Find the latitude of any place.  

Russian oil rig in Caspian Sea

Russian oil rig in Caspian Sea halts production after Ukrainian drone strike

Ukraines Security Service (SBU) struck Russias Vladimir field in the for the first time with -range , halting and production from more than 20 , a source in the said on Dec. 11

It is quite true that women like courage, and that boldness often goes a long way but it is questionable whether with high-bred natures a subdued, quiet, and delicate manner does not go still further.
Richard Jefferies

How unfinished is Iceshrimp.NET This unfinished:
Iceshrimp.NET appears to have no support for conversations. At all. I'm not just saying it has no support for enclosed conversations like on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, Facebook and every last blog out there, not to mention FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".
I'm saying it has no concept of threads. It has no concept whatsoever of a message having a parent or children in a thread.
All it seems to know is stand-alone messages. Iceshrimp.NET only shows you single messages, and it gives you no way at all to access even only what these messages reply to. This is even worse than Mastodon, and that has to say something.
Also, Iceshrimp.NET seems to use some exotic, home-brew message format that must have little to do with the W3C ActivityPub standard, even taking FEPs into consideration. It's impossible to use Hubzilla's search to import an Iceshrimp.NET message onto your stream.
And: redirects to the Iceshrimp.NET code repository. Which, in turn, contains a link to an iceshrimp.net website at the top. Another to-do that isn't even on any to-do list. Yeah, I know that and have no websites either, but Mike doesn't pretend they have websites, and especially (streams) has very good reasons not to have an official website.
Let's just hope that it has overcome the *key-inherent federation issues by having been rewritten.
# # # # # # # # # #How unfinished is Iceshrimp.NET This unfinished:
Iceshrimp.NET appears to have no support for conversations. At all. I'm not just saying it has no support for enclosed conversations like on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, Facebook and every last blog out there, not to mention FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".
I'm saying it has no concept of threads. It has no concept whatsoever of a message having a parent or children in a thread.
All it seems to know is stand-alone messages. Iceshrimp.NET only shows you single messages, and it gives you no way at all to access even only what these messages reply to. This is even worse than Mastodon, and that has to say something.
Also, Iceshrimp.NET seems to use some exotic, home-brew message format that must have little to do with the W3C ActivityPub standard, even taking FEPs into consideration. It's impossible to use Hubzilla's search to import an Iceshrimp.NET message onto your stream.
And: redirects to the Iceshrimp.NET code repository. Which, in turn, contains a link to an iceshrimp.net website at the top. Another to-do that isn't even on any to-do list. Yeah, I know that and have no websites either, but Mike doesn't pretend they have websites, and especially (streams) has very good reasons not to have an official website.
Let's just hope that it has overcome the *key-inherent federation issues by having been rewritten.
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et affirment que leur analyse de la vido, des tmoignages et des preuves balistiques dmontre que les frres , 40 ans, et , 35 ans, taient dsarms et ne reprsentaient aucune menace.

Long

Tongue

You will still lose lots of reach.
People won't see your image posts because they have technical means of hiding or completely removing any and all posts with images without alt-text from all their timelines.
People will block you upon first strike when finding one of your image posts without an alt-text.
Followers will unfollow you.
You will be lectured. You will be scolded. You will be verbally attacked. You will be called an ableist swine. Even more so if you try to defend yourself.
If you want at least some reach on Mastodon, and if you want to be left in peace, your only choice is to add a hand-written, non-AI-generated, accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-text to every single last image that you will ever post. Immediately when posting it.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Ive gotten to where I wont post anything anywhere without alt text in the photos.

Same here, only that I won't just simply add some alt-text. Rather, I go all the way and add what someone may need described and/or explained.
When I post a meme, this means a roughly standard-sized alt-text with a short visual description and transcripts of the relevant bits of text plus explanation in the post itself.
When I post an original image which is always a 3-D virtual world rendering, the image description in the alt-text is much longer. And in addition, there is an even longer long image description in the post itself that contains what I can't fit into the alt-text plus even more explanations than for my meme posts.
I never know who might see it and I want people to enjoy what I post.

On top of that, I want people to understand what I post. I don't want anyone to have to ask me for explanations in order to understand my images. I don't want anyone to have to look anything up themselves. Because my experience is that having to ask or having to look something up is not accessible.
But I only ever post about super-obscure niche topics. That's either super-obscure 3-D virtual worlds that nobody knows anything about. Or it's memes about the Fediverse which usually means the Fediverse beyond Mastodon which, again, hardly anyone on Mastodon knows a thing about.
In addition, when I post a virtual world rendering, I have to assume that people who can't see the image don't know what anything in the image looks like. I mean, they've certainly never seen a single image from within one of these worlds, right Still, they might be super curious about anything and everything in the image.
And so I have to write the longest image descriptions the Fediverse has ever seen. This doesn't take only a few minutes. It takes hours if I'm lucky and days if not.
was two months ago. It was also the only image I've posted this year.
was almost a year and a half ago. And its descriptions are actually fairly short. I've done even longer ones in the past. But the images were intentionally kept simple with little to describe and explain.
was last year, too.
(All three links lead to Fediverse posts. They don't take you to Mastodon toots. These are posts on which is part of the Fediverse, too, and federated with Mastodon. And all these posts have very much reached Mastodon timelines.)
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

MS-13 and Trump Backed the Same Honduras Presidential Candidate

Gangsters from MS-13, a Trump-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, intimidated Hondurans not to vote for the left-leaning presidential candidate,
:ArticlePost :Tuesday :English :Article :Factiva :SmartNews :SocialFlow :Politics :World :23.00 :2000-2999

Artist: Rameses B
Title: been a long time
Genre: Unknown
Deezer: YouTube: SoundCloud:

Selon , aurait fourni des renseignements sensibles sur les activits de laxe de la rsistance, comprenant et ses allis en .

:-)

Sydney sisters with ultra-rare condition dream of first summer safely outdoors

Its sad and confronting, their mother Yvette Walker told news.com.au during an emotional interview. No amount of UV


I'm not visually impaired, but ALT text frequently "explains it to me like I'm five"... because "If you know, you know" often doesn't apply to me.

This is actually sad and frustrating.
For one, next to nobody on Mastodon knows that because . Besides, they have 1,500 characters of alt-text per image, but only 500 characters for the toot, and mentions, hashtags and even CWs gnaw away on these 500 characters.
So they have no other choice than to explain things either in a thread or in the alt-text.
Fortunately, I myself don't have to worry much about character limits. I've got over 16.7 million characters, including alt-texts, but excluding CWs which are summaries here (as if that mattered). Fortunately because the kind of stuff that I tend to post is so very obscure that it requires extensive explanations on multiple levels. An image post of mine may end up with tens of thousands of characters of explanations which can all go into the post and into one post.
I only have to take into consideration that Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks will chop off extremely long alt-texts from other Fediverse server applications at the 1,500-character mark. Also, Mastodon and its forks reject posts over 100,000 characters. I think Pleroma and its forks reject posts over 20,000 characters, and Misskey and its forks reject posts over 10,000 characters already, but I barely have any audience for images there.
Sometimes I post photos without ALT Text initially, then add it later after I overcome writer's block.

I never post any image without a sufficiently set of descriptions and explanations. Ever. Even if it takes me more than a year to write the descriptions for a series of images (and it currently does).
My goal is to always be lightyears ahead of present and future requirements imposed by the Mastodon alt-text police. And I've yet to see the Mastodon alt-text police sanction anyone for overdoing things. I've probably been blocked by tens of thousands of Mastodon users for posting more than 500 characters at a time. But I probably haven't been blocked nearly as often explicitly for overly long and detailed image descriptions and explanations.
(By the way: Don't go looking for my most recent image posts here. I no longer use this channel to post images. I post them elsewhere in the Fediverse now, if I ever post them. So the last image post here is over a year and a half old.)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

Girl Smashes a Long Drive With Crazy Power!

- # needs to invest in alleviating this burden. Its already a pain for shorter things.

What is Mastodon supposed to do Lift the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts
There's a good reason why just about every alt-text guide out there...

...tells everyone to keep alt-texts short.

Besides, I myself am not even on Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla which was developed years before Mastodon, wholly independently from Mastodon and for different purposes than Mastodon.


- As far as Im concerned the purpose of this field is to be a caption. Theres absolutely zero reason to try to reproduce the entire contents of an image.

I beg to differ. Here's an article that I've written a while ago:

- This is exactly the alt field from an HTML img tag. Never host images without that field.

I know what it is.
Here on Hubzilla, we don't put alt-text into a separate text field. We put it into image-embedding markup code like in a forum post or a blog post. BBcode instead of HTML, but still.
- Im not important. Neither is anything I say. Who cares if I boost you or dont If you do care for any reason, put something in that field to make the decision easier for me.
- Others disagree with me on these points. I may boost you anyway. They may do something else.

It may be only you who thinks like that.
It may just as well be legions of Mastodon users who will block anyone upon first strike when they catch them not transcribing text in an image in alt-text, regardless of there being transcripts in the post itself.
I'm trying to satisfy as many and as many different people as possible. And that's horribly difficult for me as a) I'm on something that's very, very much not Mastodon, and b) I post images like next to no-one else. But I'd risk even more reach within the Fediverse than I already do.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Something that practically nobody on Mastodon (or anywhere else in the Fediverse) knows:
Explanations do not belong into the alt-text. There must never be exclusive information only in the alt-text. Explanations and other extra information must always go into the post text.
)
Why
Because not everyone can access alt-text.
)
# # # # # # # # # # # So this means that if I have an extremely long and fully detailed image description in the post (my character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million), and that image description contains verbatim transcripts of all text that's anywhere within the borders of the image (been there done that)...
...I still have to provide another image description in the alt-text that's still sufficiently detailed and accurate, and that contains all the same verbatim transcripts of all the same texts
Now, I'm not talking about Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon screenshots. I'm talking about renderings from within 3-D virtual worlds. They may have a whole lot of text in them even if it isn't always large enough to be readable.
For example, take this image from the same Fediverse channel that I'm replying to you right now:

I've posted it in this Fediverse post (as in the post did end up in a lot of Mastodon timelines):

I have described the image twice. In the post itself, there is a long description of 60,000+ characters, including all necessary explanations to understand the image and the description, and including transcripts of all texts:

In the alt-text which is exactly 1,500 characters long, there is a short image description of a bit over 1,400 characters which does not contain any text transcripts. That's because it doesn't have enough room for all these transcripts plus visual descriptions of where each one of all these bits of text is.
If it's a hard requirement to add all these text transcripts into the alt-text and, of course, describe where they are (because they'd be useless otherwise), then I can no longer post any images with text anywhere in them. And I probably have to delete all my image posts that do contain text and hope that they will be deleted from everywhere on Mastodon and Pixelfed as well.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #4 December 2025 - Daily Drawing Day 338
My eyelashes are annoyingly long. Whenever I wear glasses I can feel them pressing up against the lenses.
#
Watch the time lapse video of this drawing on YouTube Shorts:
See the latest at
The 2025 20-25 Challenge.
This year lets get better at something by finding a little practice time most days, in my case drawing. - Do your activity for at least 25 minutes, at least 25 days per month.
- Use the hashtag on social media etc to track your progress
- Also use the hashtag to cheer on others.
Thats about it!
Have fun with your activities, whatever they may be!
Drawing, programming, dancing, cooking, make up, reading, languages, gardening, mastering high fives, sewing, astrophysics, vcr clock setting ...
...where "always" means "since before there was even Mastodon".
A side-effect of their model, present at least on Hubzilla and Hubzilla's descendants, including still existing (streams) and Forte, is that comments/replies cannot exist in a stream without a) a parent and b) a start post. On all of them, including Friendica, it isn't a post if it replies to something, very much unlike Mastodon where a thread is a bunch of posts.
Depending on whom you ask, a conversation looks either like this:
or like this:
And by default, you always see it like this, very much unlike Mastodon where you only see single-message piecemeal in any timeline, and you have to dig deep to see a whole thread.
If you delete a comment or a reply, this won't just remove the comment from the conversation and rip a hole into the branch in the conversation where the comment used to be. Instead, it will delete the comment, all comments on it, all comments on these comments and so far from the conversation because all these comments on comments no longer have a parent, and therefore, they no longer have anywhere to attach in the conversation.
If you delete the post, you delete the whole conversation. The comments on the post will no longer have a parent, and nothing in the conversation will have a post to refer to anymore.
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1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long

#3.7B

Unfortunately, I can't join that discussion for some reason.
Just so much, : Most of my Fediverse data and identities are anything but locked to any instance. All my and channels are . I could make more clones, I could declare any clone the new main instance, and no matter which server goes offline, my channels will carry on.
Each of these servers corresponds not to an ATmosphere PDS and not to a full ATmosphere PDS/relay/AppView stack either, but to a Mastodon server, only that these servers use something else than ActivityPub as their primary protocol and ActivityPub only as an optional extra protocol. However, with the creation of Forte in August, 2024, this technology was first implemented entirely with ActivityPub.
This technology is neither new nor experimental in fact, it has been around for longer than Mastodon, much less Bluesky: It was conceived in 2011 and first implemented on a precursor of Hubzilla in mid-2012.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # #Author(s): PatIV
Title: Chteau Inferno
Episode of 3 main maps + 2 secret levels in an Infernal Castle

Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output

-run -term

Can I pay off a loan with home sale proceeds and get capital gains tax exemption

I have taken an education loan against my residential property. If I want to sell the house and
-termcapitalgains

That's why I'm working on an entire wiki on how to describe images and write proper alt-texts in the Fediverse. Right now, it's planned to have over 40 pages, even though not even half of them are written yet. The topic is actually that complex, and there's so much that nobody on Mastodon knows when it comes to alt-text.
Besides, there isn't any image description guide otherwise that takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse in account. I'm going to cover that as well, although I won't add step-by-step guides on how to add an alt-text with this Web frontend or that mobile app. But I'm going to take into consideration that the non-Mastodon Fediverse is never limited to only 500 characters.
In case you're curious:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Well, I'm used to having not only full native data portability, but even live, hot, bidirectional, real-time updates of entire Fediverse identities that contain stuff which 99% of the Fediverse doesn't support. Natively without an external application. Available for longer than Mastodon itself. Between any number of independent servers. So I'm not easily impressed.
I would be kind of impressed if LOLA managed to move a Mastodon account into a brand-new, virgin Hubzilla channel

Even that wouldn't give you a 100% identical copy of your Mastodon account. Hubzilla doesn't support quote-post control the only way to make your posts non-quote-postable is by making them non-public (something that Mastodon can only understand as a DM), and you have no control whatsoever over the permissions of your comments on other people's posts anyway. Also, as I've already mentioned, Hubzilla currently doesn't support summaries (= Mastodon CWs) in comments.
However, vice versa, it'd be even harder to shoehorn Hubzilla's wealth of features into a new Mastodon account.
# # # # # # # # # # # #

Laguna Beach looking to develop long-term outdoor dining program

Laguna Beachs outdoor dining scene could be in for some changes, particularly for
-termoutdoordiningprogram

More to :D

Long-Lasting Organic Friction Material by Performance Clutches
Discover how Performance Clutches delivers -lasting engineered for superior grip, smoother engagement, and extended clutch life. Perfect for drivers who demand reliability, performance, and eco-friendly design all in one powerful upgrade.

I'm working on my own guide. It's specifically for the Fediverse, and it's the only such guide that is not only for Mastodon.
While it won't include step-by-step instructions on how to add alt-text on this or that server application's Web frontend or in this or that app (I simply can't know/test them all, and that'd be well over 100 individual guides), it will take particular properties of non-Mastodon Fediverse applications into account, specifically the much higher number of available characters outside Mastodon.
Also, it takes many other guides into account as references to show that I haven't made everything up.
However, it isn't just one page. It's a whole wiki because the topic really is that complex, and because there is so much about image descriptions and alt-text that nobody knows about. Currently, 20 pages are written, and another 24 are planned, but both numbers may increase. And since this is a wiki, existing pages may always change.
Another advantage of having a wiki instead of one page is that I can easily point people at certain aspects of describing images or writing alt-text, e.g. when they use alt-text to write around their 500-character limit, or when they add line breaks or the quotation marks from their keyboard to alt-text, or when they want to know whether and how to describe colours.
The wiki is part of the same Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right now:

By the way, the wiki also contains a list of over 50 alt-text guides:

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Tee Higgins talks life off the field, emotions of long-term contract with Bengals

Tee Higgins talks life off the field, emotions of long-term contract with Bengals BENGALS ARE GOING TO BE
'MarrChase -termcontract -termextension

  How broken-by-design are Mastodon's quote-posts This broken.
The various issues with quote-posts on Mastodon that nobody on Mastodon is aware of CW: long (almost 6,800 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, Mastodon looking bad in comparison with the rest of the Fediverse, quote-post meta
Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about Mastodon's quote-post feature that you know nothing about. Definitely not if all you know is Mastodon. Oh, and by the way, in case you don't know yet in spite of following me: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around


Eugen Rochko is bringing quote-posts to Mastodon. But he is not bringing quote-posts to the Fediverse. The Fediverse has had quote-posts for 15 years.
It was Mike Macgirvin who introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse in July, 2010, when he launched something called Mistpark back then and Friendica today (, ). That was five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.
In fact, when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and with Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator which has quote-posts, too. So when Mastodon was launched, it immediately became possible to quote-post Mastodon toots. Not on Mastodon itself, but on Friendica and Hubzilla.

Just about everything that isn't Mastodon has already got quote-posts right now


Here are a few (but not even all) Fediverse server applications that already have quote-posts:

And they're all part of the Fediverse which means that they're all connected to Mastodon. People on all of these can theoretically read your Mastodon toots. And people on all of these can theoretically quote-post your Mastodon toots.

Mastodon's quote-post opt-in is not a water-tight defence against being quote-posted


So you can choose not to be quote-posted. But you can only choose not to be quote-posted by Mastodon users. This opt-in does not work with the rest of the Fediverse.
First of all, that's because Mastodon's quote-post feature is not compatible with anything else out there. Mastodon's developers have chosen to re-invent the quote-posting wheel from scratch. They've intentionally chosen to do so in a way that's completely incompatible with everything else out there.
Their intention was to reinforce Mastodon's appearance to its own users as the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard and to make Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. look broken. It's part of their plan to keep Mastodon users on Mastodon in the wake of Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse shrinking.
Also, they did not publish any specifications on their quote-post implementation, so even those non-Mastodon developers who are fast enough didn't have a chance to implement support for Mastodon's opt-in.
This means that even if you've set your posts to un-quote-post-able on Mastodon, everything I've listed above can still quote-post you with no resistance.

Absolute Fediverse-wide protection against being quote-posted is impossible


And don't get your hopes high that the day will come when nobody on the Fediverse will be able to quote-post you, whether they're on Mastodon or not. Such a setting is technologically impossible.
Who says that Mike Macgirvin says that. The guy who launched Friendica and brought quote-posts to the Fediverse 15 years ago, remember This guy has built the Fediverse's most elaborate, most complex, most fine-grained, most advanced permissions system into (streams) and Forte.
These two have reply control, the kind of which you couldn't image in your wildest dreams. I'm serious. They have permissions settings for almost everything on two or three levels, for your whole channel, individually per contact and sometimes even per post or per file or folder in the file storage.
But they don't have quote-post permission settings. Because that's impossible to enforce Fediverse-wide. And even if it was possible, it'd be pointless. If they can't quote-post you, they'll copy-paste you. If they can't copy-paste you either because they're on a phone, they'll post screenshots of your toots.
Mike also says, there is exactly one way to keep people from quote-posting you, and that's by not posting in public. Unfortunately, unlike what he has created, Mastodon has little between "public" and "DM", if anything.

Mastodon cannot quote-post the non-Mastodon Fediverse


This may be the big surprise: It has recently been discovered by chance that Mastodon's quote-post feature only works with Mastodon toots.
On the one hand, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica, Hubzilla etc. can quote-post just about everything that comes in from Mastodon. But on the other hand, no Mastodon 4.5 user will be able to quote-post anything from either of these. Or from Pixelfed or PeerTube or Loops or Castopod or WriteFreely or whatever.
That's because Mastodon is looking for a quote-post opt-in. But nothing else in the Fediverse supports Mastodon's quote-post opt-in, also seeing as it's still officially in development. And it's highly unlikely that everything in the Fediverse will adopt another piece of non-standard, proprietary Mastodon tech.

"Quote" actually means something else


Lastly, Mastodon has the audacity to call this feature "quote".
A "quote" is something else. Remember forums Like, bulletin-board forums with subforums and all Where posts are quoted in follow-ups, entirely or only partially That's what a quote is. That has got nothing to do with quote-posts.
Why I say that there's a difference Because I also say that Friendica has had both quotes and quote-posts.
It has had them for 15 years, both quotes (which it calls "quotes", go figure) and quote-posts (which it calls "quoted shares", and which include the original author of the quoted post, complete with their profile picture and a clickable link to them, as well as a clickable link to the original post).
Hubzilla has both. (streams) has both. Forte has both. And I wouldn't be surprised if other Fediverse server software had both, too.
The irony is that Mastodon itself has been able to render actual quotes since version 4.0 from October, 2022. At the same time, it will continue to be unable to render any quote-posts done outside of Mastodon for the foreseeable future.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

# # # # # # #
I think more rather than less is always better.

Do you have an upper limit on "more"
What if I went and took two full days to describe one image in

I've actually done that, by the way. While I haven't done it on Mastodon, the post came from the same channel that I'm replying to you from right now, so yes, it went out into the Fediverse and to Mastodon. AFAIK, Mastodon only rejects posts when they exceed 100,000 characters.

Here's a justification for this effort:

So do blind people know about cornices or herring bone

I've been wondering that myself.
I've made a series of avatar portraits last year which shall showcase their outfits. All the same avatar, all the same posture, all the same neutral, bright white background, outfits often different in only a few details like colour or material. Three or four portraits in each image, three or four images in each post.
Since they're fashion portraits, technically speaking, and since nobody has got even only a rough idea what avatars generally look like in these worlds, the images require full and detailed visual descriptions. This is why I haven't posted them yet: The image descriptions are still far from done.
In many cases, the avatar is wearing a sport jacket with herringbone pattern tweed textures. I'm still not sure whether or not I must give a description what this fabric pattern looks like, even though, admittedly, various actually blind Mastodon users have told me that I can take it as a given. Maybe for them, but for everyone
Likewise, in many cases, the avatar is wearing full brogue leather shoes. Can I assume that it's generally known what full brogue shoes look like Can't I Can I, but will I still have to give a full, detailed description of these shoes because not all full brogue shoes look the same, and/or because I can't assume that anyone (much less everyone) knows what these shoes look like in this virtual world specifically
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # For starters, making it a hard technical requirement on the server side would exclude and discriminate against

Besides, what's "the platform" Only Mastodon or the whole Fediverse
Just in case you didn't know: The Fediverse server applications that can send posts with images and other media onto your timeline include, but aren't limited to:

If "the platform" means something with one development team, it's only Mastodon. And everything else I've listed above, and then some, is free to keep alt-text optional.
If "the platform" means the whole Fediverse, this means that well over 100 Fediverse server applications, all being developed independently from another and especially from Mastodon, often working vastly differently from Mastodon, would have to make it impossible to post images without alt-text. This, by the way, is next to impossible to implement on at least some of them due to the way they handle images and therefore alt-text.
And you can be certain about one thing: If the Mastodon developers add something to Mastodon, it's very unlikely that Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, the Hubzilla developers, and Mike Macgirvin, inventor of Friendica and Hubzilla and still developer of (streams) and Forte, will follow suit. Other server applications won't because they're dead in spite of still having running servers (Calckey, Firefish, /kbin etc.), they're in maintenance mode which means they won't get new features (Iceshrimp-JS), or their development is on hold (Plume).
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Of course, this means that having any undescribed images on your timeline or stream is a risk, no matter how far back they are.
There could always be someone who discovers you. Who decides to check your timeline or stream in their Mastodon app (as opposed to checking the original in their Web browser). Who stumbles upon an old image post of yours, over three years old, before you've discovered alt-text and its important, especially before you actually started putting some effort into driving your image descriptions to perfection. Who finds that post cute or funny without checking whether the image has an alt-text or not. Or how old it is. Who not only likes (as in faves) it, but boosts it to 5,000 followers, 4,950 of whom are on Mastodon.
And before you know it, thousands of Mastodon users permanently block you for something you haven't done over three years ago because they don't check how old your post is either. All they see is an image without alt-text. Or because they do expect everyone everywhere in the Fediverse to go and add alt-texts to every last image they've ever posted.
This could happen to me.
The obvious remedy would be for me to actually go through my entire backlog of old posts and describe all the images in them. Sounds like a good idea if it takes you two minutes tops to describe one image. But I'm not going to do that for three reasons.
One, it takes me hours to describe one virtual world rendering. Days if it's more complex. It'd take me longer to describe one image than it'd take the average Mastodon user to describe their entire image backlog.
I actually haven't posted a single new in-world image in almost a year and a half because it takes so much time and effort to describe them. I have a bunch of seemingly simple avatar portraits with a feature-less, neutral, bright white background, the descriptions of which I've been working on for about a year now, and they're still far from finished, also because I now have to edit technical terms and jargon out and/or explain more of those technical terms and that jargon. It'd take me forever to describe these old images which I haven't even optimised for "quick" and "easy" describing.
Two, here on , unlike on Mastodon, adding an alt-text means editing the post. Which, in turn, might mean that the edited posts go out anew, being perceived by at least some Fediverse software as brand-new posts. However, at least some of them are very outdated, e.g. announcements for 2022 events.
Three, from the newest image post that got a brand-new description to the oldest image post that already had one and thus didn't need a new one, there'd be a sharp decline in image description quality and level of detail. I'd basically have to go and upgrade all my existing image descriptions because all of them are outdated by my current standards. I'd have to describe them all at the same level of detail. I'd have to upgrade the explanations. I'd have to cut the jargon and explain more. I'd have to change the way I've described colours and dimensions.
In fact, some of the more recent ones contain descriptions of images within the image and, in one case, even what amounts to descriptions of images in images within the image. I've onced used over 4,000 characters to describe an image within one of my images that's only 30 pixels wide and 10 pixels high. However, in my longest image description to date, I decided against describing images within the image because there would have been so many, sometimes four levels deep, that it would have gone completely out of hand: One image within that image contained several dozen images itself which, in turn, contained probably a hundred images or more.
In order for all my image descriptions to be on the same level of quality and detail from the beginning to today, I'd either have to cut the existing descriptions of images within an image although even the three-levels-deep descriptions are actually important. Or I'd have to go and add the missing descriptions of images within the image, no matter how levels deep. This, by the way, isn't even possible. That image with the dozens of images with a hundred images shows a place that no longer exists, so I can't go there and take a closer and better look at what the image within my image shows than if I only looked at that image.
I might need a rule for when to describe images within images and when not to describe them. Something that includes "if they matter within the context of the image" and "not if I have to walk or teleport to the place shown in the image in my image to describe that image" the former might or might not override the latter. Maybe add a three-level limit because I have third-level image descriptions that are important while not being overwhelmingly long.
That is, in some cases, upgrading the image descriptions would be difficult, if not completely impossible, because the places shown in my images don't exist anymore either. I can't go back there and take measurements and take new looks at the colours to and such. Other places may have changed certain details may be different now or gone entirely.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # This, by the way, is why I describe my original images, my virtual world renderings, twice. Once in the post text body, once in the alt-text.
There is always a long description that goes into full detail, that includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's any text anywhere within the borders of the image (regardless of whether it can be read in the image, for I can read it in-world), there a verbatim transcript of it. As the long description tends to grow very long, often tens of thousands of characters, it goes into the post text body. (Here on , my "character limit" is over 16.7 million.)
And then there is a shorter, but still long description in the alt-text which leaves some room within the 1,500-character limit for me to tell my readers about the long description in the post text. This description, all by itself, is mostly there because a not-too-lacking image description in the alt-text is a hard requirement if your post goes out to Mastodon. Distilling the short description from the long one may take me another hour or two. In combination ("short" image description + hint at the long image description in the post), my alt-texts tend to end up either exactly 1,500 characters long or only a few characters short.
Having two descriptions for each image was even more justified not too long ago when Mastodon hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images. Since my image posts inevitably have to exceed 500 characters, and since they do so by huge magnitudes, I have to hide them behind a long post CW.
So, back then, people saw the images, but they did not see the post text, so they did not know about the huge image description behind the CW that took me something between five hours and two full days to research for and write. Maybe they stopped reading the CW at the announced length of the post and decided not to bother. They didn't even read the entire CW which, at least in some later cases, also told them that the post behind the CW contained a long image description.
Hadn't I added an extra image description into the alt-text, I would have been mass-blocked by people who simply couldn't see an image description or any hint of an image description right off the bat. In addition to being mass-blocked by people who blocked me because there was no sufficient image description in the alt-text, regardless of the huge one in the post, because, you know, there must be an image description in the alt-text, full stop.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
# # # # # # # # # # #Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.
This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on and generally . Or why and must never be used in alt-text.
As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.
(Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)
# # # # # # # # # # #

This is very Nice but at the same Time. don't really understand , since the time each Singaporvisitor for each sub-page of this page, don't take longer than 2 minutes and each video have more than 10 minutes. Some of them, 1h long. .. So Long that Look like Dragons! )


Last updated: 2025-12-12