Stop calling it "The Metaverse" already!
So you're finally no longer allowed to reply to a post that was written neither by a follower nor in response to a follower
Or, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), to a post that wasn't started by one of your followers because these three don't serve you single comments from within threads which didn't appear on your stream from the very beginning
Well, that makes showing Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon much more difficult. Or that Mastodon's "rules" for how and where to describe images are not necessarily set in stone for the whole Fediverse because everything that isn't Mastodon doesn't have Mastodon's limitations.
Or that the first time the term "Metaverse" was used for an actual, real 3-D virtual world was not in 2021 by Zuckerberg for something he planned, but in 2007 for something that already existed and still exists.
I'd wonder if you're already a reply guy if you reply to a post in your local or federated timeline. But I don't have either.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostBisher wei man wenig ber Long Covid bei Kindern und ob impfen dagegen hilft. Daten von ber einer Million Kindern und Jugendlichen zeigen nun moderaten Schutz durch die Impfung.
"The Metaverse" as in new 3-D virtual world projects of the 2020s in general
Or "The Metaverse" as in...
...as in "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" as in "Facebook's Metaverse" as in "Meta's Metaverse" as in Horizons
Can everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Oh, and by the way, a finding of mine for those who still think Zuck was the first to slap "Metaverse" on an actual real 3-D world:
Something for those who think Mark Zuckerberg has invented the term "Metaverse" in 2021.
, the oldest grid (est. 2007), is referring to itself as "The Open Source Metaverse". Guess what It has taken over that slogan from OpenSim itself, and .
Metropolis, the first German grid (est. 2008), boldly used the full name "Metropolis Metaversum" until it was officially shut down in summer 2022. .
Since I started out in Metropolis on April 30th, 2020, I was in something called Metaverse almost a year and a half before Zuckerberg used that term.
Another fun fact: The virtual worlds/virtual reality news site has named its OpenSim category "" as early as 2010.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Metropolis #OSgrid
For the record: Yes, I know it was Neal Stephenson who coined that term in 1991 already.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Part of the secondary topic of this channel is showing a very-much-non-Mastodon view on the Fediverse to the Fedizens out there. Lots of fresh Twitter-to-Mastodon converts started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because I was one of the few to explain the Fediverse outside Mastodon to Mastodon users.
This doesn't work anymore if my posts don't reach their recipients anymore.
And besides, triggering Mastodon users with non-Mastodon behaviour can have nasty side-effects. Yeah, some mute you. Some block you. Often even without also unfollowing you. Some complain to you about it and demand you don't use any features of your instance that vanilla Mastodon 3.x didn't support yet.
But then there are those who try to complain to your instance admin about you and try to have you sanctioned. Or they have their instance admins/mods complain to your instance admin about you. And this can escalate.
A Hubzilla admin would laugh that off. Most Hubzilla hubs don't even have rules, and the rules of any one Mastodon instance don't apply here either.
But in most cases, the complaints never reach their recipients. See, the average Mastodon user doesn't know anything about Hubzilla. So they try to complain the same ways as they would within Mastodon.
They use Mastodon's report feature, but Hubzilla doesn't have it implemented. They try to send your admin a DM, but finding the admin of your hub doesn't work like finding the admin of a Mastodon instance, and oftentimes, the admin's channel isn't linked anywhere at all. They publicly complain about you with a Mastodon admin hashtag, hoping that your admin will read it. But you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla, and even if you could, why would a Hubzilla admin follow a Mastodon-specific hashtag
So the admin and the "moderation" of your hub doesn't react. Conclusion for a Mastodon user who only knows Mastodon: Your instance is basically unmoderated. And what does Mastodon do with an unmoderated instance whose users misbehave for any definition of that word Block it. Like, the whole instance.
One Hubzilla user misbehaving in the eyes of Mastodon users can cause the whole hub to be blocked on thousands of Mastodon instances, maybe including mastodon.social.
Now you could say I should flip the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse the bird and turn Pubcrawl off for good. If I did that, I could just as well delete the whole channel because it'd lose its very purpose.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta The biggest cultural difference based on server software has to be between Mastodon on the one hand and the Mike Macgirvin creations Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other hand.
Not only do they have vastly different user bases, but they developed independently from one another. When the Mastodon culture developed, those who shaped it didn't even know the other side, so they couldn't adopt any of its culture.
Said other side's culture dates back to 2010 when Friendica was launched as Mistpark, and since that was almost six years before Mastodon, it couldn't be inspired by Mastodon's culture either.
Add to that that these respective cultures are greatly shaped by technical features and limitations or the lack thereof.
Mastodon's culture is largely built around its 500-character limit which is ample for your typical phone-wielding Mastodon user. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined character limit whatsoever, and its target audience is largely on desktop or laptop computers, often running Linux, with large screens and full-size hardware keyboards.
So it's the most normal thing in the world for them to write in one post as much as they want while Mastodon users debate whether threads are good, or you should always limit yourself to 500 characters or less.
Also, alt-text. Mastodon has many disabled users, including blind or visually-impaired users. And it has a dedicated alt-text field for each image. On top of that, it offers 1,500 characters for each alt-text which, in connection with the 500-character limit for toots, has people write detailed image descriptions and explanations and put them into the alt-text. That's often information that doesn't even belong in alt-text, but there's no room for it elsewhere.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have unlimited room, so putting stuff into alt-text because the post text is too limited seems ridiculous. But they don't have a vocal disabled community, so there's little interest in accessibility. And neither of them has a dedicated alt-text field. Alt-text is supported, but it has to be manually grafted into the image-embedding code in the post. And there's no official documentation for that, I think not even for Friendica which is the only one out of the three with actually useful end-user documentation.
It's similar with content warnings. On Mastodon, they're put into the repurposed summary field, and next to nobody knows that it's a repurposed summary field rather than invented for content warnings from scratch. So since Mastodon has a content warning field, writer-side content warnings are huge, but also cause for drama.
Mastodon 4.0 has introduced filters that can create reader-side content warnings, but hardly anyone uses them, even fewer people support them with keywords or hashtags, many don't even know this feature exists, and it's generally ignored because it's un-Mastodon.
The Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) complex doesn't have a content warning field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a summary field labelled as such. Friendica doesn't even have that it uses a pair of BBcode tags for that.
And within their own ecosystem, they don't even need it. They've got the "NSFW app" instead, an over-one-decade-old, optional, simple-as-anything substring filter that automatically hides entire posts with all media and everything behind content warnings if it finds one of the entered keywords or hashtags.
So they can't understand Mastodon's commotion about content warnings, and Mastodon users can't understand why they don't add Mastodon-style content warnings.
And then there are all the things that were or are being debated on Mastodon and whether or not it should introduce them. Especially the second-wave Twitter refugees are often staunchly against them.
Full-text search and quote-tweets are being actively used on Twitter to track down and harass members of minorities who have fled to Mastodon. Of course, they don't want Mastodon to introduce either. That is, in the case of full-text search, Mastodon has found a solution, but one that doesn't really federate to the rest of the Fediverse.
Quotes and text formatting are seen as bad, too. Many don't know quotes because Twitter doesn't have them, and so they think quotes could be used as tools of harassment. And both are seen as making Mastodon feel less like Mastodon and more complicated.
Friendica and Hubzilla had all this before there was Mastodon, and (streams) inherited it from its long line of ancestors. Their users have gotten so used to having all this that they don't understand what the problems should be, also because they're so detached from Mastodon's culture. So they keep on using these features unashamedly, even around Mastodon users.
Some differences are rather simple. Take mentions, for example. Friendica has always used long names for mentions, as does its offspring. Mastodon users may find that freaky. Meanwhile, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) users may find Mastodon's mentions cryptic because they use the short name. But even they matter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseCulture #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoost #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares #TextFormatting #FullTextSearchScott M. Stolz I'm not talking about the occasional, moderate use of stuff that Hubzilla can do that Mastodon can't.
I'm not even only talking about using such stuff all the time and not in moderate amounts.
I'm talking about things like "content warnings" that read, "Summary of the post CW: long (number of characters), stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta, more-stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta." And then forgoing content warnings altogether in replies.
Or having eight and more hashtags at the bottom of a post, some of which look totally weird because they're the same as another one of the hashtags, but with "CW" at the beginning. (I use them to trigger filters. See below.)
Or image posts with alt-text for the images, but the alt-text wastes over 800 characters barely even describing the image and mentioning that the actual detailed image description is in the post itself. WTF, nobody puts image descriptions in the post, they belong into alt-text and nowhere else!
Worse yet: The post is hidden behind a content warning. And the content warning says something about tens of thousands of characters. And then you click/tap the content warning. And then an utter wall of text jumps at you, way longer than 100 toots could ever be, all in one enormous chunk.
Last but not least, my constant jabs at Mastodon, Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, Mastodon culture...
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta You can't "quote-toot" tweets on Mastodon. In fact, you can't "quote-toot" toots on Mastodon. You can't "quote-toot" anything on Mastodon.
So unless you're on Misskey or one of its forks or on Friendica or one of its descendants, or unless you want to quote something outside the Fediverse, screenshots are the way to go.
That's also because next to everyone on Mastodon is on a phone. And copy-pasting text from e.g. the Twitter app to whatever Mastodon app you use and copy-pasting the URL of e.g. the tweet into that Mastodon app is very inconvenient because copy-paste is a pain on a phone with no separate pointing device and no hardware keyboard.
Add to this that Mastodon can't only not "quote-toot", it can't quote either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Use as many as you need. But don't abuse them. For example, there are people who slap #Mastodon on posts that aren't even about Mastodon or #Fediverse on posts that aren't about the Fediverse in general, just to try and increase their range. This is bad behaviour, this is what's counterproductive, and it's actually often being sanctioned.
Still, there shouldn't be an upper limit. Some Fediverse users have filters that are triggered by hashtags and either remove posts from their timelines or put them behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this is actually the default, and it has been since even before Mastodon existed, and neither of them has a dedicated "content warning" text field. Also, at least on the latter two projects, there is no means whatsoever to add a Mastodon-style content warning to a comment like this.
Thus, at least some users, especially from these three projects (although (streams) isn't a project), add hashtags for the purpose of triggering filters. As you'll see at the bottom of this comment, it'll cause a whole lot of hashtags for the standards of someone who's used to Twitter. But they're deeply ingrained in the culture of certain non-Mastodon projects. And they're useful for at least some Mastodon users.
So any reply you may get that tells you that nobody in the whole Fediverse can possibly want more than four or eight hashtags is simply false. Some don't want more than that. Others depend on them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta Okay, this one is going to be long. Don't let the length and the text formatting disturb you. That's how we do things over here on Hubzilla, and I'm glad Mastodon can at least display them now.
So let's see...
First of all, it's unusual to have multiple description of an image in the alt-text. I'd say it's redundant, but I myself give short descriptions in the alt-text and then much longer ones than yours in the post text body which the alt-text also references.
Pick only one. For technically speaking, alt-text is not a synonym for a short description. Alt-text is the whole thing you create when pasting the AI output into that text field for images. It's what stands in for the image when you can't see the image for whichever reason, and it's all of it.
And don't add "alt-text" to alt-text.
Next, please excuse the pun, but it looks like you put blind faith into AI, and you copy-paste its output into your alt-texts unread, not to mention unredacted.
In the description of the fourth image you've linked, it really goes to show that whatever AI you use (ChatGPT for detailed image descriptions) doesn't even recognise what's in the lower picture. It doesn't get the picture, so it doesn't get the meme, so it fails to explain the meme.
I would definitely have added the information that the lower picture shows Christopher Lloyd as Doctor Emmett L. Brown in the final showdown scene of the 1985 film Back To The Future, trying to reconnect the lightning conductor cable which is about to channel the lightning bolt that shall damage the clock on Hill Valley's town hall into the DeLorean time machine with Marty McFly inside and use the energy to send him back into his time.
That is, in practice, I would have chosen a different wording and added another bit more of information. But without it, the image description is half-useless because it doesn't mention what the meme references and hints at.
Yes, it's easier and more convenient to believe in perfect fire-and-forget recognition, identification, description and explanation of any image imaginable by AI. But if you really want your image descriptions to be informative and, above all, correct, read them. And redact them. Or, better yet, write them yourself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AIScott M. Stolz
Good luck getting Mastodon to implement any standard they haven't invented themselves.
This will end in
This won't change much about many public, open-registration Friendica/Hubzilla instances not providing a link to the account/channel of the admin. Or any admin contact at all. All because the admin didn't bother to edit that page/hasn't gotten to it yet.
And it changes nothing about Mastodon users/admins trying to reach Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) admins the exact same way as they always try to reach other Mastodon admins. And failing because it doesn't work like on Mastodon. Even less in a mobile app that's geared towards Mastodon and Mastodon only.
Don't forget: On Hubzilla, everyone's on a Linux PC using a standard browser. On Mastodon, everyone's on a phone using a Mastodon app.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta If done the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) way, that'd be disturbing to Mastodon users again.
I think nobody on Mastodon knows this, but these three projects have a Facebook-like/Tumblr-like/blog-like one-post-many-comments thread structure as opposed to Mastodon's Twitter-like many-single-posts-tied-together thread structure.
This means the thread starter owns the whole thread. This also means the thread starter can moderate their own thread and even delete comments from their own thread. Even if they weren't appointed moderators by the admin. AFAIK, the deletion is actually forwarded to the source.
So a Mastodon user may e.g. troll around in a thread started on Hubzilla or attack the thread starter. A bit later, that Mastodon user will discover that their toots in reply to that Hubzilla posts are gone. Maybe the thread starter even mentions they've moderated their own thread and deleted comments.
The short form: Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots. In fact, posts from anywhere. Only toots/posts in reply to their own posts, but yes, they can. And they could before Mastodon even existed.
If this started happening often enough, and word started spreading around especially Mastodon, it'd be perceived as invasive and disruptive by many. It might cause such a big uproar that even more Mastodon users would call for defederating Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) completely.
As for actual, traditional moderation, I'm not saying it's bad per se.
I'm saying that many Mastodon admins really don't know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.
They think everything else that does *blogging is basically Mastodon with a different UI. Like an alternative mobile app for Mastodon itself. Or it's Mastodon + feature x on top. But otherwise like Mastodon.
And then they act accordingly. They try to interact with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) admins the same way as they interact with other Mastodon admins. And they neither know nor realise that these three projects are too different from Mastodon for these methods to even work!
Again:
You can't report a Hubzilla user to a Hubzilla admin using the report system because Hubzilla does not have Mastodon's report system!
You can't expect Hubzilla admins to follow hashtags for Mastodon instance admins either. Not only because they aren't Mastodon admins, and they probably don't even know that hashtag. But because you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla!
And so forth.
So what appears to be a Hubzilla admin's laziness or carelessness or ignorance are actually technical differences between Mastodon and Hubzilla that Mastodon admins are unaware of.
This has nothing to with moderation by admins/mods only being bad. This has everything to do with Hubzilla being vastly different from Mastodon. And with Mastodon admins/mods not knowing jack shit about Hubzilla.
(Good thing this is so long that nobody will read it. Otherwise it'll empower those who say that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) must be redesigned to be exactly like Mastodon or face full defederation otherwise for being too different.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta gave me to think.
Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects
So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance.
The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that.
What does the admin do Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance.
Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented.
The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff.
Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface.
Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels.
Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient.
Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #MastoAdmin. Should reach lots of admins, right
Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them.
Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet
Anyways, the warning with the #MastoAdmin hashtag doesn't reach them either.
So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user.
Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports.
We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance.
*Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #BlockingMeta #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta
But what if the offending user is on an instance
a) of something that is not Mastodon, that wasn't even inspired by Mastodon because it's older than Mastodon, and that doesn't have Mastodon's report system implemented
b) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because they aren't Mastodon admins
c) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because that project doesn't have following hashtags implemented
So whatever you do the Mastodon way never reaches the admin in the first place
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Just out of curiosity:
Let's suppose you come across someone whom you find misbehaving. You try reporting them to their instance moderation.
But they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). And you can't for the life of you figure out how to get into contact with the admin of that specific instance via Mastodon. And yes, it's a public instance.
What do you do Defederate the whole instance because its management doesn't appear to be up to Mastodon's community standards Demand it be fediblocked altogether for that reason
Or what if there's only an e-mail address, but no link to a Fediverse account If that's a problem for Mastodon instance admins, I might single-handedly be responsible for hub.netzgemeinde.eu being defederated by dozens or hundreds of Mastodon and *key instances for "non-Mastodon-standard" behaviour.
(Hashtags below mostly for filter-triggering purposes. Text filters are the CW standard where I come from and have been since at least 2012.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Ich mache das anders. Ich warne im Summary (Mastodon: Content Warning) vor allem, was jemandem auf Mastodon unangenehm sein kann, und die eigentlichen Content Warnings dopple ich noch einmal mit jeweils einem und mehreren Hashtags fr die, die Filter verwenden.
Das ist auch ein bichen eine Demonstration dessen, was dabei rauskommen kann.
Zeichen habe ich selbst mehr als reichlich zu verbrennen, will sagen, praktisch unbegrenzt viele. Daran soll's nicht scheitern. Und wenn der Post lnger als 500 Zeichen wird, gibt's dafr eine Content Warning und die Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong und #CWLongPost und bei deutschsprachigen Posts - wobei ich die Postsprache nicht einstellen kann - zustzlich #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost.
Bei Kommentaren gibt's dann nur die Hashtags, weil Mastodon-CWs nicht gehen.
CC: He may have a point, yes. There may be more people in the Fediverse who think like him, yes. He even sounds like he has come across one of my posts.
But if I did what he asked for, all my regular posts would grow to thousands upon thousands of characters and take hours to write because I'd have to break everything down to the very basics. Both the primary and the secondary topic of this channel are niche within a niche, maybe within yet another niche for a non-technical audience.
Essentially, I couldn't post anything anymore without long-post content warnings for Mastodon users who are disturbed by everything longer than 500 characters.
And my image descriptions for moderately complex in-world images, now sitting at 35,000 to 40,000 characters for the first image in a post and not counting the preamble, might easily grow beyond 50,000 or 60,000 characters. The preamble would grow well over 5,000 characters. Even longer if I took people's attention spans into consideration and explained certain things again and again.
This wouldn't even really help people outside my niche with understanding my posts. Even fewer of them would read them in the first place, and even more of them would mute or block me to get rid of those monstrous posts in their timelines.
And no, I can't explain the implications of the current scheduled OSgrid downtime in one simple sentence and in plain, everyday language to someone who doesn't even understand what a server is and knows exactly nothing about 3-D virtual worlds. Not in a way they'd fully understand.
Some of ya'll need to step back from the hyper-specific niche topics you post about and take a second to think about explaining your topics to normies, like ELI5 once in a while. Sometimes I'm scrolling my feed and I'm like wtf is all this this about.
Maybe I just curated a bunch of people with hard to follow niche interests.
Am I the only one
It seems like people aren't posting to have a conversation, It's just monologuing. I prolly fall into this once in a while as well.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.
For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.
As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.
I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than users have heard of Mastodon.
BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.
Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.
Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.
It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".
As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.
Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it Pirate Parties, anyone They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.
But getting them from something as dead-simple as to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.
And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration How about projects that use ActivityPub as a secondary protocol ((streams)) or as an optional add-on (Friendica, Hubzilla) while using something different with different features as the main protocol
I mean, I could write a lot about Hubzilla, and I occasionally contribute to the . But most of what could be written about Hubzilla would be about its inner workings (channels, permission control, no limits, theming etc.), stuff that doesn't federate in the traditional sense at all (articles, wikis, websites, the file space, CalDAV, CardDAV etc.) and stuff that only works on Hubzilla's main protocol Zot (nomadic identity).
While this is all part of what makes Hubzilla Hubzilla, none of it has got that much to do with ActivityPub, if anything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla
One is that Mastodon users, of course, expect everyone to add alt-text to all their images. That's easy for Mastodon users: Images are attached to toots, and you get a nifty text field into which you put your alt-text.
This is different on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Not only do you embed images much like in blog or forum posts. No, you don't have an alt-text field either. You embed these images using automatically generated BBcode, again, much like in forum posts. If you want alt-text, you have to edit that embedding code and graft the alt-text into it. Manually.
There is no official documentation on this whatsoever for either of these projects. The knowledge about this spreads by word-of-mouth only.
So users of these projects risk being ostracised for something they don't know a) that they have to do, b) that they can do and c) how they could possibly do.
The other issue is "image description == alt-text, full stop, end of discussion". The assumption that "alt-text" and "image description" are always mutually fully synonymous with no exception.
This comes from Mastodon's post length limitation. 500 characters. These are for the actual post, for mentions, for hashtags and for the content warning which actually counts into the post length. Doesn't leave you much room to describe an image, does it
But in alt-text, you have 1,500 characters. Per image. Always. No matter how much you want to toot otherwise.
With such a "high" limit, Mastodon users often don't simply add an alt-text of a maximum of 150-200 characters as defined in those many "how do I write alt-text for my static webpage with thousands of characters for explaining stuff" guides. No, they go well into detail. They give in-depth descriptions. They explain stuff. After all, they've got 1,500 characters of room.
Other Mastodon users love that, and they may do it themselves. Yet other Mastodon users see that the aforementioned Mastodon users love it and thus do it themselves.
With image descriptions of 700, 800, 1,000 or more characters, Mastodon users don't even question putting the descriptions into the alt-text. It's simply technologically impossible to do otherwise. So it doesn't even come to their minds. Image description == alt-text.
Okay, now here comes the catch.
First of all, you must never describe or explain something in alt-text that can't be accessed from anywhere else in the image.
That's because some people can't access alt-text, e.g. if they have a physical disability that prevents them from using a computer mouse, so they have to do everything with the keyboard, so they can't hover a mouse cursor over an image which is necessary to see alt-text in a desktop browser.
If they can't access alt-text, they can't access the information in it. If that information is only available in the alt-text but neither in the post text nor in the image, it's lost to them. Such information always goes into the post text.
Mastodon users are likely to be highly irritated upon reading that. How are you supposed to put that in the post text in the Fediverse! Mastodon doesn't give you enough characters! You can only put a detailed image description into the alt-text!
On Mastodon maybe. But only on vanilla Mastodon. Okay, and on Threads if it supports alt-text.
But everything that is not vanilla Mastodon gives you either more characters in the post text than in alt-text or no limits for either.
Even Misskey gives you 1,500 characters in alt-text and 3,000 in the post which is 2,500 more than on Mastodon. That's a thread of at least six posts rolled into one.
The other Forkeys give you 3,000 by default. Pleroma, Akkoma and their other forks give you 5,000 by default.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined limits. Not for the post text and theoretically not for the alt-text either which, as I've explained above, is grafted into the post text and not put into a dedicated text field.
That's plenty of room for description and explanation, depending on how much you go into detail. In fact, you aren't even bound to a 1,500-character limit anymore!
I still expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated whenever I describe images. That's because my alt-text usually only contains a brief image description that doesn't actually describe anything. In addition, it says that the actual, fully detailed image description is in the post which is hidden behind a Hubzilla-style summary/Mastodon-style content warning combination.
I expect someone to try and educate me about all image descriptions always only belonging into alt-text because that's how it's done on Mastodon, yada yada yada. Regardless of the image description of even only one of the images being over 25 times longer than Mastodon's alt-text, so it wouldn't even fit in there.
Mastodon doesn't do it like this, so it's wrong everywhere else as well. Even though Mastodon doesn't do it like this because it can't, and everything else can, and Mastodon can happily display what everything else can.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Late, but still:
It has been around since the 2000s. No, really. No, I'm not kidding.
The community has been using the term "Metaverse" in its common daily lingo since at least 2008. Want proof
, the first public OpenSim grid, the oldest, the largest by active users and still the second-largest by land area, has referred to itself as the "Open Source Metaverse" .
The Metropolis Metaversum, the first grid hosted in Germany, called itself just that , too.
The news site Hypergrid Business has used the name "" for its OpenSim category for quite a while already.
Oh, by the way, , active since as early as 2003, has jumped upon the bandwagon meanwhile and refers to itself as a "metaverse", too.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost I can't help but wonder if there's any influence or inspiration or experience from Second Life, the pioneer of highly modular and highly customisable avatars, going into this. And I mean actually using it, not hearsay or reading about it. (Mentioning OpenSim is probably futile here.)
Especially female avatars are tricky. Linden Labs has learned that the hard way after only supporting male/unisex clothes. When people wanted their female avatars to optionally wear high heels, or when they wanted them to wear skirts that move with the legs, Second Life's avatar standard had to be changed. All that was stuff that nobody had thought of early on, even if the default starter avatar was technically female.
For good skirts, look at Sinespace and Overte, by the way.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #VirtualClothing #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostCan everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Just because you can't get anyone who can still develop in truly cross-platform languages because everyone can only "code" Windows apps in C# or .NET or mobile apps in JavaScript anymore
Or is it worth it because more and more Fediverse instance servers run on Windows machines because aspiring instance admins can't be bothered to learn Linux
Strongly reminds me of OpenSim which, back in the mid-2000s, was built in .NET and originally Windows-only. A server application. It was eventually made compatible with Mono. It may still cause trouble on Linux or macOS, so even amongst the grids that aren't DreamGrids, about every other one is running on a Windows machine. It got worse when OpenSimulator 0.9.3 switched from .NET for Windows and Mono for everything else to dotnet6 for everything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CSharp #DotNet #Iceshrimp #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
I rarely post pictures anymore, but when I do, I always describe them before posting them. In order to make my pictures understandable, I have to write very detailed descriptions and explanations which require special niche knowledge. If hardly anyone but me has that knowledge, how could an AI possibly have it
Also, I describe my own original images not by looking at the images, much less at the resolution at which I'll post them, but by looking directly at what the images show. I can see many more details that way, and I can transcribe text verbatim that's illegible or practically invisible in the image. AI can't do that.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
In addition, Mastodon and only Mastodon dictates all culture all across the Fediverse, no matter where.
This means doing everything the Mastodon way. Content warnings for sensitive content in the summary. Friendica doesn't even have a summary field. Alt-text for all media which neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) has a text field for or even only documentation on how to graft it into BBcode.
At the same time, doing anything that can't be done on vanilla Mastodon is bad. Quotes. Shared posts (= "quote-posts" = "quote-boosts" = "quote-tweets" = "quote-toots"). Text formatting. Code blocks. Bullet-point lists. Embedded links. Even only over 500 characters. All stuff that Mistpark 1.0 (now Friendica) could do as early as 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.
The key reason why Mastodon is so dominant is not only because it has twice as many active users as everything else combined. It's because it's the one and only gateway into the Fediverse.
Everyone who comes here believes that the Fediverse is only Mastodon because telling them that the Fediverse is more than that only confuses them. Hell, they wouldn't even join if the official app didn't railroad them hard onto mastodon.social because decentrality would scare them away even before they were forced to pick an instance.
Then they spend multiple months with that belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And the Mastodon-only Fediverse is what they get used to. Their new, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy home. It's also in that phase that the first-wave and second-wave Twitter refugees were in when they shaped Mastodon's culture, completely ignoring the rest of the Fediverse which didn't even exist for them.
Then they eventually come across the very first "toot" in one of their timelines which is somewhat weird. Mostly that's because it's very long. Or maybe it does stuff of which they don't know how to do it on Mastodon because they can't do it on Mastodon at all like italics without Unicode trickery. And whoever wrote that "toot" tells them it isn't a "toot" because it's not from Mastodon, it's from XYZ, and no, XYZ is not Mastodon, it isn't a fork of Mastodon either, and yes, it's absolutely normal and intentional and legal that you can post from XYZ to Mastodon.
And then they freak out because they're disturbed by someone who has intruded into their nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon Fediverse. And they don't want this to happen ever again.
Still, I think the majority of Mastodon users have never knowingly come across anything from anywhere that isn't Mastodon. Those who say they know the Fediverse is more than Mastodon mostly only know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon from hearsay and name-dropping, but they assume it's basically Mastodon with different names, different UIs and maaaaaybe longer posts because they've read somewhere that you can post thousands of characters on this-or-that project.
So nobody on Mastodon takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse and its perks into account when shaping the Fediverse culture.
Everyone uses "alt-text" and "image description" synonymously because Mastodon toots are too ridiculously limited in size for proper image descriptions, so there's no other way in "the Fediverse" to describe an image more thoroughly than in alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. They're completely unaware that the circumstances are vastly different everywhere outside vanilla Mastodon and Threads because everything except vanilla Mastodon and Threads offers you thousands of characters by default.
The debates on whether or not to allow quotes or "quote-toots" should be possible on Mastodon are out-right hilarious. Friendica and Hubzilla have been able to both quote and "quote-toot" any post on Mastodon with no resistance from the very second that the first Mastodon instance spun up in 2016. But nobody knows that. The *keys are capable of both, too, AFAIK, but the greater Mastodon community is unaware of that as well and keeps debating only about Mastodon.
So it isn't much of a surprise that all behaviour rules for the Fediverse are made by Mastodon users for everything that connects to Mastodon, but completely disregarding the existing culture of whatever connects to Mastodon. Sometimes they disregard the capabilities of whatever connects to Mastodon, sometimes they forbid them because these capabilities are disturbing to those who want the Fediverse to feel like only Mastodon.
You're only exempt from these rules if you're on Hubzilla or (streams), and you've got Pubcrawl off. If at all.
Using nomadic identity is actually fairly safe. Mastodon users usually don't notice it unless you often post to the same people from your main instance and then from a clone. And besides, except for those who try to create imaginary scenarios of using nomadic identity as a harassment tool, those Mastodon users who know Hubzilla and (streams) offer nomadic identity envy them for their ease of moving instance and their resilience against sudden instance shutdowns.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPosttroet.cafe, one of the biggest German-speaking Mastodon instances, was on the verge of closing.
firefish.social, Firefish's lighthouse instance, has stopped working due to half a year of neglect by its only admin who is also Firefish's only core maintainer.
It's time the people behind ActivityPub finally accept Mike Macgirvin 's proposals. Nomadic identity shouldn't stay exclusive to Hubzilla and (streams).
#Fediverse #ActivityPub #NomadicIdentity #TroetCafe #FirefishSocial #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Or, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), to a post that wasn't started by one of your followers because these three don't serve you single comments from within threads which didn't appear on your stream from the very beginning
Well, that makes showing Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon much more difficult. Or that Mastodon's "rules" for how and where to describe images are not necessarily set in stone for the whole Fediverse because everything that isn't Mastodon doesn't have Mastodon's limitations.
Or that the first time the term "Metaverse" was used for an actual, real 3-D virtual world was not in 2021 by Zuckerberg for something he planned, but in 2007 for something that already existed and still exists.
I'd wonder if you're already a reply guy if you reply to a post in your local or federated timeline. But I don't have either.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostBisher wei man wenig ber Long Covid bei Kindern und ob impfen dagegen hilft. Daten von ber einer Million Kindern und Jugendlichen zeigen nun moderaten Schutz durch die Impfung.
"The Metaverse" as in new 3-D virtual world projects of the 2020s in general
Or "The Metaverse" as in...
"Metaverse" and "The Metaverse" are registered trademarks of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.
...as in "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" as in "Facebook's Metaverse" as in "Meta's Metaverse" as in Horizons
Stop calling it "The Metaverse" already!
Can everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Oh, and by the way, a finding of mine for those who still think Zuck was the first to slap "Metaverse" on an actual real 3-D world:
"Metaverse". Used in OpenSim since 2007.
Something for those who think Mark Zuckerberg has invented the term "Metaverse" in 2021.
, the oldest grid (est. 2007), is referring to itself as "The Open Source Metaverse". Guess what It has taken over that slogan from OpenSim itself, and .
Metropolis, the first German grid (est. 2008), boldly used the full name "Metropolis Metaversum" until it was officially shut down in summer 2022. .
Since I started out in Metropolis on April 30th, 2020, I was in something called Metaverse almost a year and a half before Zuckerberg used that term.
Another fun fact: The virtual worlds/virtual reality news site has named its OpenSim category "" as early as 2010.
#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Metropolis #OSgrid
For the record: Yes, I know it was Neal Stephenson who coined that term in 1991 already.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
More accountability: Ontario launches team to crack down on bad LTC actors
The 10-person team will be an "effective deterrent and tool" when escalated enforcement is required, the province said.
-termCare
Part of the secondary topic of this channel is showing a very-much-non-Mastodon view on the Fediverse to the Fedizens out there. Lots of fresh Twitter-to-Mastodon converts started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because I was one of the few to explain the Fediverse outside Mastodon to Mastodon users.
This doesn't work anymore if my posts don't reach their recipients anymore.
And besides, triggering Mastodon users with non-Mastodon behaviour can have nasty side-effects. Yeah, some mute you. Some block you. Often even without also unfollowing you. Some complain to you about it and demand you don't use any features of your instance that vanilla Mastodon 3.x didn't support yet.
But then there are those who try to complain to your instance admin about you and try to have you sanctioned. Or they have their instance admins/mods complain to your instance admin about you. And this can escalate.
A Hubzilla admin would laugh that off. Most Hubzilla hubs don't even have rules, and the rules of any one Mastodon instance don't apply here either.
But in most cases, the complaints never reach their recipients. See, the average Mastodon user doesn't know anything about Hubzilla. So they try to complain the same ways as they would within Mastodon.
They use Mastodon's report feature, but Hubzilla doesn't have it implemented. They try to send your admin a DM, but finding the admin of your hub doesn't work like finding the admin of a Mastodon instance, and oftentimes, the admin's channel isn't linked anywhere at all. They publicly complain about you with a Mastodon admin hashtag, hoping that your admin will read it. But you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla, and even if you could, why would a Hubzilla admin follow a Mastodon-specific hashtag
So the admin and the "moderation" of your hub doesn't react. Conclusion for a Mastodon user who only knows Mastodon: Your instance is basically unmoderated. And what does Mastodon do with an unmoderated instance whose users misbehave for any definition of that word Block it. Like, the whole instance.
One Hubzilla user misbehaving in the eyes of Mastodon users can cause the whole hub to be blocked on thousands of Mastodon instances, maybe including mastodon.social.
Now you could say I should flip the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse the bird and turn Pubcrawl off for good. If I did that, I could just as well delete the whole channel because it'd lose its very purpose.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta The biggest cultural difference based on server software has to be between Mastodon on the one hand and the Mike Macgirvin creations Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other hand.
Not only do they have vastly different user bases, but they developed independently from one another. When the Mastodon culture developed, those who shaped it didn't even know the other side, so they couldn't adopt any of its culture.
Said other side's culture dates back to 2010 when Friendica was launched as Mistpark, and since that was almost six years before Mastodon, it couldn't be inspired by Mastodon's culture either.
Add to that that these respective cultures are greatly shaped by technical features and limitations or the lack thereof.
Mastodon's culture is largely built around its 500-character limit which is ample for your typical phone-wielding Mastodon user. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined character limit whatsoever, and its target audience is largely on desktop or laptop computers, often running Linux, with large screens and full-size hardware keyboards.
So it's the most normal thing in the world for them to write in one post as much as they want while Mastodon users debate whether threads are good, or you should always limit yourself to 500 characters or less.
Also, alt-text. Mastodon has many disabled users, including blind or visually-impaired users. And it has a dedicated alt-text field for each image. On top of that, it offers 1,500 characters for each alt-text which, in connection with the 500-character limit for toots, has people write detailed image descriptions and explanations and put them into the alt-text. That's often information that doesn't even belong in alt-text, but there's no room for it elsewhere.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have unlimited room, so putting stuff into alt-text because the post text is too limited seems ridiculous. But they don't have a vocal disabled community, so there's little interest in accessibility. And neither of them has a dedicated alt-text field. Alt-text is supported, but it has to be manually grafted into the image-embedding code in the post. And there's no official documentation for that, I think not even for Friendica which is the only one out of the three with actually useful end-user documentation.
It's similar with content warnings. On Mastodon, they're put into the repurposed summary field, and next to nobody knows that it's a repurposed summary field rather than invented for content warnings from scratch. So since Mastodon has a content warning field, writer-side content warnings are huge, but also cause for drama.
Mastodon 4.0 has introduced filters that can create reader-side content warnings, but hardly anyone uses them, even fewer people support them with keywords or hashtags, many don't even know this feature exists, and it's generally ignored because it's un-Mastodon.
The Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) complex doesn't have a content warning field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a summary field labelled as such. Friendica doesn't even have that it uses a pair of BBcode tags for that.
And within their own ecosystem, they don't even need it. They've got the "NSFW app" instead, an over-one-decade-old, optional, simple-as-anything substring filter that automatically hides entire posts with all media and everything behind content warnings if it finds one of the entered keywords or hashtags.
So they can't understand Mastodon's commotion about content warnings, and Mastodon users can't understand why they don't add Mastodon-style content warnings.
And then there are all the things that were or are being debated on Mastodon and whether or not it should introduce them. Especially the second-wave Twitter refugees are often staunchly against them.
Full-text search and quote-tweets are being actively used on Twitter to track down and harass members of minorities who have fled to Mastodon. Of course, they don't want Mastodon to introduce either. That is, in the case of full-text search, Mastodon has found a solution, but one that doesn't really federate to the rest of the Fediverse.
Quotes and text formatting are seen as bad, too. Many don't know quotes because Twitter doesn't have them, and so they think quotes could be used as tools of harassment. And both are seen as making Mastodon feel less like Mastodon and more complicated.
Friendica and Hubzilla had all this before there was Mastodon, and (streams) inherited it from its long line of ancestors. Their users have gotten so used to having all this that they don't understand what the problems should be, also because they're so detached from Mastodon's culture. So they keep on using these features unashamedly, even around Mastodon users.
Some differences are rather simple. Take mentions, for example. Friendica has always used long names for mentions, as does its offspring. Mastodon users may find that freaky. Meanwhile, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) users may find Mastodon's mentions cryptic because they use the short name. But even they matter.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseCulture #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoost #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares #TextFormatting #FullTextSearchScott M. Stolz I'm not talking about the occasional, moderate use of stuff that Hubzilla can do that Mastodon can't.
I'm not even only talking about using such stuff all the time and not in moderate amounts.
I'm talking about things like "content warnings" that read, "Summary of the post CW: long (number of characters), stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta, more-stuff-I-think-not-everyone-wants-to-read-about meta." And then forgoing content warnings altogether in replies.
Or having eight and more hashtags at the bottom of a post, some of which look totally weird because they're the same as another one of the hashtags, but with "CW" at the beginning. (I use them to trigger filters. See below.)
Or image posts with alt-text for the images, but the alt-text wastes over 800 characters barely even describing the image and mentioning that the actual detailed image description is in the post itself. WTF, nobody puts image descriptions in the post, they belong into alt-text and nowhere else!
Worse yet: The post is hidden behind a content warning. And the content warning says something about tens of thousands of characters. And then you click/tap the content warning. And then an utter wall of text jumps at you, way longer than 100 toots could ever be, all in one enormous chunk.
Last but not least, my constant jabs at Mastodon, Mastodon users, especially Twitter refugees, Mastodon culture...
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta You can't "quote-toot" tweets on Mastodon. In fact, you can't "quote-toot" toots on Mastodon. You can't "quote-toot" anything on Mastodon.
So unless you're on Misskey or one of its forks or on Friendica or one of its descendants, or unless you want to quote something outside the Fediverse, screenshots are the way to go.
That's also because next to everyone on Mastodon is on a phone. And copy-pasting text from e.g. the Twitter app to whatever Mastodon app you use and copy-pasting the URL of e.g. the tweet into that Mastodon app is very inconvenient because copy-paste is a pain on a phone with no separate pointing device and no hardware keyboard.
Add to this that Mastodon can't only not "quote-toot", it can't quote either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Maria Ryabushkina
Russian Model
Winner Best Stringkini
Use as many as you need. But don't abuse them. For example, there are people who slap #Mastodon on posts that aren't even about Mastodon or #Fediverse on posts that aren't about the Fediverse in general, just to try and increase their range. This is bad behaviour, this is what's counterproductive, and it's actually often being sanctioned.
Still, there shouldn't be an upper limit. Some Fediverse users have filters that are triggered by hashtags and either remove posts from their timelines or put them behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this is actually the default, and it has been since even before Mastodon existed, and neither of them has a dedicated "content warning" text field. Also, at least on the latter two projects, there is no means whatsoever to add a Mastodon-style content warning to a comment like this.
Thus, at least some users, especially from these three projects (although (streams) isn't a project), add hashtags for the purpose of triggering filters. As you'll see at the bottom of this comment, it'll cause a whole lot of hashtags for the standards of someone who's used to Twitter. But they're deeply ingrained in the culture of certain non-Mastodon projects. And they're useful for at least some Mastodon users.
So any reply you may get that tells you that nobody in the whole Fediverse can possibly want more than four or eight hashtags is simply false. Some don't want more than that. Others depend on them.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta Okay, this one is going to be long. Don't let the length and the text formatting disturb you. That's how we do things over here on Hubzilla, and I'm glad Mastodon can at least display them now.
So let's see...
First of all, it's unusual to have multiple description of an image in the alt-text. I'd say it's redundant, but I myself give short descriptions in the alt-text and then much longer ones than yours in the post text body which the alt-text also references.
Pick only one. For technically speaking, alt-text is not a synonym for a short description. Alt-text is the whole thing you create when pasting the AI output into that text field for images. It's what stands in for the image when you can't see the image for whichever reason, and it's all of it.
And don't add "alt-text" to alt-text.
Next, please excuse the pun, but it looks like you put blind faith into AI, and you copy-paste its output into your alt-texts unread, not to mention unredacted.
In the description of the fourth image you've linked, it really goes to show that whatever AI you use (ChatGPT for detailed image descriptions) doesn't even recognise what's in the lower picture. It doesn't get the picture, so it doesn't get the meme, so it fails to explain the meme.
I would definitely have added the information that the lower picture shows Christopher Lloyd as Doctor Emmett L. Brown in the final showdown scene of the 1985 film Back To The Future, trying to reconnect the lightning conductor cable which is about to channel the lightning bolt that shall damage the clock on Hill Valley's town hall into the DeLorean time machine with Marty McFly inside and use the energy to send him back into his time.
That is, in practice, I would have chosen a different wording and added another bit more of information. But without it, the image description is half-useless because it doesn't mention what the meme references and hints at.
Yes, it's easier and more convenient to believe in perfect fire-and-forget recognition, identification, description and explanation of any image imaginable by AI. But if you really want your image descriptions to be informative and, above all, correct, read them. And redact them. Or, better yet, write them yourself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AIScott M. Stolz
For example, it might be useful to implement the following:
1. A standard way to announce to other projects who the administrators or moderators are.
2. A standard way to report a post via ActivityPub that automatically gets delivered to the correct people.
3. A moderation system for handling reports on each platform.
4. Bounce messages if a message cannot be delivered.
It would still be up to the projects to implement this, but developers are more likely to implement it if there is a standard.
Good luck getting Mastodon to implement any standard they haven't invented themselves.
This will end in
- Mastodon trying to push their own standard upon everyone else, Mike Macgirvin having it in dev alreeady, but Mario Vavti staunchly refusing it because he doesn't let Mastodon push anything upon him
- Mike Macgirvin making his own proposal, the best one of them all, which is rejected by everyone from the W3C to Eugen Rochko
- maybe, if they get their act together, the W3C making a proposal which Mike Macgirvin either rejects for being ridiculously weak or implements within 15 minutes, which Mario Vavti rejects because it'd be next to impossible to weave into Hubzilla and Zot6, and which Eugen Rochko rejects because Mastodon already has something that covers this, and everyone else must adopt this or else
For those concerned about privacy, if you are in a country that does not require you to disclose who runs the website, you could just put "Administrator" as the name of the Administrator. Even though you did not give a person or organization's name, there is still a listed Administrator for the instance.
This won't change much about many public, open-registration Friendica/Hubzilla instances not providing a link to the account/channel of the admin. Or any admin contact at all. All because the admin didn't bother to edit that page/hasn't gotten to it yet.
And it changes nothing about Mastodon users/admins trying to reach Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) admins the exact same way as they always try to reach other Mastodon admins. And failing because it doesn't work like on Mastodon. Even less in a mobile app that's geared towards Mastodon and Mastodon only.
Don't forget: On Hubzilla, everyone's on a Linux PC using a standard browser. On Mastodon, everyone's on a phone using a Mastodon app.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta If done the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) way, that'd be disturbing to Mastodon users again.
I think nobody on Mastodon knows this, but these three projects have a Facebook-like/Tumblr-like/blog-like one-post-many-comments thread structure as opposed to Mastodon's Twitter-like many-single-posts-tied-together thread structure.
This means the thread starter owns the whole thread. This also means the thread starter can moderate their own thread and even delete comments from their own thread. Even if they weren't appointed moderators by the admin. AFAIK, the deletion is actually forwarded to the source.
So a Mastodon user may e.g. troll around in a thread started on Hubzilla or attack the thread starter. A bit later, that Mastodon user will discover that their toots in reply to that Hubzilla posts are gone. Maybe the thread starter even mentions they've moderated their own thread and deleted comments.
The short form: Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots. In fact, posts from anywhere. Only toots/posts in reply to their own posts, but yes, they can. And they could before Mastodon even existed.
If this started happening often enough, and word started spreading around especially Mastodon, it'd be perceived as invasive and disruptive by many. It might cause such a big uproar that even more Mastodon users would call for defederating Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) completely.
As for actual, traditional moderation, I'm not saying it's bad per se.
I'm saying that many Mastodon admins really don't know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.
They think everything else that does *blogging is basically Mastodon with a different UI. Like an alternative mobile app for Mastodon itself. Or it's Mastodon + feature x on top. But otherwise like Mastodon.
And then they act accordingly. They try to interact with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) admins the same way as they interact with other Mastodon admins. And they neither know nor realise that these three projects are too different from Mastodon for these methods to even work!
Again:
You can't report a Hubzilla user to a Hubzilla admin using the report system because Hubzilla does not have Mastodon's report system!
You can't expect Hubzilla admins to follow hashtags for Mastodon instance admins either. Not only because they aren't Mastodon admins, and they probably don't even know that hashtag. But because you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla!
And so forth.
So what appears to be a Hubzilla admin's laziness or carelessness or ignorance are actually technical differences between Mastodon and Hubzilla that Mastodon admins are unaware of.
This has nothing to with moderation by admins/mods only being bad. This has everything to do with Hubzilla being vastly different from Mastodon. And with Mastodon admins/mods not knowing jack shit about Hubzilla.
(Good thing this is so long that nobody will read it. Otherwise it'll empower those who say that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) must be redesigned to be exactly like Mastodon or face full defederation otherwise for being too different.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta gave me to think.
Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects
So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance.
The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that.
What does the admin do Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance.
Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented.
The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff.
Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface.
Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels.
Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient.
Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #MastoAdmin. Should reach lots of admins, right
Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them.
Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet
Anyways, the warning with the #MastoAdmin hashtag doesn't reach them either.
So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user.
Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports.
We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance.
*Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #BlockingMeta #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta
I report the behavior through the report system and do my own justice. Maybe post a link to the account and the offending content with MastoAdmin and Fediblock tags and let people do their own research.
But what if the offending user is on an instance
a) of something that is not Mastodon, that wasn't even inspired by Mastodon because it's older than Mastodon, and that doesn't have Mastodon's report system implemented
b) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because they aren't Mastodon admins
c) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because that project doesn't have following hashtags implemented
So whatever you do the Mastodon way never reaches the admin in the first place
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Just out of curiosity:
Let's suppose you come across someone whom you find misbehaving. You try reporting them to their instance moderation.
But they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). And you can't for the life of you figure out how to get into contact with the admin of that specific instance via Mastodon. And yes, it's a public instance.
What do you do Defederate the whole instance because its management doesn't appear to be up to Mastodon's community standards Demand it be fediblocked altogether for that reason
Or what if there's only an e-mail address, but no link to a Fediverse account If that's a problem for Mastodon instance admins, I might single-handedly be responsible for hub.netzgemeinde.eu being defederated by dozens or hundreds of Mastodon and *key instances for "non-Mastodon-standard" behaviour.
(Hashtags below mostly for filter-triggering purposes. Text filters are the CW standard where I come from and have been since at least 2012.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Ich mache das anders. Ich warne im Summary (Mastodon: Content Warning) vor allem, was jemandem auf Mastodon unangenehm sein kann, und die eigentlichen Content Warnings dopple ich noch einmal mit jeweils einem und mehreren Hashtags fr die, die Filter verwenden.
Das ist auch ein bichen eine Demonstration dessen, was dabei rauskommen kann.
Zeichen habe ich selbst mehr als reichlich zu verbrennen, will sagen, praktisch unbegrenzt viele. Daran soll's nicht scheitern. Und wenn der Post lnger als 500 Zeichen wird, gibt's dafr eine Content Warning und die Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong und #CWLongPost und bei deutschsprachigen Posts - wobei ich die Postsprache nicht einstellen kann - zustzlich #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost.
Bei Kommentaren gibt's dann nur die Hashtags, weil Mastodon-CWs nicht gehen.
CC: He may have a point, yes. There may be more people in the Fediverse who think like him, yes. He even sounds like he has come across one of my posts.
But if I did what he asked for, all my regular posts would grow to thousands upon thousands of characters and take hours to write because I'd have to break everything down to the very basics. Both the primary and the secondary topic of this channel are niche within a niche, maybe within yet another niche for a non-technical audience.
Essentially, I couldn't post anything anymore without long-post content warnings for Mastodon users who are disturbed by everything longer than 500 characters.
And my image descriptions for moderately complex in-world images, now sitting at 35,000 to 40,000 characters for the first image in a post and not counting the preamble, might easily grow beyond 50,000 or 60,000 characters. The preamble would grow well over 5,000 characters. Even longer if I took people's attention spans into consideration and explained certain things again and again.
This wouldn't even really help people outside my niche with understanding my posts. Even fewer of them would read them in the first place, and even more of them would mute or block me to get rid of those monstrous posts in their timelines.
And no, I can't explain the implications of the current scheduled OSgrid downtime in one simple sentence and in plain, everyday language to someone who doesn't even understand what a server is and knows exactly nothing about 3-D virtual worlds. Not in a way they'd fully understand.
Some of ya'll need to step back from the hyper-specific niche topics you post about and take a second to think about explaining your topics to normies, like ELI5 once in a while. Sometimes I'm scrolling my feed and I'm like wtf is all this this about.
Maybe I just curated a bunch of people with hard to follow niche interests.
Am I the only one
It seems like people aren't posting to have a conversation, It's just monologuing. I prolly fall into this once in a while as well.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.
This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.
For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.
Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.
As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.
There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.
I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than users have heard of Mastodon.
BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.
Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.
Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.
It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".
As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.
Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it Pirate Parties, anyone They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.
But getting them from something as dead-simple as to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.
And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration How about projects that use ActivityPub as a secondary protocol ((streams)) or as an optional add-on (Friendica, Hubzilla) while using something different with different features as the main protocol
I mean, I could write a lot about Hubzilla, and I occasionally contribute to the . But most of what could be written about Hubzilla would be about its inner workings (channels, permission control, no limits, theming etc.), stuff that doesn't federate in the traditional sense at all (articles, wikis, websites, the file space, CalDAV, CardDAV etc.) and stuff that only works on Hubzilla's main protocol Zot (nomadic identity).
While this is all part of what makes Hubzilla Hubzilla, none of it has got that much to do with ActivityPub, if anything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla
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Nothing per se. The issues I've mentioned are different.One is that Mastodon users, of course, expect everyone to add alt-text to all their images. That's easy for Mastodon users: Images are attached to toots, and you get a nifty text field into which you put your alt-text.
This is different on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Not only do you embed images much like in blog or forum posts. No, you don't have an alt-text field either. You embed these images using automatically generated BBcode, again, much like in forum posts. If you want alt-text, you have to edit that embedding code and graft the alt-text into it. Manually.
There is no official documentation on this whatsoever for either of these projects. The knowledge about this spreads by word-of-mouth only.
So users of these projects risk being ostracised for something they don't know a) that they have to do, b) that they can do and c) how they could possibly do.
The other issue is "image description == alt-text, full stop, end of discussion". The assumption that "alt-text" and "image description" are always mutually fully synonymous with no exception.
This comes from Mastodon's post length limitation. 500 characters. These are for the actual post, for mentions, for hashtags and for the content warning which actually counts into the post length. Doesn't leave you much room to describe an image, does it
But in alt-text, you have 1,500 characters. Per image. Always. No matter how much you want to toot otherwise.
With such a "high" limit, Mastodon users often don't simply add an alt-text of a maximum of 150-200 characters as defined in those many "how do I write alt-text for my static webpage with thousands of characters for explaining stuff" guides. No, they go well into detail. They give in-depth descriptions. They explain stuff. After all, they've got 1,500 characters of room.
Other Mastodon users love that, and they may do it themselves. Yet other Mastodon users see that the aforementioned Mastodon users love it and thus do it themselves.
With image descriptions of 700, 800, 1,000 or more characters, Mastodon users don't even question putting the descriptions into the alt-text. It's simply technologically impossible to do otherwise. So it doesn't even come to their minds. Image description == alt-text.
Okay, now here comes the catch.
First of all, you must never describe or explain something in alt-text that can't be accessed from anywhere else in the image.
That's because some people can't access alt-text, e.g. if they have a physical disability that prevents them from using a computer mouse, so they have to do everything with the keyboard, so they can't hover a mouse cursor over an image which is necessary to see alt-text in a desktop browser.
If they can't access alt-text, they can't access the information in it. If that information is only available in the alt-text but neither in the post text nor in the image, it's lost to them. Such information always goes into the post text.
Mastodon users are likely to be highly irritated upon reading that. How are you supposed to put that in the post text in the Fediverse! Mastodon doesn't give you enough characters! You can only put a detailed image description into the alt-text!
On Mastodon maybe. But only on vanilla Mastodon. Okay, and on Threads if it supports alt-text.
But everything that is not vanilla Mastodon gives you either more characters in the post text than in alt-text or no limits for either.
Even Misskey gives you 1,500 characters in alt-text and 3,000 in the post which is 2,500 more than on Mastodon. That's a thread of at least six posts rolled into one.
The other Forkeys give you 3,000 by default. Pleroma, Akkoma and their other forks give you 5,000 by default.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined limits. Not for the post text and theoretically not for the alt-text either which, as I've explained above, is grafted into the post text and not put into a dedicated text field.
That's plenty of room for description and explanation, depending on how much you go into detail. In fact, you aren't even bound to a 1,500-character limit anymore!
I still expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated whenever I describe images. That's because my alt-text usually only contains a brief image description that doesn't actually describe anything. In addition, it says that the actual, fully detailed image description is in the post which is hidden behind a Hubzilla-style summary/Mastodon-style content warning combination.
I expect someone to try and educate me about all image descriptions always only belonging into alt-text because that's how it's done on Mastodon, yada yada yada. Regardless of the image description of even only one of the images being over 25 times longer than Mastodon's alt-text, so it wouldn't even fit in there.
Mastodon doesn't do it like this, so it's wrong everywhere else as well. Even though Mastodon doesn't do it like this because it can't, and everything else can, and Mastodon can happily display what everything else can.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Late, but still:
It has been around since the 2000s. No, really. No, I'm not kidding.
The community has been using the term "Metaverse" in its common daily lingo since at least 2008. Want proof
, the first public OpenSim grid, the oldest, the largest by active users and still the second-largest by land area, has referred to itself as the "Open Source Metaverse" .
The Metropolis Metaversum, the first grid hosted in Germany, called itself just that , too.
The news site Hypergrid Business has used the name "" for its OpenSim category for quite a while already.
Oh, by the way, , active since as early as 2003, has jumped upon the bandwagon meanwhile and refers to itself as a "metaverse", too.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost I can't help but wonder if there's any influence or inspiration or experience from Second Life, the pioneer of highly modular and highly customisable avatars, going into this. And I mean actually using it, not hearsay or reading about it. (Mentioning OpenSim is probably futile here.)
Especially female avatars are tricky. Linden Labs has learned that the hard way after only supporting male/unisex clothes. When people wanted their female avatars to optionally wear high heels, or when they wanted them to wear skirts that move with the legs, Second Life's avatar standard had to be changed. All that was stuff that nobody had thought of early on, even if the default starter avatar was technically female.
For good skirts, look at Sinespace and Overte, by the way.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #VirtualClothing #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostCan everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
, , : Warning issued January 9 at 2:23PM EST until January 9 at 3:00PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC*
for Liberty, , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 3:00 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 3:00 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , : Warning issued January 9 at 2:23PM EST until January 9 at 3:00PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 2:15 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 2:15 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : Warning issued January 9 at 1:46PM EST until January 9 at 2:15PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
What's even the point in writing a server application in a Microsoft language Maybe requiring dotnet6 or any other dotnet to be installed on the server Something that Debian has good reason to staunchly refuse to add to its repositoriesJust because you can't get anyone who can still develop in truly cross-platform languages because everyone can only "code" Windows apps in C# or .NET or mobile apps in JavaScript anymore
Or is it worth it because more and more Fediverse instance servers run on Windows machines because aspiring instance admins can't be bothered to learn Linux
Strongly reminds me of OpenSim which, back in the mid-2000s, was built in .NET and originally Windows-only. A server application. It was eventually made compatible with Mono. It may still cause trouble on Linux or macOS, so even amongst the grids that aren't DreamGrids, about every other one is running on a Windows machine. It got worse when OpenSimulator 0.9.3 switched from .NET for Windows and Mono for everything else to dotnet6 for everything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CSharp #DotNet #Iceshrimp #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
Excellent article about how COVID's transmitted, how our bodies reactions have changed since the beginning of the pandemic (it's not over!), and the complexities of transmission, from exposure to symptoms.
so is
I rarely post pictures anymore, but when I do, I always describe them before posting them. In order to make my pictures understandable, I have to write very detailed descriptions and explanations which require special niche knowledge. If hardly anyone but me has that knowledge, how could an AI possibly have it
Also, I describe my own original images not by looking at the images, much less at the resolution at which I'll post them, but by looking directly at what the images show. I can see many more details that way, and I can transcribe text verbatim that's illegible or practically invisible in the image. AI can't do that.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Just by not having a feature, masto can kill it across the fedi, as the lowest common denominator matters in the same way a common protocol does.
In addition, Mastodon and only Mastodon dictates all culture all across the Fediverse, no matter where.
This means doing everything the Mastodon way. Content warnings for sensitive content in the summary. Friendica doesn't even have a summary field. Alt-text for all media which neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) has a text field for or even only documentation on how to graft it into BBcode.
At the same time, doing anything that can't be done on vanilla Mastodon is bad. Quotes. Shared posts (= "quote-posts" = "quote-boosts" = "quote-tweets" = "quote-toots"). Text formatting. Code blocks. Bullet-point lists. Embedded links. Even only over 500 characters. All stuff that Mistpark 1.0 (now Friendica) could do as early as 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.
The key reason why Mastodon is so dominant is not only because it has twice as many active users as everything else combined. It's because it's the one and only gateway into the Fediverse.
Everyone who comes here believes that the Fediverse is only Mastodon because telling them that the Fediverse is more than that only confuses them. Hell, they wouldn't even join if the official app didn't railroad them hard onto mastodon.social because decentrality would scare them away even before they were forced to pick an instance.
Then they spend multiple months with that belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And the Mastodon-only Fediverse is what they get used to. Their new, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy home. It's also in that phase that the first-wave and second-wave Twitter refugees were in when they shaped Mastodon's culture, completely ignoring the rest of the Fediverse which didn't even exist for them.
Then they eventually come across the very first "toot" in one of their timelines which is somewhat weird. Mostly that's because it's very long. Or maybe it does stuff of which they don't know how to do it on Mastodon because they can't do it on Mastodon at all like italics without Unicode trickery. And whoever wrote that "toot" tells them it isn't a "toot" because it's not from Mastodon, it's from XYZ, and no, XYZ is not Mastodon, it isn't a fork of Mastodon either, and yes, it's absolutely normal and intentional and legal that you can post from XYZ to Mastodon.
And then they freak out because they're disturbed by someone who has intruded into their nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon Fediverse. And they don't want this to happen ever again.
Still, I think the majority of Mastodon users have never knowingly come across anything from anywhere that isn't Mastodon. Those who say they know the Fediverse is more than Mastodon mostly only know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon from hearsay and name-dropping, but they assume it's basically Mastodon with different names, different UIs and maaaaaybe longer posts because they've read somewhere that you can post thousands of characters on this-or-that project.
So nobody on Mastodon takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse and its perks into account when shaping the Fediverse culture.
Everyone uses "alt-text" and "image description" synonymously because Mastodon toots are too ridiculously limited in size for proper image descriptions, so there's no other way in "the Fediverse" to describe an image more thoroughly than in alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. They're completely unaware that the circumstances are vastly different everywhere outside vanilla Mastodon and Threads because everything except vanilla Mastodon and Threads offers you thousands of characters by default.
The debates on whether or not to allow quotes or "quote-toots" should be possible on Mastodon are out-right hilarious. Friendica and Hubzilla have been able to both quote and "quote-toot" any post on Mastodon with no resistance from the very second that the first Mastodon instance spun up in 2016. But nobody knows that. The *keys are capable of both, too, AFAIK, but the greater Mastodon community is unaware of that as well and keeps debating only about Mastodon.
So it isn't much of a surprise that all behaviour rules for the Fediverse are made by Mastodon users for everything that connects to Mastodon, but completely disregarding the existing culture of whatever connects to Mastodon. Sometimes they disregard the capabilities of whatever connects to Mastodon, sometimes they forbid them because these capabilities are disturbing to those who want the Fediverse to feel like only Mastodon.
You're only exempt from these rules if you're on Hubzilla or (streams), and you've got Pubcrawl off. If at all.
Using nomadic identity is actually fairly safe. Mastodon users usually don't notice it unless you often post to the same people from your main instance and then from a clone. And besides, except for those who try to create imaginary scenarios of using nomadic identity as a harassment tool, those Mastodon users who know Hubzilla and (streams) offer nomadic identity envy them for their ease of moving instance and their resilience against sudden instance shutdowns.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPosttroet.cafe, one of the biggest German-speaking Mastodon instances, was on the verge of closing.
firefish.social, Firefish's lighthouse instance, has stopped working due to half a year of neglect by its only admin who is also Firefish's only core maintainer.
It's time the people behind ActivityPub finally accept Mike Macgirvin 's proposals. Nomadic identity shouldn't stay exclusive to Hubzilla and (streams).
#Fediverse #ActivityPub #NomadicIdentity #TroetCafe #FirefishSocial #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Last updated: 2024-01-17
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