willful ass-hat.
Don't forget: Different instances have different rules. So don't report someone on another instance for not adding a content warning that's mandatory on your instance but not on theirs or the like. And don't forget either: Different projects have different capabilities and different cultures of using them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #Hashtag #Hashtags #AltText
Anfangs schrieb ich lange Aufstze wie in der Schule. Dann meldete sich mal ein Blinder und meinte, allzu ausfhrliche Beschreibungen, seien gar nicht so erwnscht: Eigentlich klar: Whrend die Sehenden das mit einem Blick erfassen, mssen Blinde den ganzen Text sich vorlesen lassen. Am schwierigsten finde ich zu erkennen, was einem Blinden ntzt uns was nicht.
Da gibt es leider keinen wie auch immer gearteten Konsens, auch wenn einige behaupten, den gbe es. Genau wie mit der Lnge und Ausfhrlichkeit von Bildbeschreibungen.
Die einen Blinden wollen Bildbeschreibungen gern kurz und prgnant. Die anderen wollen sie ausfhrlicher. Z. B. lassen sie sich nicht damit abspeisen, da du Elemente in einem Bild erwhnst, sondern sie wollen auch wissen, wie das alles jeweils aussieht.
Wenn du jegliche Bildbeschreibung in den Alt-Text packst, bringt das fr Blinde noch einen weiteren Nachteil mit sich: Screenreader knnen Alt-Text nicht navigieren. Das heit, die knnen nicht innerhalb des Alt-Text an eine bestimmte Stelle zurckspringen, sondern nur wieder ganz zum Anfang, um dann alles wieder von vorne durchzurattern.
Das ist einer von diversen Grnden, warum ich z. B. meine ausfhrlichen Bildbeschreibungen immer in den Post selbst packe. Ein anderer ist, weil sie meistens weit lnger als 1500 Zeichen werden, aber zumindest Mastodon, Misskey und die Forkeys schneiden Alt-Text an der 1500-Zeichen-Marke hart ab.
Allerdings poste ich im allgemeinen Bilder zu einem sehr obskuren Nischenthema. Die meisten Leute brauchen sehr, sehr viel Erklrung, um die Bilder zu verstehen. Und gerade meine eigenen Bilder sind manchmal ziemlich komplex, auch wenn ich versuche, das zu vermeiden.
Wie gut meine Beschreibungen ankommen, wei ich nicht. Ich habe bisher mehr Bilder beschrieben als Feedback dafr bekommen, und zwar inklusive Feedback von Leuten, denen ich ausdrcklich meine Bilderposts als Beispiele fr lange, detaillierte Bildbeschreibungen gezeigt habe. Ungefragtes Feedback hatte ich bisher nur einmal, auch wenn das positiv war.
Wer noch nie "rot" gesehen hat fngt sich mit rotem Kleid wohl eher wenig an.
Nicht jeder, der blind ist, wurde blind geboren. Wer irgendwann in seinem Leben erblindet ist, hat frher mal Farben gesehen, also auch einen Begriff von Farben.
Auerdem ntzen Bildbeschreibungen nicht nur Blinden, sondern auch Sehenden, die mieses Internet haben, wo die Bilder berhaupt nicht laden.
Ich wrde Farben immer erwhnen.
Gibt es diesbezglich eine Anleitung/FAQ
Die meisten, die es gibt, sind nur fr professionelle/kommerzielle statische Websites oder vielleicht noch professionelle/kommerzielle klassische HTML-Blogs. Die meisten, die Social Media behandeln, sind nur fr kommerzielle Social Media, also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn usw. Und die paar, die tatschlich das Fediverse behandeln, sind nur fr ganz normales Vanilla-Mastodon und gehen felsenfest davon aus, da Posts nicht lnger sein knnen als 500 Zeichen.
Die Sonderflle "Zeichenlimit deutlich ber 500 Zeichen" und "Social-Media-Post mit Bild, das viel Beschreibung und/oder Erklrung braucht", sind noch nie in so einer Anleitung abgedeckt worden.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch "MIA" means "missing in action".
I don't know all the details, just so much: The last time Kainoa was seen contributing to the Firefish repository was in June or July. Around that time, I guess, was also the last time that Kainoa was seen taking care of firefish.social. Kainoa is still alive and well and has posted something not long ago. Could be busy, nobody knows.
Anyways, fast-forward to December, 2023/January, 2024. Due to literally no maintenance whatsoever because the only admin hasn't shown up in a while, firefish.social has become entirely unresponsive. Nothing works anymore.
Also, Firefish is badly lagging behind Misskey's development. Not only no new features, but also no bug fixes, no security fixes, no nothing.
So the Firefish community took matters into their own hands. Just to mention three new forks:
- Iceshrimp was forked from Firefish, but pretty much immediately rebased to Misskey because Firefish was hopelessly outdated. It is currently being rewritten in C#.
- Sharkey was forked directly from Misskey, probably because Firefish's codebase would have needed too much maintenance. But some Firefish features shall be ported to Sharkey.
- Catodon was forked from Misskey as well, but with a different focus. Whereas Sharkey's goal is to become a Firefish replacement that has never been Firefish in the first place, having features that Misskey doesn't have while still keeping that typical Japanese style, Catodon is being tailored for Western tastes and simplified to Mastodon's level. Whether that only affects the UI or typical Misskey/Forkey features being cut, I don't know.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon
Todays playlist is long songs. Everybody likes sagas:
This could work, and it could be a first step away from the oft-criticised "content warning field" and towards reader-side text filters which, by the way, have been in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon itself.Web interfaces could get switches like these, too, and ideally, admins could add their own switches, depending on the target audience of an instance. Ideally, apps could recognise these custom, instance-specific switches and add them to their UI.
On the posters' side, it'd still require discipline because they'd have to add appropriate hashtags, and these hashtags would have to be standardised, otherwise each filter would have to cover each trigger with half a dozen different hashtags per language or so. Dedicated apps could assist in this by adding checkboxes to the post editor which have the app automatically add appropriate standard hashtags for certain topics to the "hashtag line" at the end.
This could actually start in apps without breaking standards, and it could nudge Mastodon itself into adding it to its Web UI. In fact, I can see at least some Forkeys being quicker at introducing it.
The best part: This would move the Fediverse away from something Mastodon-specific and towards something more standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta
To be honest, I'm even feeling like maybe this shouldn't be a feature, just so the Twitter-refugees don't use it, because then they will think that that is somehow what's protecting them from harassment, and not the fact that this isn't Twitter.
Even if Mastodon won't introduce the creation of quote-posts, Misskey, the various Forkeys (Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon etc. etc.), Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can quote-post just about any Mastodon toot out there with no resistance whatsoever. They always could, even when Mastodon wasn't able to display quote-posts halfway appropriately.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta To be fair, this doesn't apply to all the Fediverse. Mastodon, yes, but not the entire Fediverse.
I dare say there are two projects which handle this marvellously: from 2015 and a fork of a fork... by Hubzilla's own creator, commonly referred to as while technically being nameless. While both can "talk ActivityPub", they are based on different protocols which give them a feature that Bluesky tries hard to make everyone believe that they're working on inventing: .
First of all, Hubzilla and (streams) don't put your Fediverse identity directly into your account. Your account only grants you access. Your identity, your connections, your posts, your settings, your content etc. etc., all that resides in a , a kind of container. You can have multiple channels on one account, so you can also have fully separate identites on the same instance without having to log out and back in.
Nomadic identity itself can do two things. One, it takes care of moving a channel to another instance. And I mean actually moving it, not creating a dumb copy and leaving a dead account behind.
Two, and this is the actual killer feature, it can clone your channel to another instance. Again, not create a dumb copy. The clone is always synchronised with the original and vice versa. If one goes down, you've got the other readily at hand, so you're even safe from spontaneous shutdowns. And you can have more than one clone for each one of your channels.
Basically, moving is cloning light. Moving creates a synchronised clone, declares the clone the new main and the old main a clone, then deletes the old-main-gone-clone, and if there aren't any other channels on your old account, deletes that account.
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by who also created Hubzilla, now maintains (streams) and, in 2010, had created which was named Friendika back in 2011. Public Friendika nodes closing down had become a serious issue already, regardless of whether the shutdown was announced or came out of the blue. Early on, whenever this happened, all users on the node lost everything and had to start over from scratch.
Friendika eventually introduced moving from node to node by exporting and importing your account, but real resilience would have been different. Thus, nomadic identity was conceived. The Zot protocol was written around it because it couldn't be introduced to Friendika's DFRN protocol. In 2012, Friendica was forked and its backend re-written against Zot, becoming the Red Matrix, direct precursor of 2015's Hubzilla.
In a perfect Fediverse, everything would feature nomadic identity. But as it stands now, everything that isn't these two projects doesn't even understand nomadic identity and is easily confused by nomadic moves or someone posting from their clone instead of their main.
Unfortunately, nothing will change about this anytime soon. Mike Macgirvin has already proposed extensions for ActivityPub that'd introduce nomadic identity, albeit not in exactly the same fashion as on Hubzilla and (streams), but probably somewhat compatible. However, they have all been rejected.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity This might be a case of Chinese whispers.
What really increases accessibility when it comes to hashtags is how they're written if they consist of multiple words.
Always write multiple-word hashtags in "camelCase" (every word after the first one starts with a capital letter) or, better yet, "PascalCase" (every word starts with a capital letter). Screen readers used by blind or visually impaired users can't tell with certainty otherwise where a word ends and the next one starts.
Also, stop using Mastodon like Twitter and put all hashtags at the end of the post instead of into the text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Hashtag #Hashtags #Accessibility #A11y #camelCase #PascalCase
I consider this a reasonable compromise to be making with the people who are concerned about Quote-Responses, most of which seems to just be Twitter users, who are used to in environment which actively encourages using the feature, which is common on many websites, as a method of harassment, which is encouraged on Twitter but would be grounds for an instant ban on mainstream Fedi.
What do you mean would cause an instant ban The use of quote-posts for harassment or the use of quote-posts in general
I don't know if you've read the whole thread. I've already posted in it. If not: Lots of Fediverse projects have quote-posts regularly implemented. Two of them, Friendica and Hubzilla, have had them before Mastodon even existed, and it was Mastodon which federated itself with them and not the other way around. They call them "shared posts" and use them for the same purpose as Mastodon uses boosts: to forward posts.
They also both had quotes like the one above since their respective inception.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Have there ever been any specific promises how ease-of-use could be improved
I can't see anything that could be done without cutting features and betraying the Fediverse's principles except everything from Mastodon to Hajkey mimicking Twitter's default immediately-pre-Musk UI/UX. And maybe railroading newbies even harder by not even telling them that Mastodon is decentralised and taking instance selection away entirely and an AI that increases the mollycoddling by hiding Mastodon's decentrality and all contents coming in from the rest of the Fediverse until it decides the user is "ready".
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Well, is writing about static websites and long-form blogs and not about the Fediverse, especially not about Mastodon.
On Mastodon very specifically, everything that describes and/or explains an image always goes into the alt-text. Unlike all other *blogging projects in the Fediverse, Mastodon with its tiny character limit doesn't leave you much of a choice. So people got used to it and see it as a set-in-stone Fediverse standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #Caption #Captions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Man darf sich aber nie der Illusion hingeben, da KI jedes, aber auch jedes Bild auf Anhieb perfekt akkurat und informativ beschreiben kann.
Ich will's mal so sagen: Einfache Katzenbilder bekommt KI beschrieben. Fr reine Text-Screenshots braucht es keine KI, da reicht OCR.
Aber wenn die Bilder a) hochkomplex sind, b) extrem nischiges Unbekanntes zeigen und c) gerade deshalb sehr detailliert beschrieben und umfassend erklrt werden mssen, damit das Publikum sie versteht, und wenn an die Beschreibungen hohe Ansprche gestellt werden, das wird KI nie so gut hinbekommen wie ein entsprechend kompetenter Mensch.
Generell sollte man KI-Beschreibungen nie aus Bequemlichkeit ungesehen copy-pasten, sondern immer gucken, ob das Geschriebene so stimmt, und gegebenenfalls hndisch nachbessern.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #KI #AltText #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen So you're finally no longer allowed to reply to a post that was written neither by a follower nor in response to a follower
Or, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), to a post that wasn't started by one of your followers because these three don't serve you single comments from within threads which didn't appear on your stream from the very beginning
Well, that makes showing Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon much more difficult. Or that Mastodon's "rules" for how and where to describe images are not necessarily set in stone for the whole Fediverse because everything that isn't Mastodon doesn't have Mastodon's limitations.
Or that the first time the term "Metaverse" was used for an actual, real 3-D virtual world was not in 2021 by Zuckerberg for something he planned, but in 2007 for something that already existed and still exists.
I'd wonder if you're already a reply guy if you reply to a post in your local or federated timeline. But I don't have either.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostBisher wei man wenig ber Long Covid bei Kindern und ob impfen dagegen hilft. Daten von ber einer Million Kindern und Jugendlichen zeigen nun moderaten Schutz durch die Impfung.
"The Metaverse" as in new 3-D virtual world projects of the 2020s in general
Or "The Metaverse" as in...
"Metaverse" and "The Metaverse" are registered trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.
...as in "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" as in "Facebook's Metaverse" as in "Meta's Metaverse" as in Horizons
Stop calling it "The Metaverse" already!
Can everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Oh, and by the way, a finding of mine for those who still think Zuck was the first to slap "Metaverse" on an actual real 3-D world:
"Metaverse". Used in OpenSim since 2007.
Something for those who think Mark Zuckerberg has invented the term "Metaverse" in 2021.
, the oldest grid (est. 2007), is referring to itself as "The Open Source Metaverse". Guess what It has taken over that slogan from OpenSim itself, and .
Metropolis, the first German grid (est. 2008), boldly used the full name "Metropolis Metaversum" until it was officially shut down in summer 2022. .
Since I started out in Metropolis on April 30th, 2020, I was in something called Metaverse almost a year and a half before Zuckerberg used that term.
Another fun fact: The virtual worlds/virtual reality news site has named its OpenSim category "" as early as 2010.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Metropolis #OSgrid
For the record: Yes, I know it was Neal Stephenson who coined that term in 1991 already.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
Part of the secondary topic of this channel is showing a very-much-non-Mastodon view on the Fediverse to the Fedizens out there. Lots of fresh Twitter-to-Mastodon converts started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because I was one of the few to explain the Fediverse outside Mastodon to Mastodon users.
This doesn't work anymore if my posts don't reach their recipients anymore.
And besides, triggering Mastodon users with non-Mastodon behaviour can have nasty side-effects. Yeah, some mute you. Some block you. Often even without also unfollowing you. Some complain to you about it and demand you don't use any features of your instance that vanilla Mastodon 3.x didn't support yet.
But then there are those who try to complain to your instance admin about you and try to have you sanctioned. Or they have their instance admins/mods complain to your instance admin about you. And this can escalate.
A Hubzilla admin would laugh that off. Most Hubzilla hubs don't even have rules, and the rules of any one Mastodon instance don't apply here either.
But in most cases, the complaints never reach their recipients. See, the average Mastodon user doesn't know anything about Hubzilla. So they try to complain the same ways as they would within Mastodon.
They use Mastodon's report feature, but Hubzilla doesn't have it implemented. They try to send your admin a DM, but finding the admin of your hub doesn't work like finding the admin of a Mastodon instance, and oftentimes, the admin's channel isn't linked anywhere at all. They publicly complain about you with a Mastodon admin hashtag, hoping that your admin will read it. But you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla, and even if you could, why would a Hubzilla admin follow a Mastodon-specific hashtag
So the admin and the "moderation" of your hub doesn't react. Conclusion for a Mastodon user who only knows Mastodon: Your instance is basically unmoderated. And what does Mastodon do with an unmoderated instance whose users misbehave for any definition of that word Block it. Like, the whole instance.
One Hubzilla user misbehaving in the eyes of Mastodon users can cause the whole hub to be blocked on thousands of Mastodon instances, maybe including mastodon.social.
Now you could say I should flip the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse the bird and turn Pubcrawl off for good. If I did that, I could just as well delete the whole channel because it'd lose its very purpose.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta The biggest cultural difference based on server software has to be between Mastodon on the one hand and the Mike Macgirvin creations Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other hand.
Not only do they have vastly different user bases, but they developed independently from one another. When the Mastodon culture developed, those who shaped it didn't even know the other side, so they couldn't adopt any of its culture.
Said other side's culture dates back to 2010 when Friendica was launched as Mistpark, and since that was almost six years before Mastodon, it couldn't be inspired by Mastodon's culture either.
Add to that that these respective cultures are greatly shaped by technical features and limitations or the lack thereof.
Mastodon's culture is largely built around its 500-character limit which is ample for your typical phone-wielding Mastodon user. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined character limit whatsoever, and its target audience is largely on desktop or laptop computers, often running Linux, with large screens and full-size hardware keyboards.
So it's the most normal thing in the world for them to write in one post as much as they want while Mastodon users debate whether threads are good, or you should always limit yourself to 500 characters or less.
Also, alt-text. Mastodon has many disabled users, including blind or visually-impaired users. And it has a dedicated alt-text field for each image. On top of that, it offers 1,500 characters for each alt-text which, in connection with the 500-character limit for toots, has people write detailed image descriptions and explanations and put them into the alt-text. That's often information that doesn't even belong in alt-text, but there's no room for it elsewhere.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have unlimited room, so putting stuff into alt-text because the post text is too limited seems ridiculous. But they don't have a vocal disabled community, so there's little interest in accessibility. And neither of them has a dedicated alt-text field. Alt-text is supported, but it has to be manually grafted into the image-embedding code in the post. And there's no official documentation for that, I think not even for Friendica which is the only one out of the three with actually useful end-user documentation.
It's similar with content warnings. On Mastodon, they're put into the repurposed summary field, and next to nobody knows that it's a repurposed summary field rather than invented for content warnings from scratch. So since Mastodon has a content warning field, writer-side content warnings are huge, but also cause for drama.
Mastodon 4.0 has introduced filters that can create reader-side content warnings, but hardly anyone uses them, even fewer people support them with keywords or hashtags, many don't even know this feature exists, and it's generally ignored because it's un-Mastodon.
The Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) complex doesn't have a content warning field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a summary field labelled as such. Friendica doesn't even have that it uses a pair of BBcode tags for that.
And within their own ecosystem, they don't even need it. They've got the "NSFW app" instead, an over-one-decade-old, optional, simple-as-anything substring filter that automatically hides entire posts with all media and everything behind content warnings if it finds one of the entered keywords or hashtags.
So they can't understand Mastodon's commotion about content warnings, and Mastodon users can't understand why they don't add Mastodon-style content warnings.
And then there are all the things that were or are being debated on Mastodon and whether or not it should introduce them. Especially the second-wave Twitter refugees are often staunchly against them.
Full-text search and quote-tweets are being actively used on Twitter to track down and harass members of minorities who have fled to Mastodon. Of course, they don't want Mastodon to introduce either. That is, in the case of full-text search, Mastodon has found a solution, but one that doesn't really federate to the rest of the Fediverse.
Quotes and text formatting are seen as bad, too. Many don't know quotes because Twitter doesn't have them, and so they think quotes could be used as tools of harassment. And both are seen as making Mastodon feel less like Mastodon and more complicated.
Friendica and Hubzilla had all this before there was Mastodon, and (streams) inherited it from its long line of ancestors. Their users have gotten so used to having all this that they don't understand what the problems should be, also because they're so detached from Mastodon's culture. So they keep on using these features unashamedly, even around Mastodon users.
Some differences are rather simple. Take mentions, for example. Friendica has always used long names for mentions, as does its offspring. Mastodon users may find that freaky. Meanwhile, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) users may find Mastodon's mentions cryptic because they use the short name. But even they matter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseCulture #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoost #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares #TextFormatting #FullTextSearchScott M. Stolz I'm not talking about the occasional, moderate use of stuff that Hubzilla can do that Mastodon can't.
I'm not even only talking about using such stuff all the time and not in moderate amounts.
I'm talking about things like "content warnings" that read, "Summary of the post CW: long (number of characters), stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta, more-stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta." And then forgoing content warnings altogether in replies.
Or having eight and more hashtags at the bottom of a post, some of which look totally weird because they're the same as another one of the hashtags, but with "CW" at the beginning. (I use them to trigger filters. See below.)
Or image posts with alt-text for the images, but the alt-text wastes over 800 characters barely even describing the image and mentioning that the actual detailed image description is in the post itself. WTF, nobody puts image descriptions in the post, they belong into alt-text and nowhere else!
Worse yet: The post is hidden behind a content warning. And the content warning says something about tens of thousands of characters. And then you click/tap the content warning. And then an utter wall of text jumps at you, way longer than 100 toots could ever be, all in one enormous chunk.
Last but not least, my constant jabs at Mastodon, Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, Mastodon culture...
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta You can't "quote-toot" tweets on Mastodon. In fact, you can't "quote-toot" toots on Mastodon. You can't "quote-toot" anything on Mastodon.
So unless you're on Misskey or one of its forks or on Friendica or one of its descendants, or unless you want to quote something outside the Fediverse, screenshots are the way to go.
That's also because next to everyone on Mastodon is on a phone. And copy-pasting text from e.g. the Twitter app to whatever Mastodon app you use and copy-pasting the URL of e.g. the tweet into that Mastodon app is very inconvenient because copy-paste is a pain on a phone with no separate pointing device and no hardware keyboard.
Add to this that Mastodon can't only not "quote-toot", it can't quote either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Maria Ryabushkina
Russian Model
Winner Best Stringkini
Use as many as you need. But don't abuse them. For example, there are people who slap #Mastodon on posts that aren't even about Mastodon or #Fediverse on posts that aren't about the Fediverse in general, just to try and increase their range. This is bad behaviour, this is what's counterproductive, and it's actually often being sanctioned.
Still, there shouldn't be an upper limit. Some Fediverse users have filters that are triggered by hashtags and either remove posts from their timelines or put them behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this is actually the default, and it has been since even before Mastodon existed, and neither of them has a dedicated "content warning" text field. Also, at least on the latter two projects, there is no means whatsoever to add a Mastodon-style content warning to a comment like this.
Thus, at least some users, especially from these three projects (although (streams) isn't a project), add hashtags for the purpose of triggering filters. As you'll see at the bottom of this comment, it'll cause a whole lot of hashtags for the standards of someone who's used to Twitter. But they're deeply ingrained in the culture of certain non-Mastodon projects. And they're useful for at least some Mastodon users.
So any reply you may get that tells you that nobody in the whole Fediverse can possibly want more than four or eight hashtags is simply false. Some don't want more than that. Others depend on them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta Okay, this one is going to be long. Don't let the length and the text formatting disturb you. That's how we do things over here on Hubzilla, and I'm glad Mastodon can at least display them now.
So let's see...
First of all, it's unusual to have multiple description of an image in the alt-text. I'd say it's redundant, but I myself give short descriptions in the alt-text and then much longer ones than yours in the post text body which the alt-text also references.
Pick only one. For technically speaking, alt-text is not a synonym for a short description. Alt-text is the whole thing you create when pasting the AI output into that text field for images. It's what stands in for the image when you can't see the image for whichever reason, and it's all of it.
And don't add "alt-text" to alt-text.
Next, please excuse the pun, but it looks like you put blind faith into AI, and you copy-paste its output into your alt-texts unread, not to mention unredacted.
In the description of the fourth image you've linked, it really goes to show that whatever AI you use (ChatGPT for detailed image descriptions) doesn't even recognise what's in the lower picture. It doesn't get the picture, so it doesn't get the meme, so it fails to explain the meme.
I would definitely have added the information that the lower picture shows Christopher Lloyd as Doctor Emmett L. Brown in the final showdown scene of the 1985 film Back To The Future, trying to reconnect the lightning conductor cable which is about to channel the lightning bolt that shall damage the clock on Hill Valley's town hall into the DeLorean time machine with Marty McFly inside and use the energy to send him back into his time.
That is, in practice, I would have chosen a different wording and added another bit more of information. But without it, the image description is half-useless because it doesn't mention what the meme references and hints at.
Yes, it's easier and more convenient to believe in perfect fire-and-forget recognition, identification, description and explanation of any image imaginable by AI. But if you really want your image descriptions to be informative and, above all, correct, read them. And redact them. Or, better yet, write them yourself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI
Last updated: 2024-01-29
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