ME/CFS und Long Covid kosten jhrlich
That's a good question.
The rule (I understand it as one) says that text must always be transcribed 100% verbatim, i.e. absolutely identical to the original. However, this already collides with the rules that image descriptions must not contain all caps because they tend to irritate screen readers, and that acronyms must be handled in a way that screen readers can deal with in a sensible way.
I guess, and I can only guess, that misspellings should be corrected when transcribing text, especially in alt-text.
In earlier image descriptions, all of which are long descriptions in the post text, I've transcribed misspellings as well and even added a "(sic!)" after them to point out that it wasn't me who misspelled it. However, doing so amounts to pointing out the misspellings, as would correcting them in the transcript and then explaining which words are misspelled in which way, even though would conform more with the "always transcribe verbatim" rule. Also, I've since declared these descriptions obsolete.
Unfortunately, I can't find any online resources about alt-texts and image descriptions that even only take misspellings in to-be-transcribed text into consideration, much less define how to deal with them. It's just like text that's unreadable in the image, but that can be sourced elsewhere: It's commonly treated like it doesn't exist.
# # # # # # # # # # # You can include the user name in the alt-text as plain text. Like so: "shenanigarian of Babel". Or like so: "crowk". Or like so: "crowkcritter.cafe".
You cannot, however, include the user name in alt-text as a working, clickable mention that will attract the attention of the mentioned, like so: "" or "". This doesn't work. Alt-text doesn't support hypertext, so hyperlinks and hashtags don't work there either.
# # # # # # # # First of all, it isn't about my requirements. Just like, surprise, surprise, Mastodon's alt-text police is not blind.
It's about general accessibility. And it's about Mastodon users acting inclusively towards blind or visually-impaired people and, at the same time, ableistically towards people with other physical disabilities. Just because they cling hard to the extra 1,500 characters that alt-text gives them per image to their meagre character count for posts.
Except for professional Web accessibility experts, literally nobody on Mastodon seems to know what alt-text really is for. Alt-text is meant to be a 1:1 stand-in for an image, in case the image can't be perceived for whichever reason.
Alt-text is not meant to be an additional source of information beyond what information the image conveys.
Mastodon's use of alt-text for extra information beyond the post character limit is just as much alt-text misuse as cramming alt-text with keywords for SEO on websites. Unfortunately, it is so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that even the Mastodon devs have played along and added that "ALT" button which most Mastodon users think is the default and the standard Fediverse-wide now.
But let me tell you something:
Mastodon and its forks are most likely the only Fediverse server applications with an alt-text button. And they're far from making up the whole Fediverse.
Misskey and its various forks don't have an alt-text button.
AFAIK, Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE don't have an alt-text button, and neither has Mangane.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, they all don't have an alt-text button.
Lemmy doesn't have an alt-text button. /kbin and Mbin don't have an alt-text button. PieFed doesn't have an alt-text button.
WriteFreely doesn't have an alt-text button. Plume doesn't have an alt-text button. WordPress doesn't have an alt-text button either.
Blogs in general don't have an alt-text button. Forums don't have an alt-text button. Static websites don't have an alt-text button.
Twitter/ doesn't have an alt-text button. Facebook doesn't have an alt-text button. Instagram doesn't have an alt-text button. Threads doesn't have an alt-text button. Tumblr doesn't have an alt-text button. Flickr doesn't have an alt-text button. Pinterest doesn't have an alt-text button. And so forth.
The W3C doesn't mention alt-text buttons. The WCAG don't mention alt-text buttons.
Why not Because they're all way behind Mastodon in accessibility
No, but because their developers know that alt-text is not an additional source of information for sighted people.
Literally the only place anywhere in the Web where alt-text both counts and is actively used as an additional source of information for sighted people is Mastodon. Plus its forks.
How I handle that I put all needed extra information into the post text. But I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla. My character limit is over 30,000 times higher than on Mastodon.
Seriously, if missing alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if useless alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if inaccurate alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if too lacking alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, then putting exclusive information into alt-text must be sanctioned as ableist just as well.
To those on Mastodon who oh so desperately need more than 500 characters: Move someplace in the Fediverse that has more than 500 characters. There's Fediverse server software from 3,000 characters to over 24,000,000 characters that, nonetheless, is federated with Mastodon.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Find the latitdue and longitude of any place Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.
The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.
Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.
NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.
And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.
No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.
The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.
In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.
Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.
Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.
Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.
But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.
It's . As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.
Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.
As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.
Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.
The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.
In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.
I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.
Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.
As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.
OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.
All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.
Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.
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Once again, same shot as yesterday, but with some coloring (split tones) and other stuff done to it. I think I prefer the original
-exposure Doing The Do.
Hope you don't mind the body size
A shot I've made several days ago of me on the treadmill, but didn't get into the "mood" to process it till this morning. The processing was quite simple really, nothing fancy. Maybe I'll try to "add a touch" to it later on if I feel like it that is.
The exposure here was for 32 minutes. Probably I should've raised the camera level a bit higher to be in level with my shoulders. Anyway, it was something to break the monotony and the block I'm going through at the moment, since I didn't do much with my camera for days now (actually, weeks). With summer coming in, and the security issues are the moment, it's hard to walk outside with a camera to try and find some abstracts. I need to think inward.
-exposure I wouldn't build it on Mastodon. Nor would I build it from scratch and then against Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only much more than Mastodon, but technologically much more diverse than just Mastodon.
The best way would be to build it as an add-on (a so-called "app") for (streams) or Forte. That way, you would neither have to deal with Mastodon's limitations (yes, Mastodon is very limited although this isn't apparent to those of its users who don't know anything else), nor would you have to develop Fediverse server software from scratch.
In case you don't know them:
(streams) is the unofficial community name of a very powerful but technically nameless Fediverse application whose code is in the streams repository (). It's essentially a Facebook-style social networking application with quite a number of extra features and the second-most recent member of a software family that dates all the way back to Friendica from 2010 (). It's a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla () which, in turn, was reworked from a fork of a fork of what's now Friendica.
And Forte () is a fork of the streams repository that's very similar to (streams) itself.
All this was originally done by one and the same developer, a professional in IT and software for close to half a century.
Here is an article I've put together with tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:
Unlike Mastodon which has only got four general-purpose profile fields in addition to the profile text, both (streams) and Forte already come with the profile fields that a good dating app would need such as:
A dating app could easily tie into the directory and make use of these profile fields. It could use a tag of its own in the keyword field so that it only shows channels that use this app (I'm not sure if it's possible to detect which channel has which apps installed).
One big advantage for users is that they don't have to use their daily-driver channel for the dating app. On Mastodon and in most of the Fediverse, your account is both your login and your identity. On (streams) and Forte, you can have multiple fully independent identities, each with its own name, its own ID, its own profile, its own contacts, its own posts and conversations, its own settings etc. etc., all behind one and the same login. It's like having multiple Mastodon accounts behind one login. That way, users don't have to reveal to everyone who knows their official daily-driver channel that they're using this dating app.
Also, Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. You literally have to soft-fork it and edit the source code to change the limit. Both (streams) and Forte are essentially unlimited in characters (their actual character limit is over 24 million).
Privacy and security are much higher on (streams) and Forte than on Mastodon, in fact, much higher than most Fediverse users can even imagine. Private messages are actually literally private. On Mastodon, a direct message only defines whom it's sent to. On (streams) and Forte, permissions come into play. The start post in a conversation defines who is allowed to see the conversation. Not only that post, but all comments as well. It's literally impossible to pull someone else into an existing private conversation by mentioning because that someone simply isn't allowed to see anything in the conversation.
So when you're chatting with a woman via PM, and she dislikes you, she can't shame or dogpile you by pulling her friends into the conversation.
On top of that, although even Friendica already had quote-posts since 2010, private messages cannot be quote-posted.
For a developer, all it takes to build this is PHP plus database know-how. Like the whole rest of the family, (streams) and Forte don't need anything more than a LAMP stack. No Ruby on Rails, no Elixir, no TypeScript or Vue.js or any other JavaScript, no .NET.
Deploying a (streams) or Forte app is easy, too: Create a public git repository for it, keep it there, and server admins can add your repository to their servers and activate your app server-side. Both (streams) and Forte are very modular and designed to be easy to expand.
Most of this would be possible with Hubzilla as well which is much bigger in terms of users and available servers. However, Hubzilla has got one disadvantage: Its directory only shows Hubzilla and (streams) channels, i.e. channels that use Hubzilla's native Zot protocol. That's because ActivityPub support on Hubzilla is provided by another app, it's optional, it's off by default, and the directory can't tie into it. On (streams), ActivityPub support is still optional, but more advanced than on Hubzilla, built into the core and on by default. And Forte doesn't support anything else than ActivityPub.
In theory, it should be possible to build such a dating app for all three.
Also, yes, in theory, channels that use such a dating app can connect to Mastodon. But Mastodon users couldn't use that dating app. Mastodon simply doesn't have any support for profile fields which it itself doesn't have. Also, Mastodon is too unsecure, and meaningful conversations are difficult if one side is limited to 500 characters. And I would hate to see this dating app bound hard to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules, neither of which take the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into account.
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Zitat Ende
Ich beschftige mich schon seit Jahren mit Alt-Texten und Bildbeschreibungen. Ich habe ber 50 verschiedene Leitfden zu dem Thema gelesen . Whrend die meisten Fediverse-Nutzer entweder gar keine Alt-Texte schreiben, sie gedankenlos hinschmieren oder sie gleich komplett an eine KI delegieren, bin ich gefhlt der einzige, der kontinuierlich versucht, seine Bildbeschreibungen immer weiter zu verbessern und zu optimieren und sogar Maximalanforderungen zu erfllen.
Ich nehme das Thema also ernst, absolut ernst.
Und ich kann aus eigener persnlicher Erfahrung sagen: Eine wirklich gute, regelkonforme Bildbeschreibung, die unter allen Umstnden und mit allen Nutzeroberflchen und Apps optimal funktioniert, ist nicht in, Zitat,
Zitat Ende, geschrieben.
Oder kann es sein, da das Fediverse und ganz besonders Mastodon, wo stndig auf Alt-Texte gepocht wird, gar keine guten, qualitativ hochwertigen, optimalen Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen haben will
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My goal is to not be sanctioned and/or lectured by the alt-text police for allegedly being lazy and/or careless.
In order to achieve that, I must be ahead of everyone's requirements. Whatever these requirements may be.
But in order to achieve that, I must know their requirements. Everyone's requirements.
If you want me to follow your rules, I need to know your rules.
Right now, I'm probably vastly overcompliant with everyone's rules with only a few exceptions that I can't comply with (alt-texts must not be longer than 200 or 125 or 100 characters, posts in the Fediverse must not be longer than 500 characters, all of the text in an image must always be transcribed in the alt-text etc.).
This way, I hope that my image posts will stay in compliance with existing image description quality standards for a few years, and when they no longer are, they're so old that nobody demands I upgrade my image descriptions to then-current standards.
tldr: "Just do it" doesn't cut it. Just doing it is likely to get you sanctioned because you don't do it well enough. And something is no longer better than nothing.
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Upon confirming your follow request, they've also sent you a follow request. They're obviously curious about what you toot and what you boost.
But:
They aren't on Mastodon. You think they are. But they aren't. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla.
They didn't decide to follow you back. It was their software, Friendica or Hubzilla, that absolutely has to follow you back in order to let you follow someone on it.
See, and Mastodon have "followers" and the concept of "following". Connections that always go one way. Even if there's a "mutual", it's two connections. One that goes one way, one that goes the other way.
Friendica and Hubzilla only have "mutuals", but not as two separate connections in one way each like Mastodon mutuals, but as one connection that goes both ways. Like "friends" on Facebook. They call them "contacts".
Friendica and Hubzilla don't understand one-way "following". They understand Mastodon follow requests as requests to create a two-way connection. And when the request is confirmed, they create a two-way connection.
Mastodon, on the other hand, doesn't understand two-way "contacts". When Friendica or Hubzilla approves a two-way connection, Mastodon understands it as confirming a one-way follow request plus, independently, deliberately, intentionally, sending a follow request back.
However, the follow request you get from a Friendica account or Hubzilla channel that you've just followed was not sent deliberately or intentionally. It was fully automated. It was to turn your follow request into the kind of two-way connection that Friendica and Hubzilla understand.
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It must be 100% accurate, I guess that's a given. This also means that it must be 100% written by hand as opposed to AI-generated.
But what are the minimum requirements in terms of details for an alt-text to be helpful
Can alt-text be too long/too detailed to be helpful
I'm going to limit my alt-texts to a maximum of 512 characters. Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS and the other Misskey forks automatically delete any alt-text that's longer than 512 characters, making it appear like I hadn't provided any alt-text to begin with, that's why. Newspaper scans aside, can alt-text with no more than 512 characters be too lacking in detail to be helpful
What if, in addition to an alt-text with a maximum of 512 characters, I also provide a much longer and much more detailed image description in the post text (My character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million. I can post long descriptions with tens of thousands of characters in one piece, and I have done so in the past.)
Would that be acceptable to provide the details in description that do not fit into an alt-text of no more than 512 characters
Or is that unacceptable because the description in the alt-text must be as detailed as required, and additional descriptions in the post don't count
Or is that unacceptable because there must only be one description to each image, namely in the alt-text and only in the alt-text
Or is that unacceptable because it makes my post longer than 500 characters
Are explanations and other additional information about the image allowed in the post text Because because .
Or must explanations etc. absolutely be in the alt-text in order for the alt-text to be "helpful" enough
Must they even be only in the alt-text so that the post never exceeds 500 characters
What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 512 characters What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 1,500 characters either, but I absolutely must describe and explain them in the alt-text
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # The alt-text police of the Mastodon Home Owners' Association (Mastodon HOA) have a tendency to be overzealous. And they don't talk to each other. They all act for themselves as lone wolves with exactly no coordination amongst each other whatsoever. You never know what kinds of rules they whip up for themselves.
Chances are that they only let image descriptions count that come directly with the image. If they acknowledge an image description outside the alt-text, it must be in the post itself. Not as an external link, but the description text itself.
Besides, at least some in the Mastodon HOA have problems with external links. And I don't just mean that they don't trust embedded links whose URL they can't see in plain sight, the kind that Hubzilla can create and Mastodon can't (not that Hubzilla couldn't fake a plain-sight link by embedding a different URL than the visible).
I don't mean either that probably a majority of Mastodon users don't even recognise embedded links without a visible URL as such because they don't know that such a thing can exist in the Fediverse, because Mastodon can't make them.
No, what I mean is the notion that external links for explanations are inherently bad from an accessibility point of view. "Mastodon" (as in how Mastodon users experience the Fediverse, i.e. the Mastodon Web UI or any of the popular mobile phone apps) is sufficiently accessible. But the Web outside of "Mastodon" (same definition again) may not be accessible enough.
A few years ago, I've literally read a Mastodon toot in which someone said that explanations must not be linked to. Linked websites have a risk of not being accessible. Explanations must always be directly in the same post. Apparently, they thought that everything and anything can be explained and broken down until everyone understands it within 500 characters.
This is also why Mastodon users tend to explain their images in the alt-text. It's only there where they have at least halfway enough characters for an explanation, 1,500 per image as opposed to usually only 500 in the post text. (On Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, the alt-text is a separate database field that exists separately for each of the up to four images per message.)
That is, because . But nobody on Mastodon knows that.
It should be obvious that what counts for explanations counts for visual descriptions just as well.
And in fact, regarding Hubzilla articles, they're actually right. I've once pointed an actually blind screen reader user to an article on my Hubzilla channel. She said she couldn't even navigate the Web interface. She literally couldn't get to the text body of the article to have it read out by her screen reader.
Hubzilla's Web interface, no matter which app is opened, is not accessible. It does not work with screen readers. It's largely still stuck in 2012 when nobdy made any ruckus about the accessibility of hobbyist Web projects.
The only reason why at least some blind or visually-impaired users can read our Hubzilla posts and comments and DMs is because they're all on Mastodon, and they read our content either on Mastodon's Web UI or a Mastodon app that supports screen readers. But they do not read our content at the source. Because they can't.
I actually took into consideration linking to my long image descriptions. But my idea was not to link to a Hubzilla article, nor to a Hubzilla wiki or a Hubzilla card. No, my idea was to write a plain HTML document, upload it to my file space and link to that.
I've dropped that idea for various reasons:
And that's why I can't put my additional long description in an external document.
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First of all, implementing nomadic identity would drastically alter the way how Mastodon works. It would make Mastodon, something that's supposed to be dead-simple, a great deal more complex.
I mean, in order to really pull this through all the way (as in Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte-level nomadic identity), your identity, your posts, your followers, your followed, your settings, your filters, your everything, all this must no longer directly reside in your account. It must be containerised in something that Hubzilla calls "channel", and that container would then reside in your account and be able to reside in multiple accounts on multiple independent servers.
Next, when Mastodon introduces a new feature, they tend to try to market it as their own original pioneering invention. They can't do that with nomadic identity. There are already enough people who know that nomadic identity was actually pioneered by Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed.
Furthermore, before Gargron implements something invented by Mike Macgirvin, hell will freeze over. Even if he tried to sell it as a unique feature of Mastodon, he'd still secretly have to admit that there's something that Mike did right. And quite a few eyes would be on him in hope of Mastodon getting more features from stuff created by Mike.
Ever heard of OpenWebAuth magic sign-on Invented by Mike for Osada and Zap in the late 2010s, then backported to Hubzilla.
It was proposed for Mastodon, even if it was only client-side (as in, Mastodon logins would be detected by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but Mastodon wouldn't be able to detect OpenWebAuth logins itself). This went as far as a merge request on GitHub. It could have been built into Mastodon. The code was literally there.
The merge request was silently rejected. And that would have been a fairly small change in comparison to the complete rebuild that'd be necessary for a full-blown, Forte-level, server-side implementation of nomadic identity.
I mean, had to implement nomadic identity on Mitra client-side. That wouldn't be possible on Mastodon, what with every other Fediverse app being a Mastodon client. Mastodon would require a server-side implementation.
Seriously, it'd be easier to strap Mastodon's Web UI to Forte or Hubzilla with the necessary changes to adapt it to a vastly different backend.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # If I were to do that, my blogging platform would be Hubzilla as well.
Granted, articles don't federate to Mastodon, and 95% of all Mastodon users wouldn't even notice that the blog post is part of the same channel as the announcement post, as in, the blog post technically is in the Fediverse. But it is, so someone who is Fediverse-savvy enough might point out that, at least as far as accessibility is concerned, the same rules apply to non-federating Hubzilla articles as to Mastodon toots.
On the other hand, it could all be futile anyway because Mastodon users aren't exactly known for being keen on opening links.
# # # # # # # # # That's the trouble with virtual worlds.
The first thing about them that has newbies in awe is the technology. An entire big world to explore, all in 3-D, and all the possibilities it promises to have. Nowadays also, "The Metaverse exists! It's alive!"
Next, when they're finally in-world, they'll have to learn the ropes. It's that what keeps them busy now. And it'll keep them busy for the longer, the more complicated everything is, and the less help they get.
Second Life has the Eiger North Face of learning curves, no tutorials, precious little end user documentation, no official Linden helpdesk as a surrogate for documentation and next to no mentors who are able and willing to take a newbie by the hand, guide them to a sandbox and teach and train them for a few hours.* It'll keep newbies busy for weeks or months. OpenSim is even worse.
While learning the ropes, they enter the third phase. And that's being amazed about how awesome everything looks. Especially if they have a powerful enough machine that can really make stuff look good with lighting and shadows and materials and reflections and whatnot.
It'll take them quite a while until they even notice that the place has a culture in the first place. It'll take them even longer to learn about the culture, adopt it, live by it.
That does not mean, however, that they won't interact with anyone until that has happened. From when they've first entered the new world to when they really live and breathe its culture, they'll misbehave without even being aware that they're misbehaving.
In fact, I guess all this is also why there is no unified idea of what Second Life or OpenSim actually is. It is why there's constant friction between character players/light roleplayers on the one side and those who take it for a fancy 3-D chat app on the other side. It usually takes the chatters literal years to even only find out that character play exists, and even then, they'll never really tolerate the character players and their behaviour.
I guess the Jackie's Survivor Tips HUD would be the most useful if all newbies had it not only in their inventories, but actually attached the moment they rez for the first time.
*I've seen exactly this happen in my home grid a few years ago. Early during a DJ event, an absolute newbie with a hopelessly mangled avatar showed up. One of us ended up taking them to our sandbox and tutoring them for several hours.
# # # # # # # # #On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image descriptions for each one of my original images. One is short and goes into the alt-text, and I'm going to limit all my future alt-text to a maximum of 512 characters (otherwise users on Misskey, Sharkey etc. will believe I haven't written any alt-text because ).
The other one is enormous degrees of magnitudes longer than anything most Fediverse users have ever read in the Fediverse. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not, it contains verbatim transcripts of said text.
The nature of my original images . Besides, the only way to really be safe from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA is to overcomply with whatever minimum standards for good image descriptions anyone of them may have.
On the other hand, the self-same Mastodon HOA is likely to sanction me for the self-same posts. The reason: The posts are way too long. They exceed the limit of 500 characters that's so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that many Mastodonians are eager to defend it. Even if I hide them behind a summary with a content warning about the post being long. If I were to appease these Mastodonians, I'd have to underdescribe my images, and I wouldn't be able to explain them at all.
Speaking of underdescribing, I think at least some members of the alt-text police actually don't let image descriptions in the post count. What counts is only the image description in the alt-text. It must be accurate, it must be sufficiently detailed, and it must contain all the text transcripts. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they demanded sufficient explanations in the alt-text, not knowing that .
Even if all requirements of a good alt-text by alt-text police standards are met or even exceeded by the image description in the post, chances are the alt-text police will still sanction me if the alt-text doesn't meet these criteria.
When it comes to my original images, even squeezing all that into the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts imposed by Mastodon is pretty much impossible. Squeezing it into the 512-character limit for alt-text imposed by Misskey and its forks is even more impossible.
The only winning move is to not play at all. Curiously, some people are even upset about me rarely posting any images. Although they don't follow me. Although the channel that I use for original images () has next to no reach, so even if I were to post images again, practically nobody would notice. Although it doesn't even seem that there's much interest in that kind of images in the first place.
But apparently, according to some, posting images with only rudimentary alt-text whipped up in a minute, no long description and no explanations is always so much better than not posting images because it takes so much time and effort to describe them.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I really need to work more on my alt-text and image description wiki.
I don't know how many users will find a wiki with 50+ pages useful, but all that information must be gathered in one place, adapted to the culture and technology of the Fediverse and especially to Mastodon's culture and published for people to read.
I mean, the "how" has to include the elimination of quite a number of mistakes that just about everyone in the Fediverse keeps on making because they don't know that it's wrong.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This may be true for real-life cat photos. Just about the most simple images imaginable in the Fediverse.
But what if I don't just post real-life cat photos in which I don't have to describe much more than the cat Because I don't post real-life cat photos. I don't post real-life photos at all unless they're meme templates.
My own original images are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. This means:
As for the actual alt-texts, I'll try to keep them at 512 characters or fewer, difficult as that will be. But I'll do that for technical reasons: While Misskey and its forks are supposed to truncate longer alt-texts at the 512-character mark, they actually delete them due to a bug. If I make them longer, users on Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc. will believe that I haven't written any alt-text in the first place.
But I will keep adding long, fully detailed image descriptions to the post text where I have much more room. I need room for sufficiently detailed descriptions, I need room for all the explanations necessary for people to understand the post and the images and the descriptions, and I often need room for all the text transcripts.
For example, do you know what the main building on Nebadon Izumi's Universal Campus looks like Would it be sufficient for you if I just name-dropped it Or must I describe what it looks like
If so, well, that's 40,000 characters of description only for that building and what's visible inside it because the building mostly has glass panes for walls. 7,800 characters only for the front of a building that's five times as long as it's wide. 500 characters only for that one piece of structure around the main entrance doors. In fact, over 1,600 characters for the doors. Also, 3,200 characters for a teleport panel, including transcripts of 13 bits of text. Been there, done that, got the figures from there.
Don't worry, I will always hide long posts behind a summary with content warnings, including a warning about the post being tens of thousands of characters long due to the long image descriptions.
In fact, my meme posts will continue to be very long themselves, although not quite as long as posts with original pictures. Describing the visuals is easy most of the time, and it can be done in 512 characters or fewer. But they still need explanations. Otherwise, nobody will understand anything. All my meme posts are about obscure topics, too.
Now I'm wondering what's more likely to upset people and make them sanction me in some way, including blocking me without saying a word. Insufficient image descriptions Insufficient alt-text in particular Not putting all the text transcripts into the alt-text where many insist that they belong Or posts behind summaries and CWs that indicate that these posts are 25,000, 40,000, 60,000 characters long
But seriously, even if I cut down visual descriptions to a more normal level, which would come with its own nasty side-effects, I would still need to explain everything. So no, I can't keep image posts at 500 characters or fewer.
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The rule (I understand it as one) says that text must always be transcribed 100% verbatim, i.e. absolutely identical to the original. However, this already collides with the rules that image descriptions must not contain all caps because they tend to irritate screen readers, and that acronyms must be handled in a way that screen readers can deal with in a sensible way.
I guess, and I can only guess, that misspellings should be corrected when transcribing text, especially in alt-text.
In earlier image descriptions, all of which are long descriptions in the post text, I've transcribed misspellings as well and even added a "(sic!)" after them to point out that it wasn't me who misspelled it. However, doing so amounts to pointing out the misspellings, as would correcting them in the transcript and then explaining which words are misspelled in which way, even though would conform more with the "always transcribe verbatim" rule. Also, I've since declared these descriptions obsolete.
Unfortunately, I can't find any online resources about alt-texts and image descriptions that even only take misspellings in to-be-transcribed text into consideration, much less define how to deal with them. It's just like text that's unreadable in the image, but that can be sourced elsewhere: It's commonly treated like it doesn't exist.
# # # # # # # # # # # You can include the user name in the alt-text as plain text. Like so: "shenanigarian of Babel". Or like so: "crowk". Or like so: "crowkcritter.cafe".
You cannot, however, include the user name in alt-text as a working, clickable mention that will attract the attention of the mentioned, like so: "" or "". This doesn't work. Alt-text doesn't support hypertext, so hyperlinks and hashtags don't work there either.
# # # # # # # # First of all, it isn't about my requirements. Just like, surprise, surprise, Mastodon's alt-text police is not blind.
It's about general accessibility. And it's about Mastodon users acting inclusively towards blind or visually-impaired people and, at the same time, ableistically towards people with other physical disabilities. Just because they cling hard to the extra 1,500 characters that alt-text gives them per image to their meagre character count for posts.
Except for professional Web accessibility experts, literally nobody on Mastodon seems to know what alt-text really is for. Alt-text is meant to be a 1:1 stand-in for an image, in case the image can't be perceived for whichever reason.
Alt-text is not meant to be an additional source of information beyond what information the image conveys.
Mastodon's use of alt-text for extra information beyond the post character limit is just as much alt-text misuse as cramming alt-text with keywords for SEO on websites. Unfortunately, it is so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that even the Mastodon devs have played along and added that "ALT" button which most Mastodon users think is the default and the standard Fediverse-wide now.
But let me tell you something:
Mastodon and its forks are most likely the only Fediverse server applications with an alt-text button. And they're far from making up the whole Fediverse.
Misskey and its various forks don't have an alt-text button.
AFAIK, Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE don't have an alt-text button, and neither has Mangane.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, they all don't have an alt-text button.
Lemmy doesn't have an alt-text button. /kbin and Mbin don't have an alt-text button. PieFed doesn't have an alt-text button.
WriteFreely doesn't have an alt-text button. Plume doesn't have an alt-text button. WordPress doesn't have an alt-text button either.
Blogs in general don't have an alt-text button. Forums don't have an alt-text button. Static websites don't have an alt-text button.
Twitter/ doesn't have an alt-text button. Facebook doesn't have an alt-text button. Instagram doesn't have an alt-text button. Threads doesn't have an alt-text button. Tumblr doesn't have an alt-text button. Flickr doesn't have an alt-text button. Pinterest doesn't have an alt-text button. And so forth.
The W3C doesn't mention alt-text buttons. The WCAG don't mention alt-text buttons.
Why not Because they're all way behind Mastodon in accessibility
No, but because their developers know that alt-text is not an additional source of information for sighted people.
Literally the only place anywhere in the Web where alt-text both counts and is actively used as an additional source of information for sighted people is Mastodon. Plus its forks.
How I handle that I put all needed extra information into the post text. But I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla. My character limit is over 30,000 times higher than on Mastodon.
Seriously, if missing alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if useless alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if inaccurate alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, if too lacking alt-text is sanctioned as ableist, then putting exclusive information into alt-text must be sanctioned as ableist just as well.
To those on Mastodon who oh so desperately need more than 500 characters: Move someplace in the Fediverse that has more than 500 characters. There's Fediverse server software from 3,000 characters to over 24,000,000 characters that, nonetheless, is federated with Mastodon.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Find the latitdue and longitude of any place Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.
The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.
Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.
NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.
And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.
No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.
The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.
In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.
Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.
Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.
Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.
But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.
It's . As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.
Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.
As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.
Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.
The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.
In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.
I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.
Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.
As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.
OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.
All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.
Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.
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ME/CFS und Long Covid kosten jhrlich rund 64 Milliarden Euro: Laut einem aktuellen Bericht haben Ende 2025 rund 757.000 Menschen in Deutschland an Long Covid gelitten. Dazu kamen knapp 657.000 an...
Doing The Do (2).Once again, same shot as yesterday, but with some coloring (split tones) and other stuff done to it. I think I prefer the original
-exposure Doing The Do.
Hope you don't mind the body size
A shot I've made several days ago of me on the treadmill, but didn't get into the "mood" to process it till this morning. The processing was quite simple really, nothing fancy. Maybe I'll try to "add a touch" to it later on if I feel like it that is.
The exposure here was for 32 minutes. Probably I should've raised the camera level a bit higher to be in level with my shoulders. Anyway, it was something to break the monotony and the block I'm going through at the moment, since I didn't do much with my camera for days now (actually, weeks). With summer coming in, and the security issues are the moment, it's hard to walk outside with a camera to try and find some abstracts. I need to think inward.
-exposure I wouldn't build it on Mastodon. Nor would I build it from scratch and then against Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only much more than Mastodon, but technologically much more diverse than just Mastodon.
The best way would be to build it as an add-on (a so-called "app") for (streams) or Forte. That way, you would neither have to deal with Mastodon's limitations (yes, Mastodon is very limited although this isn't apparent to those of its users who don't know anything else), nor would you have to develop Fediverse server software from scratch.
In case you don't know them:
(streams) is the unofficial community name of a very powerful but technically nameless Fediverse application whose code is in the streams repository (). It's essentially a Facebook-style social networking application with quite a number of extra features and the second-most recent member of a software family that dates all the way back to Friendica from 2010 (). It's a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla () which, in turn, was reworked from a fork of a fork of what's now Friendica.
And Forte () is a fork of the streams repository that's very similar to (streams) itself.
All this was originally done by one and the same developer, a professional in IT and software for close to half a century.
Here is an article I've put together with tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:
Unlike Mastodon which has only got four general-purpose profile fields in addition to the profile text, both (streams) and Forte already come with the profile fields that a good dating app would need such as:
- pronouns (pick one out of 3 or none at all)
- birthday (from which the age is calculated)
- six free-text location fields, even including Facebook-style "hometown" where you used to live you can select for yourself how far you want to go into detail with revealing your location
- gender (pick one out of 14 or none at all)
- marital status (pick one out of 31 or none at all) plus who plus date since
- sexual preference (pick one out of 9 or none at all)
- a separate keyword field
- political views
- religious views
- hobbies/interests
- likes
- dislikes
- other channels/Fediverse identities
- musical interests
- books/literature
- television
- film/dance/culture/entertainment
- love/romance
- work/employment
- school/education
A dating app could easily tie into the directory and make use of these profile fields. It could use a tag of its own in the keyword field so that it only shows channels that use this app (I'm not sure if it's possible to detect which channel has which apps installed).
One big advantage for users is that they don't have to use their daily-driver channel for the dating app. On Mastodon and in most of the Fediverse, your account is both your login and your identity. On (streams) and Forte, you can have multiple fully independent identities, each with its own name, its own ID, its own profile, its own contacts, its own posts and conversations, its own settings etc. etc., all behind one and the same login. It's like having multiple Mastodon accounts behind one login. That way, users don't have to reveal to everyone who knows their official daily-driver channel that they're using this dating app.
Also, Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. You literally have to soft-fork it and edit the source code to change the limit. Both (streams) and Forte are essentially unlimited in characters (their actual character limit is over 24 million).
Privacy and security are much higher on (streams) and Forte than on Mastodon, in fact, much higher than most Fediverse users can even imagine. Private messages are actually literally private. On Mastodon, a direct message only defines whom it's sent to. On (streams) and Forte, permissions come into play. The start post in a conversation defines who is allowed to see the conversation. Not only that post, but all comments as well. It's literally impossible to pull someone else into an existing private conversation by mentioning because that someone simply isn't allowed to see anything in the conversation.
So when you're chatting with a woman via PM, and she dislikes you, she can't shame or dogpile you by pulling her friends into the conversation.
On top of that, although even Friendica already had quote-posts since 2010, private messages cannot be quote-posted.
For a developer, all it takes to build this is PHP plus database know-how. Like the whole rest of the family, (streams) and Forte don't need anything more than a LAMP stack. No Ruby on Rails, no Elixir, no TypeScript or Vue.js or any other JavaScript, no .NET.
Deploying a (streams) or Forte app is easy, too: Create a public git repository for it, keep it there, and server admins can add your repository to their servers and activate your app server-side. Both (streams) and Forte are very modular and designed to be easy to expand.
Most of this would be possible with Hubzilla as well which is much bigger in terms of users and available servers. However, Hubzilla has got one disadvantage: Its directory only shows Hubzilla and (streams) channels, i.e. channels that use Hubzilla's native Zot protocol. That's because ActivityPub support on Hubzilla is provided by another app, it's optional, it's off by default, and the directory can't tie into it. On (streams), ActivityPub support is still optional, but more advanced than on Hubzilla, built into the core and on by default. And Forte doesn't support anything else than ActivityPub.
In theory, it should be possible to build such a dating app for all three.
Also, yes, in theory, channels that use such a dating app can connect to Mastodon. But Mastodon users couldn't use that dating app. Mastodon simply doesn't have any support for profile fields which it itself doesn't have. Also, Mastodon is too unsecure, and meaningful conversations are difficult if one side is limited to 500 characters. And I would hate to see this dating app bound hard to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules, neither of which take the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into account.
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Cch lm Trng lng o st me thm ngon ti nh
Trng lng o st me l mn khai v c o, kt hp v ngt chua ca me v mm mn ca lng . Mn ny khng ch hp dn mt m cn d thc hin, ph hp
- garantiert 100% akkurat ist
- genau das beschreibt, was im Kontext des Post wichtig ist, plus das, was die Leserschaft im Hinblick auf Vorwissen und zu erwartendes Interesse am Thema noch zustzlich beschrieben haben mu
- Formen korrekt und auf inklusive Art beschreibt
- Mae und Positionen korrekt und auf inklusive Art beschreibt
- Farben korrekt und auf inklusive Art beschreibt
- Personen korrekt, angemessen und gem dem im zweiten Punkt geforderten Detailgrad beschreibt
- Texte auf dem Bild 100% exakt Zeichen fr Zeichen transkribiert
- sich aber daran hlt, Texte in Grobuchstaben nicht in Grobuchstaben zu transkribieren
- Abkrzungen in Transkripten auf eine korrekte, inklusive Art und Weise zu handhaben
- sich daran hlt, nicht mit "Bild" oder "Foto" anzufangen
- sich daran hlt, keine Informationen zu enthalten, die nicht auch auf dem Bild und/oder im Posttext zu finden sind
- sich daran hlt, keine Zeilenumbrche zu enthalten
- sich daran hlt, keine Anfhrungszeichen zu enthalten, wie sie auf einer Computertastatur oder der Bildschirmtastatur eines Smartphone zu finden sind
- sich daran hlt, keine Links zu enthalten
- sich daran hlt, keine Hashtags zu enthalten
- sich daran hlt, keine Emoji zu enthalten
- sich daran hlt, keine Fachsprache und keinen Fachjargon zu verwenden oder, falls das absolut unausweichlich sein sollte, die jeweiligen Begriffe zu erklren
ein paar Sekunden Denk- und Schreibzeit
Zitat Ende
Ich beschftige mich schon seit Jahren mit Alt-Texten und Bildbeschreibungen. Ich habe ber 50 verschiedene Leitfden zu dem Thema gelesen . Whrend die meisten Fediverse-Nutzer entweder gar keine Alt-Texte schreiben, sie gedankenlos hinschmieren oder sie gleich komplett an eine KI delegieren, bin ich gefhlt der einzige, der kontinuierlich versucht, seine Bildbeschreibungen immer weiter zu verbessern und zu optimieren und sogar Maximalanforderungen zu erfllen.
Ich nehme das Thema also ernst, absolut ernst.
Und ich kann aus eigener persnlicher Erfahrung sagen: Eine wirklich gute, regelkonforme Bildbeschreibung, die unter allen Umstnden und mit allen Nutzeroberflchen und Apps optimal funktioniert, ist nicht in, Zitat,
ein paar Sekunden Denk- und Schreibzeit
Zitat Ende, geschrieben.
Oder kann es sein, da das Fediverse und ganz besonders Mastodon, wo stndig auf Alt-Texte gepocht wird, gar keine guten, qualitativ hochwertigen, optimalen Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen haben will
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Cch lm Trng lng o ngm tng Mn n nhanh gn, ngon ming
Mnh s hng dn cc bn cch lm Trng lng o ngm tng siu n gin, ch cn vi nguyn liu quen thuc v thi gian chun b ngn gn. Trng c luc
My goal is to not be sanctioned and/or lectured by the alt-text police for allegedly being lazy and/or careless.
In order to achieve that, I must be ahead of everyone's requirements. Whatever these requirements may be.
But in order to achieve that, I must know their requirements. Everyone's requirements.
If you want me to follow your rules, I need to know your rules.
Right now, I'm probably vastly overcompliant with everyone's rules with only a few exceptions that I can't comply with (alt-texts must not be longer than 200 or 125 or 100 characters, posts in the Fediverse must not be longer than 500 characters, all of the text in an image must always be transcribed in the alt-text etc.).
This way, I hope that my image posts will stay in compliance with existing image description quality standards for a few years, and when they no longer are, they're so old that nobody demands I upgrade my image descriptions to then-current standards.
tldr: "Just do it" doesn't cut it. Just doing it is likely to get you sanctioned because you don't do it well enough. And something is no longer better than nothing.
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keep developing those distance#drones friends, so can be by them and start , the , the .
Okay, so you're on Mastodon. You've sent a follow request to what you think is another Mastodon account.Upon confirming your follow request, they've also sent you a follow request. They're obviously curious about what you toot and what you boost.
But:
They aren't on Mastodon. You think they are. But they aren't. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla.
They didn't decide to follow you back. It was their software, Friendica or Hubzilla, that absolutely has to follow you back in order to let you follow someone on it.
See, and Mastodon have "followers" and the concept of "following". Connections that always go one way. Even if there's a "mutual", it's two connections. One that goes one way, one that goes the other way.
Friendica and Hubzilla only have "mutuals", but not as two separate connections in one way each like Mastodon mutuals, but as one connection that goes both ways. Like "friends" on Facebook. They call them "contacts".
Friendica and Hubzilla don't understand one-way "following". They understand Mastodon follow requests as requests to create a two-way connection. And when the request is confirmed, they create a two-way connection.
Mastodon, on the other hand, doesn't understand two-way "contacts". When Friendica or Hubzilla approves a two-way connection, Mastodon understands it as confirming a one-way follow request plus, independently, deliberately, intentionally, sending a follow request back.
However, the follow request you get from a Friendica account or Hubzilla channel that you've just followed was not sent deliberately or intentionally. It was fully automated. It was to turn your follow request into the kind of two-way connection that Friendica and Hubzilla understand.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Cch lm trng ct lng o hnh git nc Luc nhanh, ngon chun v
Bn s c tri nghim trng ct lng o vi hnh git nc tinh t, va mm va thm. Mnh s hng dn chi tit cch luc trng sao cho lng vn cn ch
It must be 100% accurate, I guess that's a given. This also means that it must be 100% written by hand as opposed to AI-generated.
But what are the minimum requirements in terms of details for an alt-text to be helpful
Can alt-text be too long/too detailed to be helpful
I'm going to limit my alt-texts to a maximum of 512 characters. Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS and the other Misskey forks automatically delete any alt-text that's longer than 512 characters, making it appear like I hadn't provided any alt-text to begin with, that's why. Newspaper scans aside, can alt-text with no more than 512 characters be too lacking in detail to be helpful
What if, in addition to an alt-text with a maximum of 512 characters, I also provide a much longer and much more detailed image description in the post text (My character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million. I can post long descriptions with tens of thousands of characters in one piece, and I have done so in the past.)
Would that be acceptable to provide the details in description that do not fit into an alt-text of no more than 512 characters
Or is that unacceptable because the description in the alt-text must be as detailed as required, and additional descriptions in the post don't count
Or is that unacceptable because there must only be one description to each image, namely in the alt-text and only in the alt-text
Or is that unacceptable because it makes my post longer than 500 characters
Are explanations and other additional information about the image allowed in the post text Because because .
Or must explanations etc. absolutely be in the alt-text in order for the alt-text to be "helpful" enough
Must they even be only in the alt-text so that the post never exceeds 500 characters
What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 512 characters What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 1,500 characters either, but I absolutely must describe and explain them in the alt-text
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # The alt-text police of the Mastodon Home Owners' Association (Mastodon HOA) have a tendency to be overzealous. And they don't talk to each other. They all act for themselves as lone wolves with exactly no coordination amongst each other whatsoever. You never know what kinds of rules they whip up for themselves.
Chances are that they only let image descriptions count that come directly with the image. If they acknowledge an image description outside the alt-text, it must be in the post itself. Not as an external link, but the description text itself.
Besides, at least some in the Mastodon HOA have problems with external links. And I don't just mean that they don't trust embedded links whose URL they can't see in plain sight, the kind that Hubzilla can create and Mastodon can't (not that Hubzilla couldn't fake a plain-sight link by embedding a different URL than the visible).
I don't mean either that probably a majority of Mastodon users don't even recognise embedded links without a visible URL as such because they don't know that such a thing can exist in the Fediverse, because Mastodon can't make them.
No, what I mean is the notion that external links for explanations are inherently bad from an accessibility point of view. "Mastodon" (as in how Mastodon users experience the Fediverse, i.e. the Mastodon Web UI or any of the popular mobile phone apps) is sufficiently accessible. But the Web outside of "Mastodon" (same definition again) may not be accessible enough.
A few years ago, I've literally read a Mastodon toot in which someone said that explanations must not be linked to. Linked websites have a risk of not being accessible. Explanations must always be directly in the same post. Apparently, they thought that everything and anything can be explained and broken down until everyone understands it within 500 characters.
This is also why Mastodon users tend to explain their images in the alt-text. It's only there where they have at least halfway enough characters for an explanation, 1,500 per image as opposed to usually only 500 in the post text. (On Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, the alt-text is a separate database field that exists separately for each of the up to four images per message.)
That is, because . But nobody on Mastodon knows that.
It should be obvious that what counts for explanations counts for visual descriptions just as well.
And in fact, regarding Hubzilla articles, they're actually right. I've once pointed an actually blind screen reader user to an article on my Hubzilla channel. She said she couldn't even navigate the Web interface. She literally couldn't get to the text body of the article to have it read out by her screen reader.
Hubzilla's Web interface, no matter which app is opened, is not accessible. It does not work with screen readers. It's largely still stuck in 2012 when nobdy made any ruckus about the accessibility of hobbyist Web projects.
The only reason why at least some blind or visually-impaired users can read our Hubzilla posts and comments and DMs is because they're all on Mastodon, and they read our content either on Mastodon's Web UI or a Mastodon app that supports screen readers. But they do not read our content at the source. Because they can't.
I actually took into consideration linking to my long image descriptions. But my idea was not to link to a Hubzilla article, nor to a Hubzilla wiki or a Hubzilla card. No, my idea was to write a plain HTML document, upload it to my file space and link to that.
I've dropped that idea for various reasons:
- Generally, still, external links are frowned upon.
- I don't know if plain HTML is accessible without a CSS. And I can't add a CSS to this HTML if the HTML document is not served to the recipient by a Web server, but by a file server.
- I don't know how Google Chrome on Android or Safari on an iPhone will react when they access an HTML document on a file space. Will they display it as a website Or will they download it onto the device as a file without opening it because, again, it is served to them not by a Web server, but by a file server
- Mobile users dislike opening websites from apps because they dislike their browser popping open. And on Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, almost everyone is on a phone and a dedicated app almost all the time.
- This also means that mobile users would have the image and the description in two separate apps. The image in their Mastodon app, the description in their browser.
- I would need much more description.
Right now, when I have multiple images, my long descriptions consist of a preamble that contains all necessary explanations and, if applicable, visual descriptions of elements that are common to all images. The individual descriptions for each image follow.
But if I had one image description file per image, then each image description would need the whole preamble included. I can't just add the preamble to the first description file.
What if someone opens the third description file first They'll only have a very incomplete description. And linking to the first description file is inconvenient. I would have to know the URL of the first file before completing and uploading the other files because I'd have to include the URL of the first file in them. And the users would have to have three documents open (the image post, the description of the image they're interested in, the description of the first image with the preamble) just to experience one image. Spread across two phone apps.
And that's why I can't put my additional long description in an external document.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # No dice.
First of all, implementing nomadic identity would drastically alter the way how Mastodon works. It would make Mastodon, something that's supposed to be dead-simple, a great deal more complex.
I mean, in order to really pull this through all the way (as in Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte-level nomadic identity), your identity, your posts, your followers, your followed, your settings, your filters, your everything, all this must no longer directly reside in your account. It must be containerised in something that Hubzilla calls "channel", and that container would then reside in your account and be able to reside in multiple accounts on multiple independent servers.
Next, when Mastodon introduces a new feature, they tend to try to market it as their own original pioneering invention. They can't do that with nomadic identity. There are already enough people who know that nomadic identity was actually pioneered by Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed.
Furthermore, before Gargron implements something invented by Mike Macgirvin, hell will freeze over. Even if he tried to sell it as a unique feature of Mastodon, he'd still secretly have to admit that there's something that Mike did right. And quite a few eyes would be on him in hope of Mastodon getting more features from stuff created by Mike.
Ever heard of OpenWebAuth magic sign-on Invented by Mike for Osada and Zap in the late 2010s, then backported to Hubzilla.
It was proposed for Mastodon, even if it was only client-side (as in, Mastodon logins would be detected by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but Mastodon wouldn't be able to detect OpenWebAuth logins itself). This went as far as a merge request on GitHub. It could have been built into Mastodon. The code was literally there.
The merge request was silently rejected. And that would have been a fairly small change in comparison to the complete rebuild that'd be necessary for a full-blown, Forte-level, server-side implementation of nomadic identity.
I mean, had to implement nomadic identity on Mitra client-side. That wouldn't be possible on Mastodon, what with every other Fediverse app being a Mastodon client. Mastodon would require a server-side implementation.
Seriously, it'd be easier to strap Mastodon's Web UI to Forte or Hubzilla with the necessary changes to adapt it to a vastly different backend.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # If I were to do that, my blogging platform would be Hubzilla as well.
Granted, articles don't federate to Mastodon, and 95% of all Mastodon users wouldn't even notice that the blog post is part of the same channel as the announcement post, as in, the blog post technically is in the Fediverse. But it is, so someone who is Fediverse-savvy enough might point out that, at least as far as accessibility is concerned, the same rules apply to non-federating Hubzilla articles as to Mastodon toots.
On the other hand, it could all be futile anyway because Mastodon users aren't exactly known for being keen on opening links.
# # # # # # # # # That's the trouble with virtual worlds.
The first thing about them that has newbies in awe is the technology. An entire big world to explore, all in 3-D, and all the possibilities it promises to have. Nowadays also, "The Metaverse exists! It's alive!"
Next, when they're finally in-world, they'll have to learn the ropes. It's that what keeps them busy now. And it'll keep them busy for the longer, the more complicated everything is, and the less help they get.
Second Life has the Eiger North Face of learning curves, no tutorials, precious little end user documentation, no official Linden helpdesk as a surrogate for documentation and next to no mentors who are able and willing to take a newbie by the hand, guide them to a sandbox and teach and train them for a few hours.* It'll keep newbies busy for weeks or months. OpenSim is even worse.
While learning the ropes, they enter the third phase. And that's being amazed about how awesome everything looks. Especially if they have a powerful enough machine that can really make stuff look good with lighting and shadows and materials and reflections and whatnot.
It'll take them quite a while until they even notice that the place has a culture in the first place. It'll take them even longer to learn about the culture, adopt it, live by it.
That does not mean, however, that they won't interact with anyone until that has happened. From when they've first entered the new world to when they really live and breathe its culture, they'll misbehave without even being aware that they're misbehaving.
In fact, I guess all this is also why there is no unified idea of what Second Life or OpenSim actually is. It is why there's constant friction between character players/light roleplayers on the one side and those who take it for a fancy 3-D chat app on the other side. It usually takes the chatters literal years to even only find out that character play exists, and even then, they'll never really tolerate the character players and their behaviour.
I guess the Jackie's Survivor Tips HUD would be the most useful if all newbies had it not only in their inventories, but actually attached the moment they rez for the first time.
*I've seen exactly this happen in my home grid a few years ago. Early during a DJ event, an absolute newbie with a hopelessly mangled avatar showed up. One of us ended up taking them to our sandbox and tutoring them for several hours.
# # # # # # # # #On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image descriptions for each one of my original images. One is short and goes into the alt-text, and I'm going to limit all my future alt-text to a maximum of 512 characters (otherwise users on Misskey, Sharkey etc. will believe I haven't written any alt-text because ).
The other one is enormous degrees of magnitudes longer than anything most Fediverse users have ever read in the Fediverse. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not, it contains verbatim transcripts of said text.
The nature of my original images . Besides, the only way to really be safe from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA is to overcomply with whatever minimum standards for good image descriptions anyone of them may have.
On the other hand, the self-same Mastodon HOA is likely to sanction me for the self-same posts. The reason: The posts are way too long. They exceed the limit of 500 characters that's so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that many Mastodonians are eager to defend it. Even if I hide them behind a summary with a content warning about the post being long. If I were to appease these Mastodonians, I'd have to underdescribe my images, and I wouldn't be able to explain them at all.
Speaking of underdescribing, I think at least some members of the alt-text police actually don't let image descriptions in the post count. What counts is only the image description in the alt-text. It must be accurate, it must be sufficiently detailed, and it must contain all the text transcripts. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they demanded sufficient explanations in the alt-text, not knowing that .
Even if all requirements of a good alt-text by alt-text police standards are met or even exceeded by the image description in the post, chances are the alt-text police will still sanction me if the alt-text doesn't meet these criteria.
When it comes to my original images, even squeezing all that into the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts imposed by Mastodon is pretty much impossible. Squeezing it into the 512-character limit for alt-text imposed by Misskey and its forks is even more impossible.
The only winning move is to not play at all. Curiously, some people are even upset about me rarely posting any images. Although they don't follow me. Although the channel that I use for original images () has next to no reach, so even if I were to post images again, practically nobody would notice. Although it doesn't even seem that there's much interest in that kind of images in the first place.
But apparently, according to some, posting images with only rudimentary alt-text whipped up in a minute, no long description and no explanations is always so much better than not posting images because it takes so much time and effort to describe them.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I really need to work more on my alt-text and image description wiki.
I don't know how many users will find a wiki with 50+ pages useful, but all that information must be gathered in one place, adapted to the culture and technology of the Fediverse and especially to Mastodon's culture and published for people to read.
I mean, the "how" has to include the elimination of quite a number of mistakes that just about everyone in the Fediverse keeps on making because they don't know that it's wrong.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This may be true for real-life cat photos. Just about the most simple images imaginable in the Fediverse.
But what if I don't just post real-life cat photos in which I don't have to describe much more than the cat Because I don't post real-life cat photos. I don't post real-life photos at all unless they're meme templates.
My own original images are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. This means:
- I can't forgo detail descriptions under the assumption that people know what stuff looks like anyway. I can't assume that anyone already knows what anything in my images looks like.
- Every other time, there's nothing particular in the image that matters more within the context of the post than everything else. Instead, the whole image with everything in it matters all the same.
- The other half of times, what matters within the context is irrelevant because the existence of 3-D virtual worlds is so intriguing to someone out there that they demand a full, detailed image description.
As for the actual alt-texts, I'll try to keep them at 512 characters or fewer, difficult as that will be. But I'll do that for technical reasons: While Misskey and its forks are supposed to truncate longer alt-texts at the 512-character mark, they actually delete them due to a bug. If I make them longer, users on Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc. will believe that I haven't written any alt-text in the first place.
But I will keep adding long, fully detailed image descriptions to the post text where I have much more room. I need room for sufficiently detailed descriptions, I need room for all the explanations necessary for people to understand the post and the images and the descriptions, and I often need room for all the text transcripts.
For example, do you know what the main building on Nebadon Izumi's Universal Campus looks like Would it be sufficient for you if I just name-dropped it Or must I describe what it looks like
If so, well, that's 40,000 characters of description only for that building and what's visible inside it because the building mostly has glass panes for walls. 7,800 characters only for the front of a building that's five times as long as it's wide. 500 characters only for that one piece of structure around the main entrance doors. In fact, over 1,600 characters for the doors. Also, 3,200 characters for a teleport panel, including transcripts of 13 bits of text. Been there, done that, got the figures from there.
Don't worry, I will always hide long posts behind a summary with content warnings, including a warning about the post being tens of thousands of characters long due to the long image descriptions.
In fact, my meme posts will continue to be very long themselves, although not quite as long as posts with original pictures. Describing the visuals is easy most of the time, and it can be done in 512 characters or fewer. But they still need explanations. Otherwise, nobody will understand anything. All my meme posts are about obscure topics, too.
Now I'm wondering what's more likely to upset people and make them sanction me in some way, including blocking me without saying a word. Insufficient image descriptions Insufficient alt-text in particular Not putting all the text transcripts into the alt-text where many insist that they belong Or posts behind summaries and CWs that indicate that these posts are 25,000, 40,000, 60,000 characters long
But seriously, even if I cut down visual descriptions to a more normal level, which would come with its own nasty side-effects, I would still need to explain everything. So no, I can't keep image posts at 500 characters or fewer.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
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