Find the latitude of any place.  

I Like Trains. Absolutely stunning work

Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know.

It's true. Mastodon reduces Article-type objects to the title, if there is any, the summary, if there is any, and a link to the original page. It's intentional and by design.
Hubzilla managed to prove it with the 9.0 release several weeks ago. Up until then, Hubzilla posts went out as Note-type objects. The 9.0 release introduced a switch for the entire channel that defaulted to sending Article-type objects and could be switched back to Note-type objects. And all of a sudden, anything that came from Hubzilla was rendered as described above. The Hubzilla community had largely all but forgotten about it. A hotfix disabled the switch and hotwired Hubzilla to Note-type objects until 9.0.1 removed it again.
The actual reason of this behaviour is because Article-type objects tend to be blog posts with all bells and whistles. Text formatting, headlines, horizontal rules and, most importantly, an arbitrary number of images embedded anywhere within the post.
Mastodon, however, is so "original gangsta purist microblogging" that it refused to support any of this up until version 4.0. And even since version 4.0, it can only render the former two.
In other words, if Mastodon tried to render a blog post as-is, it'd fail miserably and botch it big time. Like, rip four of the embedded images out of their embedding, leave them dangling below the post, and throw all images that go beyond these four away altogether because Mastodon can't handle more than four images.
And this mangled rendering of the blog post would literally be the only way that most Mastodon users would experience the post. There wouldn't be a big button that'd take them to the source. There's a button, but stashed away in a pop-up menu that isn't labelled as containing such a button.
The next-best alternative would have been for Mastodon to include full support for everything that can be done with Markdown or HTML or Friendica/Hubzilla's expanded BBcode. But, again, that wouldn't be purist microblogging. That'd be un-Mastodon-like.
So the only alternative left was to not render the post at all and link to the original instead.
The Hubzilla community is fully convinced that Mastodon took this step to flip the bird at Hubzilla.
In order to understand this idea, there are a few things to understand. First: When Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with Hubzilla which had already been there. Both communicated via OpenMicroBlog, the predecessor of OStatus.
Next: Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub in July, 2017, when it wasn't even a W3C standard yet. Mastodon was the second, some two months later. For quite a while, it was just these two.
Finally: We all know how limited Mastodon is. Hubzilla, on the other hand, had inherited its text formatting capabilities from Friendica, and they're immense. If you can do it in a blog post, you can do it in a Hubzilla post.
Only that Mastodon couldn't render any of it.
AFAIK, Hubzilla kept asking Mastodon to implement full HTML rendering for posts so it'd stop mangling posts from Hubzilla and Friendica. Mastodon staunchly refused because that'd go too far beyond purist microblogging and Twitter-mimicking. Same reasoning as for hard-coding the 500-character limit.
Eventually, Mastodon introduced this switch plus the specific handling for Article-type objects. But instead of being a special mode that does have full HTML rendering capabilities as demanded by Hubzilla, it just creates a link to the original.
For Mastodon, it's keepin' it real and sticking to purist microblogging. For Hubzilla, it's a way to spite them and their silly text formatting and image embedding antics. Hubzilla still holds a grudge against Mastodon for this.
But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.

The only way for this to change is if you went to Mastodon's GitHub repository and filed an issue which labels this behaviour as a bug. And if as many other Fediverse projects as possible joined in on the same issue. And if the pressure on Mastodon became so big that they cave in and introduce all rendering capabilities necessary to show a long-form blog post the way it's supposed to look.
Again, Hubzilla has tried it which led to the creation of this phenomenon. Others have tried it, too. And I'm not even sure if a vast alliance of Fediverse devs could change it.
After all, Mastodon is in such a position that it doesn't even have to act. It presents itself to the majority of Fediverse users as the one and only fully-featured Fediverse standard and implies that everything that deviates from it is broken.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #ActivityPub

I Like Trains. Absolutely stunning work from best doggo!

Clover (+):
Delta ():
Xhhy: ():
Wooby ():
Doodzie ():

Find the latitdue and longitude of any place And while Richard MacManus is fantasising over it, Mike Macgirvin is working on literally exactly this right now. The guy who made that still blows Mastodon out of the water, and he did so years before Mastodon.
He invented , one identity on multiple instances of the same Fediverse project, in 2011. He made it reality in 2012. He rolled out the first stable release supporting nomadic identity in 2013. For reference: Mastodon is from 2016.
What Tim Berners-Lee is doing with Solid is nothing else than re-inventing Mike's wheels. Deliberately. And implementing ugly kluges that Mike has never needed.
And now Mike is working on stretching nomadic identity across instance types. And making it work with nothing but ActivityPub and technology he had invented himself years ago. No Solid involved.
Again, he is not fantasising. He is actually working on it, as in he's making progress.
Money quote-posts:
Everything you thought you knew about identity on the fediverse just changed. I'm serious as a heart attack. There's nothing you can do about it except learn how to deal with it. Who are you really It's not at all who you think you are.
In other news, everything you thought you knew about the streams repository also just changed.
What's the streams repository A fediverse server that most of you have never heard of, but it doesn't matter because we've been rocking the fediverse since Eugen was in high school popping zits.
These two events are totally unrelated. Just a coincidence really.
I'll tell you all about it once I assemble everything I know into a long blog post (most likely one for each).
At the moment I'm tying up a few loose ends and then it's off to Bluesfest. Back in a few days.

Mary Mack, dressed in black
Silver buttons all down her back
High to low, tip to toe
She broke a needle and she can't sew
Walkin' the dog
Just a-walkin' the dog
If you don't know how to do it
I'll show you how to walk the dog

(screaming guitar solo)
I understand the information content of that post was a bit sparse. I'll try and give you a high-level summary of the first claim.
You're used to identity on the fediverse being one actor per one server. If you don't like the server, you can move to another.
Some of us have nomadic identity, which is one actor and multiple servers. Same content. Same followers. You don't move servers, they're identical clones. You can post from any of them and all your followers will see the posts and be able to interact with them (assuming they have permission - that's a different topic).
But here's what's coming (the technology is already here):
One actor, multiple servers, multiple server types. Each with the same or potentially different content and the same or different followers.
In other words, if you follow 'clarence', you might suddenly find yourself following clarencepixelfed, clarencepeertube, clarencemastodon (3 instances) and clarencestreams (2 instances). Everywhere that clarence ties to that identity.
Now not all of these may accept your follow request. Because clarence has a say in all of this.  And clarence might post completely different content at each and make it available to completely different audiences. But the content is also completely portable, so it actually could be duplicated across some or all of them. None of this will matter to you, because you're just following clarence and whatever content from whatever instance or project she makes available to you - and even if she moves to another instance of any or all of these projects.
Cheers.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identity #NomadicIdentity

The Daily Picture Theme  

The theme for April 24, 2024 is I participate in a photography challenge on Spoutible, a social media site, A hashtagged theme is posted each day from the account of Daily Picture Theme which describes itself as "The Big Photo Album of Our Community. The theme for today is and it is not an easy assignment. I wasn't sure whether to use "long" as a verb, adjective or name.

It didn't take to make this mushroom soup. (Recipe in Alt Text.)

DailyPictureTheme

If I've understood it correctly, Mike Macgirvin is working on a concept of federated identity that shall go beyond his own 13-year-old concept of nomadic identity.
That is, of course, you'll still need to manually register accounts on all instances that you want to use. But if what Mike is working on actually comes to fruition, you'll be able to clone your identity across different projects instead of only across server instances within Hubzilla or within (streams).
Add OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on on top, another one of Mike's inventions from ca. 2018/2019, and you'll get close to what you want.
The major caveat is that this won't be easy to implement for projects that aren't nomadic already. I guess this will come with the requirement to adopt the same concept of channels as identity containers as Hubzilla and (streams). And I estimate the chances that Mastodon will implement it to be close to zero.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #OpenWebAuth #NomadicIdentity Also, if it weren't for notorious reply guys on Friendica and Hubzilla, thousands upon thousands more Mastodon users who have joined around November 2022 would believe the Fediverse is only Mastodon still today.
If you're living in a Mastodon-only bubble in which nobody else is aware of a Fediverse outside of Mastodon, the only ones who can tell you otherwise are reply guys on non-Mastodon instances with their unsolicited comments. They've got that information that nobody in your bubble has.
And , if it weren't for me reply-guying you, you'd still believe that an 1,500-character alt-text is the absolute pinnacle of long and detailed image descriptions because nothing could possibly exist beyond it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ReplyGuy #ReplyGuys
um, sure, that's conceivable. the image may be a joke with many layers to it and at some point you either get it or you don't.

Not conceivable. It's literally the way I describe images. One image may lead to over 13 hours of research and writing and ca. 40,000 characters. , . And I actually consider these two posts outdated and lacking already.
is shorter at a bit over 25,000 characters and more up-to-date, albeit far from complete. I'm linking to it because it uses one fifth of its length, 5,000 characters, to describe one single item that doesn't exist in real life.
I barely get any reactions on them, usually none at all. Neither praise nor criticism, no likes/faves/thumbs-up, nothing. I don't know what people think about them, seeing as how high the standards can be in the Fediverse.
Maybe people silently like them. Maybe people silently ignore them. Maybe each time I post and describe an image, 500 Mastodon users and half a dozen entire instances block me for my excessively long posts. I don't know.
That's why I'm asking someone who wants images that don't explain themselves to total outsiders to be explained. I explain them, and I try to explain them the best I can without requiring too much prior knowledge because I can't expect a casual audience to have that prior knowledge.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta If there's such a thing as no explanation and too little explanation, would you say there's also too much explanation
For example, an extremely explanatory image description that's in the post text, not only because explanations don't belong into alt-text, but because it exceeds the maximum length of Mastodon's alt-text over a dozen times or even several dozen times That has to be that long because what the image shows is extremely niche and extremely obscure
Would you say that's overkill
Or do you say, the more, the merrier
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Is there any mechanism by which a honeypot would be revealed Is there any reason why the Fediverse cannot be completely crawled from a client

It wouldn't be an automated process to be built into, say, a Mastodon instance.
It'd be the user community noticing something's awfully fishy about that instance.
Something else that could make things at least a lot harder for authoritarian regimes is a concept invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 that goes way beyond what Mastodon can do: . It's currently implemented only on and , both created and the latter still maintained by Mike himself.
It has two advantages: its architecture and, I'd say, also its obscurity. Nation states are only just barely becoming aware of the existence of Mastodon. They know nothing about the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. And so they know even less about the very fringes of the Fediverse which have had such stuff readily available and in daily stable and productive use for about a dozen years now.
Any Mastodon account can be silenced by the Chinese state by blocking the server if it's outside of China or shutting the server down if it's in China. Same for almost the entire rest of the Fediverse.
Hubzilla or (streams) can be made resilient against this by making them nomadic. This means that one and the same channel resides on multiple servers. I'm not talking about dumb copies like when you move your Mastodon account. I'm talking about absolutely identical clones which are synchronised and kept identical in real-time.
I can see four possible scenarios.
One, a dissident collective in China. They create a bunch of channels and spread each one of them across one or two dozen Hubzilla or (streams) servers or even more. If one is shut down, the others carry on with the exact same content, the exact same connections etc. etc. And more can be created at any given time. In order to silence these channels, the authorities would have to find all clone servers and shut them down, one by one, faster than new clones can be created.
And as long as even only one channel backup survives on, what, a USB pen drive or a phone, disguised as e.g. an MP3 file that can easily be renamed back to what it actually is, a Hubzilla or (streams) channel can come back on new servers.
Two, channels outside of China communicating into China. Even supposing that nobody in China uses anything nomadic, e.g. everyone only uses Mastodon or Misskey, having a dozen clones of the same channel outside of China makes it possible for them to follow both the main instance of the channel and the clones. If one server that contains an instance of that channel is blocked by Chinese authorities, the same information will automatically flow through the others. And, again, new clones can be created at any given time.
Three, like one, but one of the dissidents escapes to somewhere in the West with a backup of the channel on some kind of physical storage, disguised in such a way that Chinese authorities won't find it, at least not that easily. That dissident sets up a server at home or rents some Web space capable of running Hubzilla or (streams), both of which need nothing more than a LAMP stack.
They install Hubzilla or (streams), and they create a "new" channel by uploading the channel backup created in China. This will create a nomadic clone of that channel outside of China which will immediately connect to the 20 instances of the channel which existed in China when the backup was created. If new instances have been launched in the meantime, it is made aware of that.
One nice thing about nomadic identity is that it does not work in a hub-and-spoke way, i.e. it isn't only communication between the main instance and the clones. It's communication between all clones as well, so even finding and taking out the main instance can't stop nomadic identity.
If there are 20 clones in China and 20 clones outside of China, this means:

Four, and this is the most difficult variant, the other way around: Chinese dissidents take a foreign channel and clone it in China. It largely works the same otherwise, but the channel backup has to be smuggled into China.
The latter two would make it possible to clone anything from the Fediverse into China by nomadic identity.
You post something on mas.to.
I follow you on hub.netzgemeinde.eu, and I receive your post.
My channel has 20 clones on hub.chinesedissidentserver01.org through hub.chinesedissidentserver20.org. They all receive your post just the same.
Then I repeat (= boost) your post. So do all 20 clones in China just the same.
Anyone on chinesemastodoninstance.social or chinesemisskeyinstance.social who follows even only one of these clones receives your post. Not a dumb copy but the original, relayed through Hubzilla.
That is, I'm not entirely sure what'd happen if China blocked mas.to. But even if they did, I'd switch from repeating (= boosting) to sharing (= quote-posting). Or I could set up another channel, install Channel Sources, connect to your Mastodon account and use my connection to your Mastodon account as a channel source. This new channel would automatically repost everything you post, again, as a verbatim but otherwise dumb copy.
Then China can block mas.to all the want, but they won't be able to stop your content coming in through Hubzilla and my channel clones that way. The downside, of course, would be that it'd be one-way communication because you wouldn't receive any replies to your posts.
The biggest danger a network of clones in China (especially scenario 3 and 4) would have to face would not be blocks or forced server shutdowns. It'd be infiltration. Anyone who runs a clone has pretty much full access to it.
If you run a clone, you can post through it under the same identity as the main instance and all the other clones. None of the other clone owners can control what you post in the name of the main instance. If you run a clone, you can upload any and all content and have it cloned across the whole network of clones. If you run a clone, you can make it the main instance. If you run a clone, you can change any and all settings as you want to. Like, you could cut off any and all connections to Mastodon and almost the entire rest of the Fediverse by simply turning Pubcrawl off. Or you could make content public that was uploaded with limited permissions.
But if you run a clone, you can also delete or change content. You can delete files. You can delete connections, and connections on Hubzilla and (streams) are mutual by default there is no Twitter-like follower/followed dichotomy. You can Superblock connections if you don't want them to see what happens on the channel, and this will mean that all 40 instances of the channel Superblock that connection.
And if you run a clone, you can easily see the list of all clones of the channel.
If you only have one state infiltrator running a clone, disguising as a dissident, you're basically fucked. The infiltrator can sabotage the channel, swiftly delete any and all uncomfortable content, falsify content and spread state propaganda through the channel. They can send the list of instances of the channel to the authorities who will immediately block the servers carrying the foreign instances and do everything they can to track the domestic servers down and kill them off before a new clone can be established outside of China.
The moment all foreign instances are permanently blocked, and all domestic instances are permanently shut down, the cross-border nomadic network is basically dead. Even if someone in China and someone outside of China both install backups of this channel, they won't connect across the border. The new instance in China will only know the 20 blocked foreign instances and the 20 shutdown domestic instances, but it won't know the new foreign instance. Same for the one outside of China which won't know the new instance in China. The network can only be restarted by setting up an instance, making enough clones again and smuggling a backup across the border again.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity What you could do is as follows:

That way, Hubzilla will always automatically repost everything you post on Friendica.
Channel Sources could be described as a kind of universal reverse cross-poster. Reverse because it isn't "Hubzilla to something else", it's "anything that Hubzilla can connect to to Hubzilla". It could serve as a Friendica-to-Hubzilla cross-poster, as a Mastodon-to-Hubzilla cross-poster, as a Diaspora*-to-Hubzilla cross-poster, as an RSS-to-Hubzilla cross-poster (been there, done that, probably angered countless Mastodon users) etc.
The obvious downside is that these reposts are dumb copies which receive their own thumbs up, thumbs down, repeats and comments. None of this is sent back to Friendica. You still have to check your Hubzilla channel once in a while and, for example, reply to comments.
Also, I'm not sure what'd happen if you commented on something on Friendica, regardless of whether your Hubzilla channel is aware of that discussion or not. It could be that Channel Sources would also cross-post your comments and do so out-of-context.
And it seems to be Hubzilla-exclusive. (streams) doesn't have it anymore.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #ChannelSources #CrossPoster It all depends on what you want.
If what you want is features that are available elsewhere in the Fediverse, go elsewhere in the Fediverse, and you've got these features.
If what you want is features that are available elsewhere in the Fediverse, but with Mastodon's UI and UX, then hard-fork Mastodon, throw everything out that isn't UI and convert what remains into an alternative UI for Misskey or Sharkey or Hubzilla or (streams).
If, however, what you want is 100% water-tight safety from Threads, you have to hard-fork the Fediverse itself. Design a whole new federated protocol, hard-fork Mastodon and re-write it against that new protocol. Oh, and keep the protocol secret so that Friendica won't adopt it because Friendica can theoretically forward anything from Bluesky and Threads to anything else it's connected to and vice versa. And Friendica is connected to just about everything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta I'd say it's quite difficult to block the entirety of the Fediverse, if it's possible at all.
On a DNS level, it'd be a game of whack-a-mole. These regimes would have to know all instances of all projects and block them one by one. And the split-second that some new instance spins up for the first time, it'd have to be blocked immediately.
Even deep packet inspection for blocking purposes would require any and all Fediverse content to have enough in common to be recognisable against the Internet background noise and thus filterable. However, not only is the Fediverse much, much more than just Mastodon, but some Fediverse projects work vastly differently from Mastodon. In fact, some don't even use only ActivityPub. So these regimes would have to know every last Fediverse project inside-out.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMetaIch wrde sagen, erstens: Auflisten, mit welchem Account auf welchem Node es Schwierigkeiten gibt. Das ergibt sich so peu peu durch regulre Versuche der Interaktion.
Zweitens: Daraus destillieren, mit welchen Nodes es Schwierigkeiten gibt. Ich schtze, da wird es sicherlich eine Systematik geben.
Drittens: Support Forum anschreiben. Mit diesem-und-diesem Friendica-Node gibt's Schwierigkeiten, mit diesem-und-diesem nicht.
Viertens: Sich an die Friendica-Leute wenden und versuchen rauszukriegen, was die Nodes, bei denen es nicht geht, gemeinsam haben, was die, bei denen es geht, eben nicht haben. Oder umgekehrt.
Fnftens: Wenn man das wei, entscheiden, ob es ein Bug auf Friendica-Seite oder einer auf Hubzilla-Seite ist. Und dann einen Issue mit Bug Report einreichen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost
Otoh the issue of embedding #AltText in pictures is a bit fraught. Eg though it's technically possible to do this in #Friendica, the method for non-technical users is esoteric, obscure & confusing, so is IMO highly likely to be skipped. Others like #Hubzilla have other complexities afaik.

Well, to be fair, no Fediverse project so far has been created from scratch with the greatest accessibility possible as part of its concept. Not even Mastodon. Mastodon is not so much as accessible as it is because the developers have added the necessary features as because its users made the use of these features pretty much mandatory over the last two years and firmly engrained it into Mastodon's culture.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) do alt-text almost exactly the same way, only that Hubzilla and (streams) can use slightly different image and URL tags that support extra features introduced with Zot and OpenWebAuth. But this was born along with Friendica back in 2010 when Friendica was still Mistpark, long before Mastodon has a dedicated alt-text field.
Friendica's way of handling posts, comments and discussion threads is not inspired by Facebook for a change, but by long-form blogging. This is apparent first and foremost by there not being any character limit where Mastodon has 500 characters, by the wealth of text formatting features and by images being embeddable anywhere in a post as opposed to only attachable as files. Basically, anyone who chose Friendica over Facebook was given a full-blown blog with just about all bells and whistles along with it.
But like on so many other blogging platforms, Friendica's WYSIWYG editors has never had buttons for all supported features. In fact, IIRC, Friendica didn't even have a WYSIWYG option at first. Either way, just like on other blogging platforms, if you really want to go all the way, you can't rely on WYSIWYG only. You have to get your hands dirty on raw markup code.
Granted, on Friendica and Hubzilla, it's extended BBcode and not the HTML that was pretty much mandatory back in the day or the Markdown that seems to have become the standard nowadays, but still. And every serious blogger knew HTML back in the day, and today, every serious blogger still knows either HTML or Markdown or both.
Also, when Friendica came out under the name Mistpark back then, bulletin-board forums were still huge, so even if you weren't a blogger, chances were you were familiar with BBcode from using forums. In 2010, no forum had WYSIWYG editors that completely concealed the underlying code, especially not on by default. So when you clicked the "b" button, what you got in the editor was not bold letters but a pair of b/b tags.
All this is also why Friendica, as well as Hubzilla and (streams), has previews for everything, just like blogs and forums.
On all three, alt-text falls under "special features for power users and professionals", just like headlines, horizontal rules, text colour (unlike in forums), background colour, text size or typeface. When that feature was included, nobody added alt-text in privately-used social networks. Thus, it was only necessary to add this feature and to have it in some way or another, not to make it as dead-simple for casual corporate silo converts to use as possible. In the early 2010s, a graphical alt-text editor in a Facebook alternative would have been pearls before swine. The target audience for adding alt-text wasn't afraid of code, and your Facebook buddy who came over to check out Friendica had never even heard of alt-text.
And that's why we still have to manually graft alt-text into the image-embedding code today.
At least Friendica explains it in its user documentation because Friendica has decent user documentation. Hubzilla's user documentation reads like a technical specification because it has barely changed from what Friendica's documentation was like in 2012, and it's hopelessly outdated and incomplete. The community is actually considering re-writing it from scratch. And since it was that terrible in 2018 already, it was handed over as-is all the way to (streams) which eventually discarded any and all documentation because it was so bad. Neither of the two explain how to add alt-text the knowledge is spread by word-of-mouth.
On the other hand, alt-text seems to be buggy on Friendica. However, nobody ever notices it. This is partly because Friendica has been around for too long to adopt anything from Mastodon's culture, and it's partly because there's hardly any other Fediverse project whose user base is largely as hostile towards Mastodon as Friendica, perceiving it as invasive, obnoxious and completely ignorant towards the non-Mastodon Fediverse. People simply refuse to follow any kind of fad that comes from Mastodon, and this includes alt-text. And since nobody uses it, nobody notices that it's buggy, and nobody files a bug report.
Ipso facto anyone not using CWs &/or warning tags &/or AltText is a bastard

And the few who are aware that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that everything else in the Fediverse is basically Mastodon with extra stuff glued on. It goes beyond the imagination of next to everyone on Mastodon that something that can interact with Mastodon like more Mastodon might actually be designed and work wholly differently. The few who know have Friendica accounts or even Hubzilla channels.
The rest cannot comprehend why some users from outside Mastodon "refuse" to add CWs or flag images sensitive. As I've mentioned previously, hardly anything beyond Mastodon and (streams) can flag images sensitive for Mastodon, and (streams) has no documentation for that, much less dedicated UI elements.
CWs are even more complicated. In the cases of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this has to do with how different they are from Mastodon in concept and from their long-form blogging heritage.
Mastodon got its CWs in 2017 when a user from the demo scene submitted a feature request and pull request that re-purposed StatusNet's summary field for content warnings. Mastodon didn't use the summary field until then after all, you don't need a summary for 500 characters or fewer. That pull request was accepted, and Mastodon had its CWs.
AFAIR, Friendica did have a summary field back when I used it, at least up until 2012 when Hubzilla's saga began. Hubzilla still has it, so does (streams). And summaries actually make sense on all three. After all, they're fully capable of long-form blogging, and they don't have any character limits.
Friendica must have done away with the summary field at some point in the second half of the 2010s or in the early 2020s, probably after adding ActivityPub support in 2018. Friendica users themselves are so used to overly long posts that summaries have never been part of Friendica's culture anyway, and not few Friendica users have switched summaries off entirely. Summaries were probably only a concession towards StatusNet users and a requirement for the connectivity to Twitter. After all, back in the day, Twitter was unable to handle anything longer than 140 and, later, 280 characters.
But then Mastodon and all that followed in its footsteps became more and more important and influential, and with it came Mastodon's content warnings. All of a sudden, Friendica's summaries had to serve two contradicting purposes: cutting posts down for Twitter (the original post was linked to AFAIK) and Mastodon CWs. Making two fields out of one was out of question, though.
So Friendica discarded the summary field altogether and replaced it with the abstract/abstract BBcode tags. These could be made as flexible as they have to be: abstract=twit/abstract only went out to Twitter, abstract=apub/abstract only goes out to whatever is connected via ActivityPub, including Mastodon, and both can be used at the same time.
The obvious downside is that Friendica novices don't know how to add Mastodon CWs to their posts because there isn't even a field for that.
The advantage is that these tags can be used everywhere, including comments. , this is something that you should know about Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams): On all three, a reply is something entirely different from a post that doesn't reply to anything, even though it's all the same on Mastodon. None of the three has its roots in microblogging, and everything that isn't microblogging distinguishes between (start) posts and replies/comments, all the way to having one editor for posts and one or several completely separate editors for comments whereas Twitter and Mastodon have only one for everything.
Since these editors are separate, they aren't the same either. A reply on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) is basically like a blog comment. You simply don't need certain features in blog comments. This includes summaries for example. Why would you need a summary for a comment
On Friendica, this isn't a problem. You can add abstract/abstract tags to comments just the same as you can add them to posts. And in fact, at least when the Twitter connection still worked, they even made sense because Friendica actually made it possible to comment on tweets, but only if there was an abstract to cut that comment down to something Twitter could swallow if it was too long.
Hubzilla, being a hard fork and under a wholly different license than Friendica, did not take this change over in spite of being able to connect to Twitter itself. (streams) doesn't have to because it can only connect through its own Nomad, Hubzilla's Zot6 and ActivityPub it can't even connect to Diaspora* anymore.
Thus, both still have a summary field. And it's actually labelled accordingly: "Summary".
For one, this confuses the hell out of newbies who have just come over from Mastodon, too. They think they can't add CWs because Hubzilla doesn't have a field for that, because nobody has told them that it's the summary field. On top of that, there's still the false information circulating around Mastodon that Friendica's title field is Mastodon's CW field from which they deduce that so is Hubzilla's title field. In fact, Friendica's title field does something wholly different on Mastodon, something that's largely unexpected, and Hubzilla's and (streams)' title field does zilch on Mastodon.
Besides, even if you know that Hubzilla's summary field is Mastodon's CW field, there's another problem: Only the post editor has a summary field. The comment editors don't. Again, what sense do summaries make for blog comments None. So why have such a field in the first place if it doesn't make any sense, at least not from a long-form-blogging or Facebook-replacing point of view And that's why there's no summary field for comments.
But if there's no summary field, you can't add Mastodon-style CWs either. I myself would have put a CW on this comment due to its excessive length, but I don't because I simply don't have the means.
And this is something Mastodon users neither know nor understand.
On top of all this, and Mastodon users don't understand this either, Mastodon CWs aren't and will never be part of the Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) cultures. As I've written previously, all three already have NSFW, and their users prefer it a lot over Mastodon's standard-breaking kluge.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)
im not so technical to see all the differences even if i know there are.

To be fair, if all you know is Mastodon, and all you ever see is Mastodon, you can't know much about these differences beyond some posts looking weird or doing weird stuff that's technically impossible on Mastodon, e.g. quotes (see above), over 500 characters (see this entire comment), text formatting (see this entire comment again) or unusual-looking mentions (again, see above) and hashtags (see the end). But, for example, Mastodon doesn't tell anyone what instance type a post comes from.
If you even only want to take an outside glance at what another project is like, you have to go visit one of its instances. If you want to take a deeper look, you have to join it and use it. Again, that's natural.
already saw accounts from other non masto instances having a different communication culture. maybe its simply caused by the functionality given.

It definitely is. And the biggest differences exist between Mastodon and projects that had already been in the Fediverse for years when Mastodon was launched, especially Friendica which is about six years older than Mastodon and Hubzilla which, at its core, is about four years older than Mastodon and was made from a Friendica fork by Friendica's own creator.
is on Friendica herself as well: , so she knows what she's talking about. I myself am on Hubzilla, and I used to be on Friendica long before Mastodon took off.
Two more misconceptions common on Mastodon are than a) the Fediverse is only microblogging, even after the discovery of stuff like Akkoma or Misskey, and b) Mastodon was there first. So Mastodon users often wonder how something can possibly be so much different from Mastodon, and why "they" (the developers) haven't simply done things just like Mastodon.
But for one, Friendica and Hubzilla are much older than Mastodon. When Mastodon came out, not only did they already exist, but both had long since outgrown their experimental phase. They were fully established, they were in daily stable use, and most importantly, they had been around for long enough to have developed their very own culture.
This was the case even more whenever Mastodon experienced a growth spurt, be it in ca. 2017 when the furries and otaku were chased off Twitter, in early 2022 when Elon Musk threatened to buy Twitter and in late 2022 when he did.
On top of this, Mastodon is a Twitter clone for better or worse, even taking over some of Twitter's shortcomings because that's allegedly what microblogging is. Friendica, however, is not. It was made to be an alternative to Facebook in 2010 when it had been revealed how evil Facebook truly is. But instead of being a faithful clone, it aimed to be better while serving the same purpose.
This alone explains a whole lot of differences between Mastodon and Friendica.
Hubzilla can serve the same purpose as Friendica, maybe even better because nomadic identity can make Hubzilla channels resilient against sudden instance shutdowns which is the very same reason Hubzilla came to exist. But it actually aims to be a federated social content management system with built-in, optional features that go way beyond what Friendica offers. Nonetheless, it's culturally similar.
the nsfw hashtag and the option to mark pictures as sensitive are a fedi wide standard though

The #NSFW hashtag actually seems to be more of a Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) thing.
The reason is because all three have their own solution for content warnings which happens to be named "NSFW". It's a special word filter that only does one thing: It searches posts etc. for keywords (substrings actually which might cause false alerts) entered in its word lists, and if it finds one, it hides the whole post or comment or DM behind a content warning. Unlike on Mastodon, this includes all images, and at least on Hubzilla and (streams), it even includes the hashtags.
Not only does this feature pre-date Mastodon's content warnings by almost seven years, but Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users see it as superior to Mastodon's content warnings. The advantage is that NSFW doesn't put content warnings on content when it's being posted. It puts content warnings on content after it's received. It happens on the reader's side.
Thus, everyone only receives warnings for content they personally need to be warned about, provided a post or comment or DM contains the appropriate keywords or hashtags. Unlike Mastodon's content warnings, NSFW does not, for example, force "food" content warnings on people who don't have an eating disorder or "depol" content warnings on people who couldn't care any less about German politics.
In Mastodon's culture, the #NSFW hashtag doesn't really serve a specific purpose. People simply use it to have another hashtag on their toots. Filtering doesn't come to mind because filters aren't an integral part of Mastodon's culture. Content-warning-generating filters are even less because they have only been around for less than a year. If anything, the hashtag increases visibility of NSFW content to those who are searching for it.
Mastodon's option to flag images sensitive, on the other hand, is a non-standard, home-brew, exclusive Mastodon development. I'd go as far as calling it proprietary. Not only has it never been part of the specification of either of the protocols Mastodon has used, but I think it doesn't even have an official technical specification, much less an official API for other projects to use.
Thus, most other Fediverse projects do not support it. I know (streams) supports it by automatically adding that flag to images in posts with a #nsfw or #sensitive hashtag and even that only when sending it out through ActivityPub. I think Mastodon's sensitive flag actually had to be reverse-engineered to make this possible.
Both Hubzilla and (streams) have their own sensitive flag for images which is built into their included file server, and I think Friendica has it, too I'm wondering why it seems to be impossible to translate that flag to Mastodon.
This is actually a pity. Here on Hubzilla, I can have Hubzilla and (streams) users click up to four times until they can see a sensitive image: first the NSFW button if they have NSFW activated, then the summary, then a spoiler tag, then the actual image which is blurred out until then. The exact same post, on Mastodon, immediately shows the exact same image in its full glory to everyone or at least to those who don't have any filters for any of the hashtags in the post. And the vast majority of Mastodon users don't.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

you know what

you know what

There seems to be everything for WordPress. Even including a plug-in that connects WordPress to : . .
It actually goes beyond blogging. It adds grid management tools to WordPress, including access to avatar creation and search management. And it's based on Olivier van Helden's .
One planned feature is the integration of the of the Hypergrid events calendar which even comes in the shape of an in-world panel showing the next events to happen on participating grids.
Both projects are sponsored by the grid and promoted by its grid admin, Gudule Lapointe, who has presented both at Hypergrid International Expo tonight.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #SpeculoosWorld #W4OS #2do #WordPress
But is it a QP or a link to the post Does the author get a notification

Depends because there are currently two ways of quote-posting.
The Friendica way from 2010, also used by Hubzilla and (streams), generates a dumb copy of the original post from a reference written in a pair of special BBcode tags which includes a link to both the poster, even with their profile picture on compatible instances, and the original post.
share=55993487/share
becomes

But is it a QP or a link to the post Does the author get a notification
I think that's what is being discussed here. Anyone can link anything. I see it every day on my timeline, but those show up as links to a toot, and the embedded display generally doesn't even show the toot that is being "quoted". I doubt the author can get notified from that type of interaction.
And the author is notified. I've tested just that with a Mastodon user.
The Misskey way, I don't know from when that is, consists of "RE:" plus the URL of the quoted post from which compatible frontends are expected to generate the actual quote-post.
RE: https://mas.to/thylacoleo/112305011343985452
I don't know whether the author is notified.
However, what Mastodon is working on right now is very likely to be something entirely new and completely incompatible with anything that has existed. So I can't say how it'll work.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #CatodonA couple hours ago, I tried my hand at making Mastodon users shit brix in by telling them that the same quote-posts they don't want on Mastodon are readily available already now all over the Fediverse except for Mastodon.
That just about everyone in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon can quote-post everything on Mastodon right now.
And that no non-standard, proprietary opt-in or opt-out on Mastodon can stop them from quote-posting Mastodon toots.
Either most of those whom I've replied to haven't noticed yet, or they've blocked me on the spot for posting stuff that scares them. Including that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Mastodon When I quote-post a Mastodon toot on Hubzilla, the tooter is notified. I know for certain, I've tested it.
Same goes for Friendica and (streams) which use the same quote-posting technique. Not sure about Misskey and the Forkeys, though, and about Pleroma and its forks.
And the only way for Mastodon to stop this would be for all Mastodon instances to Fediblock all non-Mastodon instances. Which is a game of whack-a-mole.
Mastodon can never be 100% safe from quote-posts. That's the way it is. Deal with it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate What if I told you:
Pleroma has quote-posts already now.
Akkoma has quote-posts already now.
All the other Pleroma forks have quote-posts already now.
Misskey has quote-posts already now.
Firefish has quote-posts already now.
Iceshrimp has quote-posts already now.
Sharkey has quote-posts already now.
Catodon has quote-posts already now.
All other forks of Misskey, Firefish and Iceshrimp have quote-posts already now.
Friendica has quote-posts already now.
Hubzilla has quote-posts already now.
(streams) has quote-posts already now.
Only a few examples.
And all of them can quote-post everything and everyone on Mastodon already now.
And no, they haven't introduced quote-posts because Mastodon doesn't have them. Friendica has had quote-posts since it was made, and Friendica is 6 years older than Mastodon. Same for Hubzilla which is 4 years older than Mastodon. Both could quote-post Mastodon toots from the moment that Mastodon was launched.
The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediverseIsNotOnlyMastodon #NotOnlyMastodon

research , also areas managed by Public Sector:

Residential gardens could help insects declining due to habitat loss.

Long grass and flowering ivy increase butterfly populations.

Gardens with benefit butterflies most in highly urban areas.

LINK to paper below...

what functions do Lemmy, Pixelfed, and others serve that Mastodon doesn't

For starters, Lemmy, the other Threadiverse projects and several other Fediverse server applications, e.g. Friendica and its descendants Hubzilla and (streams) have one technological advantage over Mastodon when it comes to discussions:
They have a proper concept of conversations. They distinguish between a start post and a reply or comment, and they make use of the "context" attribute on the latter to reference the start post of a thread. This makes it possible to tie discussion threads like in a forum or on Reddit together.
In addition, they always deliver all replies in a thread to all participants in the same thread. No mentions needed. This makes it possible for everyone to easily follow a discussion without having to rely on everyone mentioning everyone or keep looking up the start post at its source.
Mastodon doesn't do either. Mastodon mimics with all its shortcomings, and doesn't have any comparable functionality, and such functionality wouldn't be microblogging, so Mastodon doesn't have it either. Just like everything is the same kind of tweet on , everything is the same kind of toot on Mastodon, and it relies on mentions and an out-dated, deprecated OStatus tag that doesn't even exist in ActivityPub to tie directly related posts together.
Thus, meaningful discussions between more than two participants are easily possible on Lemmy, /kbin, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc., but on Mastodon and the other "Twitter clones", they require the users jumping through hoops, if they work at all.
Also, discussion groups. Lemmy, /kbin, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. have had them since their respective inception. Mastodon doesn't because doesn't, and groups aren't microblogging. The Mastodon devs are said to be working on implementing groups, but I expect that to become a dirty hack that's incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse. In the meantime, Mastodon users need external, third-party solutions like Guppe, now-defunct Chirp or Friendica.
Mastodon users try to use Mastodon as the all-purpose Swiss army knife of the Fediverse. Mastodon itself tries to market itself as the perfect, fully-featured, one-size-fits-all jack-of-all-trades solution in the Fediverse that lets you do everything you want to do. At the same time, however, Mastodon tries to hold on to its idea of purist microblogging, and it has to struggle with the consequences of having done so all the time.
The only way the Mastodon folks can hope to push their agenda through is by:

I joined Lemmy and Pixelfed wanting to participate but the level of traffic seemed too low to generate the interaction I had hoped for. Did I look in the wrong places, or did I fail to notice the action, or did I look too early

Sadly, there are lots of Lemmy communities in which hardly anything happens. They've got hundreds of subscribers who, however, don't interact with the community. There's often only one user who occasionally posts stuff, but absolutely nobody ever replies to anything.
If you happen to be interested in a catalogue of Lemmy communities, try . Or if you're specifically looking for an active community, try .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Threadiverse #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #Sublinks #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) tldr: In images from virtual worlds, never assume anything to be common knowledge and thus known to everyone.

Essentially, it's because 3-D virtual worlds are something that most people aren't familiar with. 3-D virtual worlds based on are even more obscure, so even fewer people are familiar with them.
There may be 50 people in the Fediverse who know OpenSim in general. Out of 10,000,000++. And any given place in any of these worlds may be familiar to two dozen or one dozen or even fewer, maybe actually only me.
If you post a run-of-the-mill cat photo, you can safely assume that there's next to nothing in the image that anyone isn't familiar with except maybe what the cat itself looks like. When I post an image from a 3-D virtual world, I have to assume that nobody knows anything about it.
But at the same time, I have to assume that there are at least a few people who are totally curious about these virtual worlds. This could be, for example, because until they came across my image post, they were completely unaware that any 3-D virtual worlds actually exist, what with "the Metaverse" apparently having been officially pronounced dead.
If they're blind or visually-impaired, they don't know what this particular virtual world looks like because nobody and no image description has told them what such a world looks like before. But they may want to know. Because see above.
There are many things that require me to write such long descriptions and explanations.
For example, it's good style to mention in an image description where the image was taken. But I can't just drop the name of a sim or of a place on a sim and assume that everyone knows what I'm talking about.
Black White Castle isn't New York City. People don't know what I mean if I write the picture is from Black White Castle. Even most OpenSim veterans wouldn't know because Black White Castle isn't Lbsa Plaza either, and seriously, would you know what Lbsa Plaza is without Googling
So if it's a place on a sim, I have to mention which sim it's on. Then I have to mention which grid the sim is in. Then I have to explain that this grid is a virtual world running on OpenSim.
People still wouldn't get it at this point because they don't know what OpenSim is, what a grid is and what a sim is.
So I have to explain what OpenSim is, what Second Life is because OpenSim largely uses the same technology, what a grid is and what a sim is.
No AI can do that. No AI can identify a place on an OpenSim-based sim, especially if it has only been launched a few days or a few hours ago, especially not with 100% accuracy, and then explain all of the above, just by examining an image from that place. And I'm not even talking about identifying and explaining the multi-layered pop culture reference behind both the design of the place and its name.
Or how about certain elements in the image
I could mention that there's a teleporter somewhere in the image. But this information is half-useless without an explanation what this teleporter is for and what it does. And blind and visually-impaired people don't know know what it looks like. How are they supposed to know what a teleporter looks like
Or I could mention that there's an OpenSimWorld beacon in the image because it's in a rather prominent place. What do you think, how many Fediverse users would know what I'm talking about How many know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is How many sighted users can identify an OpenSimWorld beacon when they see one in an image
Do you know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is Would you be willing to Google that, or would you be annoyed to have to Google such stuff in order to get my image and its description
Or would you prefer me to tell you And what do you think, would others prefer me to tell them over them having to Google everything they don't get
If you prefer being told over having to scrape all that information together yourself: I've explained and described an OpenSimWorld beacon before. In no fewer than 5,000 words. I also had to explain what OpenSimWorld is, that's why. It's these 5,000 words, or at least one hour of Googling, or not getting it.
And, of course, let's not forget the blind and the visually-impaired. Whenever I mention something in the image, they'll inquire, "Yeah, but what does it look like! What does this look like, what does that look like"
Not telling them what they don't know but want to know is ableist.
If I mention there's a sign or a poster somewhere in the image, they're likely to want to know what's on that sign or poster. If there's something written on it, they're likely to want to know what is written on it.
After all, it's pretty much mandatory to transcribe any and all text within the borders of an image. Verbatim, word by word, ideally including all spelling mistakes. There are no defined exceptions to this rule. That's why in some of my image descriptions the transcripts take up more characters combined than fit into Mastodon alt-text, let alone a vanilla Mastodon toot. I take this rule seriously.
Again, this is something that AI can't do on the same level as me. AI can't run OCR on text that's too small to be legible, so tiny that it's actually invisible or partly obscured. I can. Because I look at these bits of text in-world where I can move the camera as I please, including closer to the text or around obstacles that obscure it.
is an example of how I handle text in image descriptions.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI Nicht immer, und das wei ich aus ganz persnlicher Erfahrung.
Es kommt oft genug vor, da ich versuche, einen Post durch Zeichenzhlen per Copy-Paste in Mousepad auf unter 500 Zeichen zu bringen, um die Mastodon-Nutzer zu beschwichtigen, aber letztlich scheitere, weil ich dann wichtige Informationen streichen mte.
Manchmal wrde der eigentliche Post-Inhalt an sich schon passen. Aber mit den Hashtags, die ntig sind, um bei sensiblen oder schnell genervten Nutzern die Filter auszulsen, wird das Ganze dann doch noch lnger als 500 Zeichen.
Dann werfe ich einfach das Handtuch. Dann gibt's die "#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost"-Hashtags am Ende, bei deutschsprachigen Posts zustzlich "#LangerPost #CWLangerPost". Und wenn's kein Kommentar ist, also keine Antwort auf irgendwas, gibt's auch eine Zusammenfassung plus "CW: long (n characters)" und den anderen notwendigen Inhaltswarnungen im Summary.
Oft genug, so wie hier jetzt gerade, lt es sich ganz einfach nicht in 500 Zeichen minus ntige Hashtags so erklren, da Auenstehende es sofort einwandfrei verstehen.
Der Extremfall sind bei mir Bilderposts. Die kann ich berhaupt nicht mit 500 Zeichen und weniger minus ntige Hashtags machen.
Das liegt daran, da ich immer eine ausfhrliche, detaillierte Bildbeschreibung nebst Erklrungen und Transkriptionen smtlicher Textstcke im Bild liefere. Und die geht in den Post selbst und blht den gewaltig auf.
Die kann ich aus zwei Grnden nicht "wie jeder andere" in den Alt-Text tun. Zum einen: Sie ist zu lang. Mein Rekord liegt bei , und ich habe wirklich schon mal versuchsweise (Achtung, die Bildbeschreibung an sich ist technisch stark berholt). Zum anderen: Erklrungen gehren nicht in den Alt-Text, weil nicht jeder den Alt-Text aufrufen kann.
Also gibt's im Alt-Text nur

Ich denke mit Grausen daran, wie es wre, wenn in bestimmt 200 Hppchen in Mastodon-Gre zerschnipselt wrde, oder alternativ an den massiven Informationsverlust, wrden die Bildbeschreibungen komplett wegfallen.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BiBesch #BildbeschreibungenMeta
For images people add on their posts, the ideal would be a program that describes those images.

As long as it doesn't take the functionality of describing images yourself away.
I still vastly prefer to describe my own images myself. No AI will ever be able to do it nearly at the same level of detail, accuracy and informativity, seeing as how niche the topic is that my images show, and how much in these images has to be described and explained.
The result was underwhelming. So I can safely say I know know from personal experience what I'm writing about.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI
I don't think anybody expects you to alt text those. I don't think you even could.

You can't, but some want to, and I think there are even people who demand everyone describe these images.
I mean, technically, you can put the image description into the post text body if you've got enough room for it. But Mastodon doesn't have a preview, so you can't see which image Mastodon picks as the preview, if any, before you post, and you wouldn't know which image to describe in the first place. Other projects do have a preview, but that preview doesn't show what a post will look like on Mastodon.
In both cases, the only way to know is to send the post, check it (on Mastodon if you aren't there), see which image is the preview, write an image description for it and then edit the image description into the existing post. And even then you'll have fundamentalists who'll complain that there is no actual alt-text for the picture, even though you're like me, and you've gone out of your way and written a massive, detailed image description in the post itself.
So alt-text for automatically generated preview images is like flagging automatically generated preview images sensitive: science-fiction.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
das gab es doch nie, eben weil Mastodon ja erst spter dazu zum Fediverse dazu kam.

Das wissen aber sehr viele Mastodon-User nicht, vor allem die Fundies. Die glauben, Gargron htte mit Mastodon auch das Fediverse erfunden, am besten sogar erst Anfang 2022.
Und wenn sie dann davon hren, da es auch noch was anderes gibt, glauben sie, das sei alles nachtrglich an Mastodon drangeschraubt worden, weil sie ja auch erst von Mastodon und dann von den anderen Sachen gehrt haben. Und sie wundern sich, warum "die" "das" anders gemacht haben als auf Mastodon.
Vor allem sehen sie alles, was nicht Mastodon ist, als Eindringlinge. Und sie htten gern das Fediverse zurck, wie es war, bevor diese Eindringlinge da waren, also nur mit Mastodon. Wenn sie lange genug dabei waren, dann glauben sie mglicherweise sogar, sie htten dieses Nur-Mastodon-Fediverse selbst noch miterlebt.
Ich glaube, bei vielen stt man auf taube Ohren, wenn man ihnen erzhlt, da das Fediverse acht Jahre lter ist als Mastodon, Friendica sechs Jahre und Hubzilla (na ja, Red) und das Wort "Fediverse" vier Jahre.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon Es gibt leider auf Mastodon absolute Mimosen, die ihr Nur-Mastodon-nur-500-Zeichen-Fediverse wiederhaben wollen, weil alles, was davon abweicht, sie verstrt. Und die knnen unsereins tatschlich Reichweite kosten.
Ignoriert zu werden, weil man die 500-Zeichen-Marke berschreitet, ist dabei noch harmlos. Allerdings kostet das auch schon Reichweite, wenn jemand denselben Post mit demselben Inhalt geboostet htte, wenn er nicht zu lang gewesen wre.
Es gibt Leute, die blockieren sofort jeden, von dem sie einen Post mit mehr als 500 Zeichen sehen oder mit sonst irgendwas, was Mastodon nicht kann. Wenn so jemand der einzige Nutzer auf einer nicht so groen Instanz ist, der deine Posts empfngt, und dich dann blockiert, tauchen deine Posts nicht mehr in der fderierten Timeline der ganzen Instanz auf.
Ich wage zu behaupten, es gibt sogar Leute, die sich an die Mods ihrer Instanz wenden, damit die was gegen die "strenden" Posts machen. Und wenn da ein Mod so tickt wie sie oder ihren Usern jeden Gefallen tun und dabei am Fediverse jenseits von Mastodon null Interesse haben, dann bist du schneller instanzweit gesperrt, als du gucken kannst. Oder die ganze Instanz, wo du bist, wird gesperrt.
Ich habe ja tatschlich den Verdacht, da ich auf so manch einer Instanz gesperrt bin, weil ich nicht "mastodonmig" genug poste und mich nicht ausschlielich an die Mastodon-Kultur halte. Wenn ich mit einer Instanz ber meinen Main nicht interagieren kann, ber den Klon aber sehr wohl, erhrtet sich der Verdacht sogar noch.
Will sagen, es ist durchaus mglich, da einzelne Mastodon-Nutzer mit ihren Aktionen dafr sorgen, da ganz andere Mastodon-Nutzer dich nicht mehr wahrnehmen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
but this makes me wonder about how a more robust permissioning layer for posts and comments could work.

It already exists. Ask Mike Macgirvin who created in 2010, invented in 2011 and then created the precursor of in 2012 before turning it into Hubzilla proper in 2015. So all this actually happened before Mastodon.
Hubzilla has already got permission setting that'd blow your mind. There are 17 different settings, 12 of which are for things that aren't exclusive to Hubzilla, and they all have either seven or eight levels of access permission each. They're available for the whole channel and optionally also for "privacy groups" of connections.
They don't keep people from doing things, e.g. they don't grey out and deactivate the Send button on Mastodon or even Hubzilla itself if I don't allow someone to send me posts. But if they don't allow something, the server rejects it. So I'm not talking about filters that delete things.
Mike's current work, that contains a nameless, brandless but very powerful fork of a fork of a fork... of Hubzilla, goes even further in permissions.
You may want to read . Money quotes:
Permissions: If you haven't been given permission to speak, you aren't part of the conversation.  If you have not been granted permission to view a photo or video, you won't see it.
Audience: Your choices go far beyond public and not public. Yes, we have groups. We also have circles. You can also just select a dozen people right now and have a conversation only with them.
...
Rules: You make them.

In short:
For Mastodon users, it's a science-fiction Fediverse utopia.
On (streams), it's reality, available right now.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Consent #Permissions #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Sorry to say, but at least this suggestion can have out-right horrible consequences:
  • Include an additional opt-in mechanism for your service if it's not just a search engine or profile discovery (or something very close to them)

Most people will think of the Bridgy Fed bridge to Bluesky.
What I'm thinking of, however, is a suggestion on Mastodon's GitHub repository to add quote-posts to Mastodon, but with mandatory opt-in per account which, if off, shall make it technically impossible for anyone in the Fediverse to quote-post someone's posts. This included instances being Fediblocked if they don't respect this opt-in.
As it looks like, Mastodon is currently working on implementing it.
The suggestion was clearly made by someone who didn't know how the Fediverse works, and who didn't know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, much less that many Fediverse projects had quote-posts readily available at that point. Some of them had had them for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
None of them have an opt-in for quote-posts. Such an opt-in following the ActivityPub standard has been speculated, but whether it'd actually work is unknown because nothing has ever implemented it. That's partly because most of them aren't important refuges for Twitter users who have been harassed using quote-tweets and partly because none of the two existing implementations of quote-posts are ActivityPub standards themselves.
This also means that anyone on Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc. can happily quote-post not only each other, but also anyone on Mastodon with zero resistance.
The combination of Mastodon introducing its own home-brew, non-standard, proprietary quote-post implementation and its own home-brew, non-standard, proprietary opt-in implementation (when was the last time Mastodon built something on top of ActivityPub) and making it mandatory for the whole Fediverse, or else Fediblock, would have devastating consequences.
Most likely, there won't be any documentation on how this opt-in works because it's an original non-standard Mastodon design. So in order to comply with it, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc., all the projects that can quote-post already now, will have to reverse-engineer it to be able to implement it.
Both will take time. But they can't start reverse-engineering it until it's finalised. However, it's finalised when it's being rolled out to running instances. And the mandatory opt-in compliance rule (or else Fediblock) will be effective from that very moment.
So when Mastodon rolls out this feature and the rule along with it, every last instance of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc. will still be able to quote-post anything on Mastodon because the projects wouldn't have had a chance to implement compliance with Mastodon's opt-in.
Thus, according to the rule, every last instance of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc. would have to be Fediblocked Mastodon-wide for not respecting Mastodon's quote-post opt-in because they're unable to do so.
In this light, these two lines are even more important:
  • Get broad feedback before launching and listen to it
    Honor existing opt-in and opt-out mechanisms

In Mastodon's case, this means:
Alas, I can't see this happen, seeing as Mastodon gGmbH seems to aim for a "being the Fediverse" duumvirate together with Meta Platforms, Inc.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Consent #OptIn Good luck making a standard for something that isn't even all the same all over the Fediverse.
Take replies as an example. Mastodon mimics Twitter. All posts are technically the same, whether they're replies or not. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for Mastodon to name replies something else than start/stand-alone posts.
On the other hand, there are many projects that have a concept of conversations. Threads aren't made up of posts and more posts, but of one posts and many of something different. So a reply is something vastly different from a start/stand-alone post and handled differently. Separate entry fields. Fewer features. Replies have a different set of recipients than start/stand-alone posts. Or you don't even own your reply to someone's post because that someone does.
This is the case for nodeBB, at least partially. It has been the case for Friendica since its inception almost 14 years ago when it was still named Mistpark. It has been the case for Hubzilla since its inception almost 12 years ago when it was still Red. It was and is the case for everything that came after Hubzilla, including (streams). It's the case for everything that mimics Reddit, i.e. Lemmy, /kbin, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks etc. It's the case for Plume as well as the WordPress plug-in. And so forth.
In all these cases, it's counter-productive to use the exact same term for start/stand-alone posts and for replies.
On the other hand, the same term is used for different things on different projects which leads to confusion. On Mastodon, "community" is an unofficial word for loose gatherings of users who have something in common. On Lemmy, it means the same as a subreddit, basically a forum. On (streams), it means a server instance.
Like Hubzilla, (streams) can't use "instance" for server instances because an "instance" refers to an instance of a cloned channel. Speaking of which, for almost 12 years again, Hubzilla has been using "channel" for a kind of identity container that's unique to these two and completely alien to pretty much the whole non-nomadic rest of the Fediverse. So "channel" may refer to other things elsewhere.
If you really aim to create a common language for the whole Fediverse and make it pretty much mandatory, you'll have to get the developers of all projects (or "projects" because (streams) isn't one) on board. Otherwise they'll be overruled by a committee that has no idea what they're even doing.
For example, if both Mario Vavti (Hubzilla) and Mike Macgirvin (streams repository) are left out, and nobody in the committee has ever heard of Hubzilla and (streams) and their channel concept and nomadic identity, Hubzilla and (streams) will be forced to rename all kinds of unique features while not even having any words to name them anymore because they're all officially redefined otherwise, because the common Fediverse language was defined with complete disregard for nomadic identity.
Also, I expect two things to happen. One, everyone wants to keep their own language. Some may argue that it sets them apart from others which is the reason for Lemmy communities vs /kbin magazines. Others may argue for how long they've been using certain terms, especially Friendica, and they don't want these terms taken away by "intruders". Others again may just be stubborn and, in turn, try to push their language onto everyone else. The latter I can see happen with Mastodon whose representatives will argue that Mastodon is twice as big as everything else combined, maybe even in combination with fake news propaganda that Mastodon was here first.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #TerminologyThis sounds like good advice...
If you're posting a video clip or an audio clip attached to a post, remember to include a text description which describes the sound. This is important so that the video or audio is accessible to deaf people.
Also, if it's a video, it's important to describe both the sound and the visuals so that it's accessible to everyone.
Text descriptions for audio and video are added just like text descriptions for images (exact steps vary depending on which app you use).

...but in my case, this would go out of hand. So much that I've completely discarded the idea of posting in-world videos.
I'm someone who has taken most of a day to describe three still images in a post in which take over an hour to read. No, you haven't misread any of this. And
Of course, if I were to describe a video, I'd have to go as much into details. However, there'd be a whole lot more to describe.
The video would constantly change. It would show much much more than a still image. There'd be audio that'd require detailed description instead of just name-dropping. All of it. Yes, including panning position. Movements of my avatar would have to be described. Movements of the camera around my avatar as well as independently from my avatar would have to be described. All movements would of course require distances, angles, speeds and changes of speed
The description would require a time code: Everything that happens would have to be mentioned including when exactly it happens, and since things might happen quickly or in quick succession, I'm talking about at least tenths of seconds.
Ten minutes of in-world video would take me weeks to describe, and the description would be the length of a novel and take a whole day to read.
Mastodon users would never see the post with the video because, as far as I know, Mastodon automatically rejects all external posts that exceed 100,000 characters, and I'm talking about millions of characters here. I don't even know if Hubzilla would let me post that much, and Hubzilla doesn't have any character limits except for what the Web server can handle.
Nobody would ever read this, so the whole effort would be in vain. But anything less than this would be critically lacking.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #VideoDescription #VideoDescriptions #A11y #Accessibility I know the threads you're referring to. Not only have I posted in both, but I've checked some of the profiles of the staunchest "Keep the Fediverse only Mastodon" protesters who clearly gave the impression of not knowing that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, let alone more than ActivityPub.
Some joined in late October or in November 2022. Second Twitter migration wave.
So no, we aren't talking about the furries who have escaped Twitter in 2018 and made #awoo one of the most popular hashtags on Mastodon.
Had I mentioned all participants in the threads in my posts to give Mastodon just a little bit of Hubzilla's conversation model (remember, you can't follow threads on Mastodon, and Mastodon doesn't tell you about unread comments on posts you've already received), I think I might have caused a mass brick-shitting event by teaching many, many more Mastodon users that the Fediverse is not only more than Mastodon, but more than ActivityPub, and that I was literally writing to them via a Zot6-to-ActivityPub bridge right then.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon Not everyone on Mastodon welcomes the rest of the Fediverse with open arms when they learn about it.
I mean, keep in mind that almost everyone who came over from Twitter to Mastodon in the last two years was not told that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. So they came here with the belief that Mastodon = the Fediverse and the Fediverse = Mastodon, and nothing can "ruin this paradise" for them. And a paradise it was to them, compared to even pre-Musk Twitter but more so to Musk's Twitter.
They settled into Mastodon nicely. They got used to Mastodon. All while not even expecting there to be more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon.
Some eventually learned the truth.
It may have been because they've clearly used "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" synonymously or implied or out-right claimed that certain features that Mastodon lacks aren't available in the Fediverse at all or something like that. And some reply guy from Friendica came along and told them there's more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon.
It may have been because they themselves found a post in their personal timeline that did stuff that's completely impossible on vanilla Mastodon. 500 characters. Or text formatting. Or a quote. Whatever. Maybe it simply got washed up in their timeline because one of their followers had boosted it. And they asked the poster, "Like, WTF is this witchcraft! How do yo even DO this on Mastodon" And the poster told them, "I'm not on Mastodon, I'm on Hubzilla, Hubzilla is not Mastodon, it isn't a Mastodon instance, it isn't even a Mastodon fork, it's independendent from Mastodon, but it's connected to Mastodon, yada yada yada."
Their reaction might have been, "There's more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon And whatever is out there can do all that cool stuff that I've been wanting to do so long Intriging! Tell me more!" Plus an instant follow request. Their first non-Mastodon connection.
But their reaction might just as well have been, "WTF! Nope! This is absolutely disturbing! I don't want ANY of this in the Fediverse! It was so nice and friendly and cosy with only Mastodon, and now there are these intruders! Make them go away!"
I'm not even kidding: I know someone whom a Mastodon user has blocked because he's on Friendica and not on Mastodon. To her, the Fediverse equalled Mastodon, full stop. To her, he was an evil black-hat hacker who used this evil black-hat hacker tool named Friendica to hack himself into her Mastodon.
I've recently learned that there are actually people who came over from Twitter to Mastodon around the time when Musk bought Twitter, and who definitely still believe the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And they've done so for almost a year and a half. They will shit bricks when they learn the truth.
Also, there are people who want certain features purged from the whole of the Fediverse.
First and foremost, posts with over 500 characters. It's often those who still use the official Mastodon app that can't fold long posts in whom long posts disturb, but not only them.
I've once run a poll on whether or not to CW posts with over 500 characters, and if so, how. One option was a total, Fediverse-wide ban on posts over 500 characters. One user actually voted for that. That's proof enough that this attitude is cold, hard reality.
Then there's text formatting. Or quote-posts remember that quote-tweets are used on to harass members of minorities, and they've often escapted to Mastodon because it doesn't have quote-toots. Or quotes in general.
All stuff that vanilla Mastodon can't do. At least not out of the box without some fancy, non-standard 3rd party mobile app work for quote-toots. So it's all stuff that some people want purged from the whole Fediverse.
If someone from Mastodon came to you and told you to stop posting over 500 characters or writing in bold type or italics, would you as an Akkoma user do so In everything you'll ever post If I guessed not, would I be correct
See, Mastodon users can't convince users of Akkoma or Firefish or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla to make use of features that Mastodon doesn't have. They can't force them either. There's no way for Mastodon users to have these features removed from those other projects either.
So the only remaining way to get rid of these features at least on these Mastodon users' home instances is by blocking everything from which posts with these features come.
But how should this blocking be done Instance by instance That's a game of whack-a-mole. For each instance you block, you discover two more instances. And new instances are being launched all the time. User by user That's even more tedious and even more of a game of whack-a-mole.
And this is the reason why this has never been attempted, much less actually carried out yet.
I mean, those who are used to being on non-Mastodon Fediverse projects like Akkoma or Misskey or Friendica or Hubzilla are also used to having thousands of characters to play with and all kinds of text formatting and bullet-point lists and quotes and quote-posts, sometimes even things like headlines or images embedded in posts.
It's only natural for them not to understand how those feel who only know Mastodon. But I've read enough Mastodon toots that I think I'm able to understand how they feel. And not exactly rarely, posts that do stuff impossible on Mastodon and/or clash with Mastodon's culture (which requires e.g. content warnings in the summary field, regardless of whether whatever you use has a better solution than that) make them feel disturbed.
That said, I'd say that right now the number of Mastodon users who actually demand everything that isn't Mastodon be Fediblocked is rather small. But make it possible, and tell them that it's possible, and more users will demand it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Defederation #DefederationMeta
Was ist hubzilla, pixelfeed friendica Keine Ahnung. Wenn's wichtig wird, werd ich's mir ansehen

Das wird noch frh genug wichtig.
Beispielsweise, wenn du dich wunderst, wie zum Geier ich ber 500 Zeichen posten kann. Oder fett oder kursiv oder unterstrichen oder oder Code oder so. Wo Mastodon das doch nicht kann.
Oder wenn du "im Fediverse", also auf Mastodon, unbedingt irgendein bestimmtes Feature haben willst. Und dann kommt ein Nicht-Mastodon-Nutzer an und zhlt lauter Fediverse-Projekte auf, die das schon lange haben.
Oder wenn du dich wunderst, warum ich all die Hashtags hier drunter habe. Und ich dir sage, die sind dafr da, Filter auszulsen, auch solche, die CWs generieren. Und du mich dann fragst, wieso ich nicht einfach eine CW schreibe. Und ich dir sage, da das hier auf Hubzilla bei Antworten nicht geht, und dann anfange zu erklren, da das hier eine ganz andere Struktur hat, weil Hubzilla weder ein Twitter- noch ein Mastodon-Klon ist. Und da im brigen leserseitig automatisierte CWs Teil der Hubzilla-Kultur sind, CWs im Summary-Feld dagegen nicht.
Oder wenn du dich berhaupt an irgendwas strst, was irgendein Fediverse-Projekt macht, was Mastodon so nicht macht. Und dich und in die Runde fragst, wieso nicht einfach alle das so machen wie Mastodon. Und dann kommt ein Friendica-Nutzer und sagt, Friendica macht das schon sechs Jahre lnger also, als es Mastodon berhaupt gibt.
Die Hnde auf die Ohren zu pressen und zu singen: "Lalalala, das Fediverse ist nur Mastodon, ich will von dem anderen Kram nix hren", fhrt zu nichts.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NichtNurMastodon

Google pixel's long exposure mode: een revolutie in smartphone fotografie Pixel Exposure Fotografie Fotografie Camera

I've actually done that.
I've had write an image description for a picture that I had previously described myself.
Me: ca. 8 hours, 25,271 characters, quite informative and explanatory, albeit not perfect.
LLaVA: ca. 5 seconds, 558 characters, uninformative, vague, partly completely wrong.
The comparison with both descriptions can be found . My analysis of the comparison can be found .
Verdict: When it comes to properly describing OpenSim pictures in a way that helps everyone understand the pictures, AI is completely useless.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLaVAIt's been over two months since the last time I've posted an image and even longer since the last time I've posted a meme.
Maybe I should do it again. But ever since I've started taking image descriptions seriously, each image or meme post has become a project that might take up most of the day.
It's hard enough already to find something that's interesting to show while not impossible to describe.
And I guess there are fewer users all across the Fediverse who appreciate my image descriptions than Mastodon users who block me for posting tens of thousands of characters at once because my image descriptions are so long. That's also because Misskey and the Forkeys reject all posts with a five-digit character count, so nobody there even receives my image posts, but not only.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Last updated: 2024-04-28






Guangxi Zhuang