the snow monkeys of nagano japan
Yes, Diaspora* is two months younger than Mistpark.
But Diaspora* of 2024 is no match for Mistpark of 2010, feature-wise. Mistpark, on the other hand, evolved into Friendica which federated with everything that moved, then into Hubzilla, the nomadic Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, and lastly, into the streams repository which is the home of the technologically most advanced Fediverse software to date.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)Meine Basis-Contact Roles sind erstmal aufgeteilt in nomadisch und nichtnomadisch und in "darf mir Posts schicken" und "darf mir keine Posts schicken". Das ist nmlich in meiner Channel Role deaktiviert, damit das nicht jeder darf. Ein hlicher Hack eigentlich, aber solange Hubzillas Filter nicht so tun, wie ich will...
Ich habe auch noch zwei mit erweiterten Privilegien. Die hchsten hat die Familien-Role, in der nur meine In-world-Schwester Juno Rowland ist.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ContactRole #ContactRoles #Hubzilla Ich wrde Blogposts immer verlinken, selbst wenn das Blog selbst im Fediverse ist. Das heit, die meisten Projekte, die Blogposts im Fediverse versenden, machen das automatisch so, da Mastodon nur den Titel (so vorhanden), eine Zusammenfassung (so vorhanden) bzw. die ersten Zeilen und einen Link zum Original anzeigt.
Zum einen kann gerade Mastodon keine Blogposts mit allen Schikanen so darstellen wie im Original. Z. B. entfernt es Inline-Bilder ersatzlos.
Zum anderen gibt's auf Mastodon Leute, die, ohne ein Wort zu sagen, jeden blockieren, von dem ber 500 Zeichen in einem einzigen Post kommen. Manche machen das nur, wenn berlange Posts keine entsprechende Content Warning haben, aber wie willst du die sauber in einen Blogpost einflechten
berall sonst ist es den Leuten egal, wieviele Zeichen du postest. Und einige Serveranwendungen beherrschen in ihren Webinterfaces volles HTML-Rendering, stellen also auch selbst den aufwendigsten Blogpost noch so dar wie im Original.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Fediquette The eternal question is: Is the Fediverse defined as everything that's decentralised in some way Then e-mail, XMPP, Matrix, OpenSimulator, Vircadia and Overte are parts of the Fediverse, too, and the Fediverse is several decades old. Oh, by the way, Friendica and Hubzilla can directly federate with e-mail.
Is it defined as everything that's connected to anything that uses ActivityPub in some way Then Twitter and Tumblr are/used to be parts of the Fediverse, connected directly to Friendica and Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseDie Standard-Einstellung von Hubzilla ist, dass Beitrge Dritter, mit welchen man nicht verbunden ist, in denen man selbst erwhnt wird, nicht in der Timeline angezeigt, also nicht akzeptiert werden. Damit beschrnkt man den Empfang von Postings durch Erwhnung auf diejenigen Kanle/Nutzer, mit welchen man verbunden ist.
ber die Einstellungen lsst sich der eigene Kanal aber auch so konfigurieren, dass man Postings auch von "Fremden" empfngt, also von Nutzern, die nicht in der Kontaktliste sind. Dies berschreibt die Standard-Berechtigungen fr den Nachrichtenempfang.
Diese Einstellung lsst sich ber "Einstellungen" (Hauptmen oben links) -> "Privacy-Einstellungen" -> "Accept all messages which mention you This setting bypasses normal permissions" vornehmen.
#FediTips #FediverseTips #hubzilla #hubzillahppchen #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Then go ahead and give me a good, informative image description of no more than 200 characters that's up there with the best of the best on Mastodon and potential material. One that won't leave any blind user asking, "Yeah, that's fine and dandy, but what does it look like!"
Without reading my long description or my alt-text first, that is.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextHallOfFame Interesting how this article doesn't mention the one implementation of federated identity that is in daily stable use right now: , as invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011, five years before Mastodon. It is now implemented on from 2015 as well as from 2021.
Currently, nomadic identity requires special protocols, and it's limited to within Hubzilla or within (streams). But Mike is working on implementing it across project borders and using only ActivityPub right now.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentityAnd here, for comparison, is the description of the image in the parent post by an AI, namely v1.6. The prompt was, "Describe the image in detail." Half a minute later, the result happens to still be short enough for a Mastodon alt-text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLaVAIt's almost hilarious how clueless the AI was again. And how wrong.
First of all, the roof isn't curved in the traditional sense. The end piece kind of is, but the roof behind it is more complex. Granted, unlike me, the AI can't look behind the roof end, so it doesn't know.
Next, the roof end isn't reflective. It isn't even glossy. And brushed stainless steel shouldn't really reflect anything.
The AI fails to count the columns that hold the roof end, and it claims they're evenly spaced. They're anything but.
There are three letters "M" on the emblem, but none of them is stand-alone.There is visible text on the logo that does provide additional context: "Universal Campus", "patefacio radix" and "MMXI". Maybe LLaVA would have been able to decipher at least the former, had I fed it the image at its original resolution of 2100x1400 pixels instead of the one I've uploaded with a resolution of 800x533 pixels. Decide for yourself which was or would have been cheating.
"Well-maintained lawn". Ha. The lawn is painted on, and the ground is so bumpy that I wouldn't call it well-maintained.
The entrance of the building is visible. In fact, three of the five entrances are. Four if you count the one that can be seen through the glass on the front. And the main entrance is marked with that huge structure around it.
The "few scattered clouds" are mostly one large cloud.
At least LLaVA is still capable of recognising a digital rendering and tells us how. Just you wait until PBR is out, LLaVA.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLaVA Long Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.
For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).
And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.
If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.
It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.
This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"
On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.
They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.
If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.
At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.
Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.
The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.
However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.
There's . "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about
Hahahaha... no.
Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.
If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.
If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.
At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.
So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts
Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.
And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #A11y #Accessibility
Yes, I have embedded the image in my original post. I'm on Hubzilla where this is as normal as posts with thousands or even tens of thousands of characters. Hubzilla is influenced by neither Twitter nor Mastodon.
But Mastodon would normally remove all traces of embedded images from posts including the alt-text. And Hubzilla always converts copies of all embedded images into file attachments, alt-text included, when sending a post via ActivityPub.
Your screen reader should normally only present to you the content warning plus the image with the alt-text. And when you open the content warning, your screen reader should read the post text and then immediately afterwards the full image description.
Then I realised that both tweesecake.social and dragonscave.space don't run vanilla Mastodon. They run Glitch. And while Glitch does remove embedded images from posts, it does not remove their alt-texts. You can't know that, but where your screen reader reads an alt-text within the post, there is no image. There is only the alt-text which Glitch has left in.
Still, the order in which I've composed the post, including both the image being embedded in the post and the length of the text before and after the image, is deliberate. Hubzilla is fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles, far beyond what Mastodon or Glitch can render. And as strange as this may sound to a Mastodon user, Hubzilla's culture does not rule out making use of these features.
Solving the second problem you've mentioned would require me to put the full image description before the actual post text. And everyone who comes across the post would first have to read or scroll through an hour worth of image description before they'd read what I actually want to say in the post.
In a sense, what I've posted is actually a blog post. I think the confusion might come from Mastodon users, including Glitch users, expecting everything in their timelines to be a native Mastodon toot.
Also, from what I've read elsewhere, having the image descriptions and all explanations in the very same place as the image itself is the most accessible way. It's much more convenient and less cumbersome than having to navigate elsewhere to get a description plus explanations. Replies in a thread already fall under "elsewhere".
Also, I do have the technical means of putting the full description into a separate document without even having to leave Hubzilla. But for one, that would be just as cumbersome and inconvenient. And besides, a while ago, a blind Mastodon user told me that Hubzilla articles apparently don't work in their screen reader. So I can't rely on them for accessibility purposes anyway.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta I'm genuinely surprised you like it.
I mean, I had to cut down on the alt-text a whole lot to squeeze it into 1,500 characters.
And then there's still the full image description. It's in the post, and the post is hidden behind a content warning because it's so excessively long. I would have mentioned in the alt-text that the full image description is hidden behind a content warning, but, well, 1,500 characters. It was that or cutting away fewer details in the short image description.
Have you checked the full description in the post yet
And do you really think nothing is missing from either
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility Just to be on the safe side: I've just posted an image. I've described it in the alt-text the best I can within the 1,500-character limit, and the alt-text is actually exactly 1,500 characters long. So I had to limit myself.
In addition, I've described it in greater and more appropriate detail, including all necessary explanations, in the post. All in all, the full image description in the post is a bit over 60,000 characters long. The description is so long because what is in the image is extremely obscure, and I can't expect anything in it to be known to anyone. And I've actually limited myself again.
Could you please check whether the descriptions are sufficiently detailed and sufficiently accessible Again, I can't possibly fit any more into the alt-text itself, but I could expand upon the full description if there is something missing that needs to be described.
You can find the post under the hashtag #. The link might not work, so you might want to type the hashtag into the search yourself. There should only be one post under that hashtag. I can't link to it directly because, although it was federated to Mastodon, it isn't on Mastodon itself.
I'm absolutely serious, and I'm honestly and sincerely asking for serious feedback by a blind user. I don't have any blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users as connections who could otherwise give me feedback, and I guess you are serious enough yourself, and your standards are high enough to not ignore any shortcomings and be critical where it's appropriate.
Thanks in advance.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility My contribution is my first image post in three months. As usual, I've described the image appropriately. This, however, led to me outdoing myself again.
The alt-text with the "short" description is precisely 1,500 characters long. The actual image description in the post is over 60,000 characters long. And I've had to limit myself in both cases.
. Or try to find it under the hashtag
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaAnd speaking of eye contact: I've made another picture of the same building, an aerial view. The alt-text for it is actually done.
The reason why I haven't posted it may sound crazy: When I returned to this place to writen the full image description for the second image, I took a closer look at the image. And I discovered that two of the skin vendors are visible from ahead. With a preview image of the skin. All safe for work because they only show the face, but they show the face! Rather clearly even.
Two words: eye contact.
I could not have posted this image. Not unless I could get Mastodon to blank it out. And I can't get Mastodon to blank it out.
I immediately abandoned the image-describing endeavour. That is, even though that description would have been substantially shorter than the first one because I could have referenced the first one, I'm not even sure if I had managed to complete it in time for today.
It's actually a pity because the aerial view is even more spectacular, but that's the way it is.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #EyeContact #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaI've actually limited myself in this post.
For example, I'd normally describe an image in my images at roughly the same level of detail as my images themselves. I didn't do that this time. That's also because it would have gone completely out of hand. One of the teleporters has a preview image on it that shows lots of similar teleporters, many of which have their own preview images. If I had wanted to go all the way, I would have had to describe all the preview images on the teleporters in the preview image on the teleporter in my image.
If I look at the preview image on that teleporter in my own image, what I see looks more like a beige kite in front of a blue background. The 564 (!) individual teleporters in that preview image are so tiny, they aren't even visible. And my local copy of the image has a higher resolution than the one that I've uploaded. I can only see these teleporters when I'm in-world, and I move the camera so close to the teleporter that the preview image fills the viewport of my viewer almost entirely.
If I really wanted to see what's on these teleporters, I'd have to go where they are standing and look at each one of them individually up close. In fact, I've done so. And when I was there, I discovered just how many of them also have text on their preview images. Some of them even show images or other textures on these preview images which, in turn, have text on them.
Strictly speaking, I would have had to describe dozens of images in all details. Strictly speaking, I would have had to transcribe hundreds of bits of text. Text in an image in an image in an image. Sometimes text in an image in an image in an image in an image.
And strictly speaking, I should not even have embedded this image in my post. I should have linked to it. That's because some of the preview images on these teleporters have avatars on them. With faces. With eyes.
If I were on Mastodon, I would have to flag this image sensitive because there are images in an image in this image that have eyes on them and added a "CW: eye contact" content warning. I could have done the latter here on Hubzilla, but I decided not to let anyone know what's in this image on a microscopic sub-pixel level. And here on Hubzilla, I don't have the means to do the former.
So I decided to only describe one image in detail, namely the one that I've posted. And it took me a few days, and it took over 60,000 characters to only even do that. Call me ableist, but I wasn't too keen on spending weeks technically only describing one image, just to find out that my image description of hundreds of thousands of words happens to exceed the maximum number of characters which the Web server underneath this Hubzilla hub can handle at once. Then all the work would have been in vain.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta is my contribution to World Sight Day in the Fediverse and Global Accessibility Awareness Day, just to show that I do describe my images, and that I do so in a way that I think is appropriate, considering how niche my images are. It is my first image post in three months.
There is only one image in this post, but with an alt-text of precisely 1,500 characters plus a long image description of 60,553 characters. That's more than 50% longer than my previous record.
I don't know how many hours exactly I've invested into describing this image. But I started writing the description on Monday. I missed some nice, sunny, warm days because I had to describe this image. I did the last edits today.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #WorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDayIt's one of the most well-known OARs, and I guess every OpenSim user with a little more experience has come across at least one instance of it: the .
It was built by Michael Emory Cerquoni, an early OpenSimulator developer first known in-world as Nebadon Izumi who released his creations under the Oni Kenkon Creations brand, and who is also the builder of Wright Plaza, OSgrid's famous old freebie sim. The project was a collaboration with the now-defunct Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds at the University of California in Irvine, and it was designed and intended to act as an actual virtual campus.
Due to the size of the project as a whole and the main building in particular, Nebadon built the Universal Campus as a mega-region, an OpenSim hack from around 2009 that made it possible to stretch a build across multiple standard regions, in this case two by two. So the Universal Campus is not one OAR, it's four, one for each region.
The first publicly available version of the Universal Campus was released in 2011, so as futuristic as it looks, it is already roughly 13 years old.
The main building shown here is outright gargantuan. It is still one of the biggest buildings around the Hypergrid. At a length from north to south of over 200 metres, it actually had to be built across a region border. Today, a decade after the introduction of varsims, this is no longer a problem.
Although it's possible to walk from everywhere on the island to everywhere else, a network of custom-made teleporters with ten destinations reduces travel time greatly. One destination is right in front of the main building, and two more are inside, the only two in-door destinations, such is the immense size of the building.
OpenSimulator was first published in January, 2007. It was made possible when, in 2006, Linden Lab open-sourced the official Second Life viewer, which is how client applications for Second Life and OpenSim are called, thus laying its viewer API open. This led to the development of third-party viewers. After the development of third-party viewers had started, OpenSim was developed against them and the Second Life viewer API. It does not have its own official viewer, but most of the popular third-party Second Life viewers are compatible with OpenSim as well.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.
In Second Life, a sim is always one region. OpenSim had a hack from 2009 on that was called "mega regions". It exploited a feature in third-party Second Life viewers that was not used by Second Life itself, and that made it possible to extend a sim across multiple regions in a square arrangement. The Universal Campus itself is built as a mega region of two by two standard regions. Since this hack was buggy and limited, varregions, now known as varsims, were first developed for the OpenSim fork Aurora-Sim. Eventually, they were officially introduced into OpenSim in 2014. They theoretically allow for a sim to stretch across as many as 32 by 32 standard regions with no borders in-between.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim also has the option to save entire sims into archives and load them from archives, so-called OARs which is short for OpenSimulator Archives. Many of these are available online. Mega regions are saved in one OAR for each region, and as the Universal Campus was designed as a mega region and pre-dates varsims, it is divided into four individual OARs. A varsim, on the other hand, can be entirely saved in and loaded from one OAR.
OSgrid also adopted the early OpenSimulator slogan "The Open Source Metaverse" immediately after its launch. It still uses that slogan, and the term "metaverse" has been commonly used by the OpenSimulator community ever since.
All dimensions in this description are estimated.
The southern entrance, the main entrance to the building with the main landing area right outside the doors, is surrounded and marked by a tall geometrical structure which is rather complex in spite of only having straight edges. It resembles a spaceship from an early video game as roughly as it resembles the letter A or an upside-down V. It is almost perfectly symmetrical around both vertical planes. Its medium grey surfaces are untextured otherwise and don't mimic any particular material.
On each far side is a vertical "column" with a footprint with the shape of a trapeze, very roughly four metres or thirteen feet wide and four metres or thirteen feet thick. The short side of the trapeze, measuring only a bit over three and a half metres or twelve feet, is on the outside. These columns rise up some nine metres or 30 feet on the inside. The top slopes downward towards the outsides, so the columns are less than eight or about a half metres or 27 feet high on the outside.
The centre and top piece of the structure, right above the doors and roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet above the ground, is roughly ten metres or 33 feet tall and roughly four and a half metres or fifteen feet wide. It has a rectangular cross-section when looked at from inside the building or from the main landing area, but a heptagonal cross-section when looked at from the sides. Its seven visible faces are all rectangular. At the bottom, it is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick with only one surface. The top is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick, too, but with a pair of surfaces of the same size at an angle of under five degrees, forming a slight ridge at the top.
The inner and outer sides of this centre-piece are each made up from an upper surface which is a square and sloped outward from the top and a lower surface which is a rectangle and sloped outward from the bottom. They meet at an angle of roughly 20 degrees.
On each side, two irregularly-shaped structures of seven surfaces each connect the seven edges of the sides of the centre piece with the four edges of the inner sides of the columns. Six of these surfaces are more or less slightly twisted because they connect edges at different angles with each other. The only planar surface is the one that connects the bottom edges which are all horizontal.
Two pairs of double glass doors make up the actual main entrance. Each door blade is about two and a half metres or eight feet wide and about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high. The glass has the same horizontal gradient texture both on the inside and on the outside so that all door blades can be identical. The only difference between the door blades is whether the door script opens them clockwise or counter-clockwise. The texture is arranged in such a way that there are narrow lighter areas along both vertical edges when the hinge is on the left, and there is a wide lighter area on the lock side and a narrow lighter area on the hinge side when the hinge is on the right. The narrow sides of the door blades are opaque when looked at from the outside but, due to OpenSim's limitations, not when looked at from the inside. The doors open inward by 90 degrees, and they do so when they're clicked, or when an avatar approaches them. They can be closed manually by clicking them again, otherwise they close automatically after ten seconds.
Each door blade has one simple door handle on the inside and the outside tinted the same generic grey as the large structure surrounding the doors. The handles are only a few centimetres wide. The grips have a square cross-section. Above and below, there are thicker parts which connect the grips to the doors while being flush with them on the sides and facing away from the door blades. Altogether, each handle is half a metre or one and five eighths feet long. The top of each handle is about one and three quarters metres or five and three quarters inches above the ground.
Between the two door pairs and on their sides, there are altogether three columns with a rectangular footprint of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet width by 30 centimetres or one foot thickness, each roughly seven and a quarter metres or 24 feet tall. Above each pair of doors, they are connected with a horizontal beam that fits between the top surfaces of the columns and the top edges of the doors while being half as thick as the columns.
The spaces between the large structure around the entrance, the columns and the horizontal bars are filled with glass panes.
The whole door ensemble does not sit exactly at half the thickness of the large structure. It is shifted outward by about half a metre or one and five eighth feet.
A structure shaped like an almost flat pyramid, but with a flattened top, is mounted upside-down against the bottom surface of the centre of the large structure around the main entrance. The glass pane above the doors passes right through its middle. A square light is installed on the flattened top which is actually the bottom now, illuminating the entrance area when it is dark. Otherwise, this flat structure has the usual brushed stainless steel texture which appears rather dark here.
On each side of the entrance area, a cylindrical column with a diametre of roughly four metres or thirteen feet rises some 20 metres or 66 feet upward. Each column is slightly tilted inward along the longitudinal axis of the building and outward to the sides. On each side, farther outside, there is another, even taller column, easily over 30 metres or 100 feet tall. These columns are tilted along the longitudinal axis of the building at the same angle, but outward to the sides at a smaller angle. They make up the southern corners of the main building. All four columns are textured to resemble brushed stainless steel.
A semi-cylindrical structure connects the complex main entrance structure through the inner columns with the outer columns on the ground. Its diametre is roughly 2.40 metres or eight feet. It uses the usual brushed stainless steel texture, but the brushing direction is radial, and the texture is stretched along the axis of the cylinder so much that its nature is anything but obvious.
Between the columns and the main entrance structure, there are three more glass panes. The panes between the inner and outer columns are mounted halfway into the building whereas the one around the main entrance structure is almost all the way inside the building. Three horizontal stainless steel rods of about 30 centimetres or one foot lead through each pane. They are roughly evenly spaced, but closer to the upper and lower edges of the glass panes than to each other. The rods that pass through the panes between the columns grow to a diametre of roughly 45 centimetres or one and a half feet towards their ends before ending in short cylinders with diametres of about 1.80 metres or six feet.
On top of the inner columns and partly intersecting with the outer columns, a massive, upright, flat structure with stainless steel textures serves as the southern end of the roof. It has to be about 50 metres or 160 feet wide, about 15 metres or 50 feet tall and about 3.60 metres or 12 feet thick. The front and rear surfaces are slightly countersunk with margins of slightly varying thickness all around except for the bottom. The top edge has a fairly short horizontal section of ten metres or 33 feet in the middle from which it curves downward in sections of ellipses. The bottom edge is almost horizontal and leads to corners from which short 45-degree slopes lead upward. The slopes from the bottom and the ellipses from the top meet in rounded corners. Unlike the columns below, this roof end is mounted vertically.
The inner 80% of its diametre are filled with a gradient from medium dark grey at the top to medium light grey at the bottom. Three shaded three-dimensional primitive shapes are displayed in this area, a cube with one corner each pointed to the top and the bottom at the top, a sphere in the bottom left, a tetrahedron in the bottom right. At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source". Below, the Roman number MMXI, 2011, marks the year of the first public release of the Universal Campus.
A thin dark grey circle separates this area from the outer 20% which are light grey. Re-using the same typeface as in the inner part, and in dark grey with blue shading, "Universal" is written at the top and "Campus" at the bottom, both capitalised with otherwise small caps and following the circular shape of the logo.
29 identical black circular spots, very roughly evenly spaced, protrude from underneath the logo all around it by a bit more than their own diametre. They separate the logo from the surrounding white area which, in turn, is surrounded by the aforementioned black conical slope.
The Universal Campus logo is illuminated from below. The light source sits in a slot in a cylinder on top of the main entrance structure, about two metres or six and a half feet long and a diametre of about 30 centimetres or one foot. This cylinder has spherical end pieces, and the whole arrangement has a simple, glossy, medium grey surface.
Eight cylindrical beams with a diametre of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet and the usual stainless steel texture serve as the near-vertical supports. Nearly evenly spaced, except for the first being closer to the second, and running from the bottom to the top, they divide each side into eight full-sized sections and one small section right in front of the conference hall.
As mentioned above, the building has four sets of side entrances. One on each side is right behind the front behind the colour and the first support beam, one on each side is just south of the conference hall between the seventh and eighth support beams. The doors are identical to the ones that make up the main entrance, but each side entrance has three pairs of doors instead of two.
Between the three double doors, there is a filler column with a rectangular vertical cross-section, a width of about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet and a thickness at ground level that is slightly less than the width. While the inside surface is vertical, the outside surface is sloped in parallel to the outward tilt of the side of the building. Similar but wider columns are installed on the sides of the doors, being the closest that the building has to outer walls. Another structure with a rhomboid north-south cross-section sits on top of each set of four pillars, connecting them and carrying a glass pane on top. Its inside surface is sloped outside, its outside surface has a stronger slope than the outer side of the building. Also, its texture is lighter than that of the pillars.
Everything else between the vertical and horizontal structures on the sides of the building is filled with glass panes, all with a light vertical streak down their centres, blurred by the gradients on its sides.
A little bit of roof is visible underneath these brackets. The roof has four identical sections from its end to the conference hall. All are mostly planar with a rounded outer side. From above, they have the most elaborate surface of the whole building. It is almost black. A bump map or a normal map divides it into slightly embossed and slightly less rough rectangles, slightly countersunk and slightly rougher rectangles and the another bit smoother lines in-between. The rectangles are of varying size. They have an aspect ratio of four to five along the building's longitudinal axis by three to four along its transversal or vertical axis. In addition, the texture on these roof segments is glossy, giving it a plastics-like appearance. From below, however, it is smooth and transparent with the same tint of grey as the glass panes.
Between the inner and outer sections of this kind on each side, there is one long textured strip, on top of which rest the larger brackets across the centre of the roof. Its texture is slightly glossy, but hard to identify as resembling something: It consists of stretched rectangular fields of medium grey, arranged transversally, with very thin dark grey outlines, surrounded and interrupted by narrow areas of medium light grey which are emphasised by bump-mapping or normal-mapping which makes them appear embossed as well as specular-mapping which makes them appear glossier than the rest. Within these fields, but at some distance from its outlines, there are more nested rectangles, from outermost to innermost: medium dark grey, dark grey, medium dark grey, medium grey and slightly bumpy, medium light grey and bumpier as well as appearing to be slightly countersunk, light grey and appearing to be even more countersunk. This pattern repeats over a hundred times over the length of the southern part of the building. It is on the bottom face of these two strips as well, but not on its narrow sides.
The very middle of the roof is simply one long glass pane. It is separated from the dark sections to its side by what seems to try to resemble rectangular aluminium profiles with the long sides oriented vertically. On each side, at a height right above the glass pane, there is a stripe that glows white in the dark while not actually being a light source this is another OpenSim limitation.
The dome is surrounded by a huge, disc-like object of varying thickness, but very thin on the eastern side which is revealed in the image, that is well over a hundred metres or 330 feet in diametre. It is bascially an eccentrical cone with a circular outer shape and a way off-centre hole towards it slightly slopes down. The geodesic dome mostly rests on the edge of the hole which means that the outer edge of the disc is shifted way to the east. There is also a cutout towards the south all the way to the circular hole, uncovering the roof of the southern part of the building. The western edge of the cutout deviates from being parallel to the longitudinal axis of the building by a few degrees to the right. The eastern edge of the cutout points at the centre of the circular hole.
Along the outer edge, the top surface of the disc is tapered over a distance of about seven and a half metres or 25 feet so that the outer edge is almost razor-sharp. For unknown reasons, the western edge of the cutout shows a similar sharpness by being tapered at the bottom.
The upper and lower surfaces of the disc shows variations of the usual brushed stainless steel texture. The cutout faces, however, show a dark grey texture with four darker grey grooves upon zooming in.
Right below, there is a second, similar asymmetrical cone, but smaller in diametre, even thinner and with a bigger slope. Its outer edge touches the first disc from below. Being dark coffee brown, it is the only outward part of the building that is not a shade of grey. Also, while it is half-transparent like tinted glass from above, all other surfaces are opaque and glossy, so it's possible to look through it from above, but not from below.
The inner edge of the brown cone connects to a ring around the conference hall at about roof height on the outside or the top. The ring describes about three quarters of a circle with the opening oriented towards the southern parts of the building. It has a slightly darker tint on its brushed stainless steel texture.
The ring also serves as the upper connection between the seven cylindrical pillars that surround the conference hall, four of which are hidden behind the building itself in the image. They have a diametre of about six metres or 20 feet, and they vary in length by a few metres. They all stand on the ground, and they are sloped outward from the conference hall, partly intersecting with the two cones above.
The upper floor is roughly U-shaped with the opening towards the south and the main entrance. It also serves as the ceiling for the ten seminar rooms on the ground floor, five on each side, above each of which it extends inward with a semi-elliptic shape. Its bottom side, the ceiling, is light grey. It has a bump map or a normal map which not only roughens it up but also divides it into octogonal pads with rectangular spaces in-between. The vertical surfaces towards the aisle have a texture that simulates small, square, dark grey panels in four rows held in place with one rivet in each corner. The seams between the panels are black. On some surfaces, the textures have obviously been stretched horizontally, making the panels rectangular, the rivet heads elliptical and the vertical seams wider than the horizontal seams. The upper side with its bluish-grey patterned carpet texture cannot be seen in the image.
The entire inner edge of the upper floor is protected by a railing. It consists of one mostly light grey rail with a rectangular cross-section on the floor, an identical rail that is a bit over 1.20m or four feet high above the floor and a number of small, slightly darker grey vertical beams with a square cross-section which connect them. The whole railing lacks texture and gloss.
Of the seminar rooms on the right, only the separation walls can be seen through the panes on the right of the building. These have mostly tan textures but with coarse and blurry stripes of various greys at the top and bottom.
Through the right-hand pane in the front, two seminar rooms on the left are visible, the rooms A7 and, north or to the right of it, A8. The seminar rooms A7 through A9, as well as A2 through A4 on the right, have a variety of untinted glass doors each: one in the northern corner towards the central aisle, another one in the southern corner, and one in each of these two corners that leads to the neighbouring seminar room. Apart from the lack of tint or texture, the glass doors are identical to the entrance doors.
The aisle-side wall of each seminar room can be described as convex although it is not rounded. It rather consists of four segments separated by narrow vertical columns with square footprints. They are connected by a number of horizontal rods with a rectangular cross-section. One is always right under the ceiling. Three more are roughly at 65%, 50% and 33% height above the ground. For the outermost segments, this is the height of the glass doors, so underneath the rod at 33% height above the ground, they have another vertical rod to separate the doorway from a narrower piece of wall. At some 12 or 13% height above the ground, there is another rod, and the last one is on the ground, in both cases except where there's a doorway.
The space between the latter two horizontal rods is filled with a wooden panel, showing the same reddish wood grain as all wooden-textured furniture in the building and on the sim. The other spaces have untinted glass panes in them. To illustrate the dimensions: The wooden panels are about 1.80 metres or six feet high, so for realistically-sized avatars, the only way to look into or out of the seminar rooms is through the doors.
On the vertical rod next to each aisle door, a sign with the room number is installed. The sign itself is simple, flat and rectangular. It is entirely black except for the white room number written on it in a regular Helvetica sans-serif typeface. It is attached through a glossy white cuboid that serves as a very simple mounting bracket.
Furthermore, there is an easel with a blank whiteboard standing next to each aisle door. It is a simple construction from cuboids, cylinders, a tetrahedron at the top and small spheres for feet and joints. Apart from the whiteboard which is mostly white and untextured except for the plywood texture on the back, the whole thing shows a brushed stainless steel texture with some gloss added.
Inside each seminar room, visible through the window-pane behind the easels, there is a whiteboard which is a much more elaborate construction. Each room has two of these. There is also a dark grey HDTV screen attached to the middle one of the three columns with a wall-mount swivel arm. A bit of furniture is barely visible through the closed glass door: Each room has seven quite long tables with elliptical ends, one long light grey foot on two legs with a wooden plank between them and a dark grey surface surrounded by wood grain. Six of these tables are for seminar participants with two chairs each. These chairs consist of two wooden parts in the shape of a stretched U with rounded sides and dark grey padding, two small metal rods connecting them and four conical metal legs. The seventh table is for the teacher whose chair is identical to those for the participants, only that it has an extra headrest in the same style as the rest of the chair plus a pair of elliptical armrests.
The control panel is labelled in a typeface not entirely dissimilar from Futura. On its left, there is a top-down view of the entire Universal Campus with the north oriented to the left. It shows the various buildings and other places. Ten circular markers are placed on the map, all with a glossy grey frame and a black number from one to ten. All markers but one are yellow one is always glow-in-the-dark green. In this case, it is marker number 6 to the right of a rectangular building with a circular extension in its bottom corner. Below the aerial view, there is another, slightly bigger yellow circular marker, but with a red frame surrounded by a glowing red aura while not glowing itself. It has the number 2. Next to it is a label with an arrow-like point to the left that reads, black on white, "This is currrent (sic) location". It is up to the user, however, to find the marker with the same number on the map.
On the right of the control panel, there is a touchable list of destinations with their numbers in markers of the same size as the glowing red one in the bottom left, but with the usual shiny grey frame. The labels with the names of the destinations are identical in style with the current location marker:
The background of the control panel is glossy medium grey. The rest of the structure is glossy with a gunmetal-like dark grey texture.
There are also quite a few potted plants inside the building. On the sides of the teleport panel, there are two identical aa palms in square terracotta pots with wide rims. Like the other potted plants, these mostly dark green plants with long pointy leaves are kept at an indoor-compatible size, namely about three and a half metres or eleven and a half feet tall. Also, like the other potted plants, they are made of only four flat and surfaces with partially transparent pictures of the plant on them, arranged in angles of 45 degrees to one another.
Through the main entrance, a slightly taller Jacaranda tree with dark lilac flowers can be seen. It is planted in a bulgy terracotta pot with a smaller rim than the square ones which is supposed to be round. In order to reduce the impact on graphics performance, however, the pot is actually hexagonal. There is also one of the two angled flights of wooden stairs leading to the upper floor and, outside the building again, a small but wide maple tree with brown autumn leaves. A look through the side entrance to the right shows an even slightly taller Bougainvillea with purple flowers. Above these doors, the underside of the upper half of the other flight of stairs is shown. The steps are not covered from below, and the spaces between them are open.
Some of the unusual dividers on the upper floor can be seen through the windows, too. The main element is a half-arch of a bit over 90 degrees from the floor to the tilted structures on the side of the building. Its core is a thin, roughly 1.80 metres or six feet wide circle segment with an inner radius of about four and a half metres or fifteen feet and a dark grey texture which resembles some kind of rock. It is lined on both the inside and the outside with arches with a brushed stainless steel texture. The inner arch is about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet wide, the outer arch is slightly narrower, and both are significantly thicker than the core arch. From both ends of the arch, narrow brushed stainless steel bars extend to the centre of the arch where they meet. They are thinner than the stainless steel arches, but thicker than the core arch. Finally, the area between the two bars and the inner arch is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.
On each side of the upper floor, there are six such dividers. The southernmost ones are installed right above and north of the stairs and attached directly to the vertical structures on the sides. Between the other ten and the side structures, there are horizontal extensions in much the same style. The arches themselves are extended to the sides by two rhomboids in the same style, a longer one of some four and a half metres or fifteen feet with four cylindrical connectors of roughly 60 centimetres or two feet of diametre on its corners underneath which avatars can pass and a shorter one of some three metres or ten feet which connects to the vertical structures. The latter one also has a third stainless-steel-framed rhomboid all the way down to the floor underneath itself which is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.
Unlike in most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars in OpenSim-based worlds, just like Second Life, are not monolithic. They are highly modular, they are highly configurable, and they have evolved over the years. The most basic classic avatar consists of five components that always have to be there. The only one that cannot be replaced is the system body which is automatically generated by the viewer application. OpenSim has the same system body as Second Life. The four components that can be replaced but never removed are the shape which greatly defines the look of the avatar with 88 parametres, the skin which is a set of three textures for the head and which can be tinted with parametres, the upper body and the lower body, the hair which defines the shape and length of the classic hairdo growing out of the head as well as its texture, and the eyes which are basically only a texture again.
Classic clothes are also referred to as layer clothes because they are just that, layers of textures painted onto the system body. Their order is defined by nine categories, in each of which a classic avatar can only wear one kind of clothing. A few of these have an influence on the shape of the avatar: The shirt and the jacket can widen the arms to simulate sleeves. Likewise, the pants can widen the legs downward to simulate pants legs and even bell-bottoms. And the shoes can both raise the avatar in general and grow a sort of spike out of the heel, lift the whole avatar except for the toe area because the system body does not actually have toes and thus generate high heels. A separate layer is for skirts it textures a part of the system body which is usually fully transparent and thus invisible. In 2011, four tattoo layers were added between the skin and the two underwear layers.
It is also possible to attach objects to an avatar at 30 different points, and it has been for as long as OpenSim was around. This was quickly used not only for things carried by the avatar, jewellery or other accessories, but also for more realistic hair, for better-looking shoes in comparison with the painted-on classic shoes, for various ways of having new shapes of skirts, for collars, for pants legs et cetera.
Originally, these attachments were made from primitive objects or "prims" in short: basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cones and the like which can be generated and manipulated a lot in-world without needing external software except for making textures. Since building complex objects from them is somewhere between highly complicated and impossible, it was made possible to import sculptmaps as exported from 3-D software like Blender and use them to create more complex prims. All kinds of prims can be made flexible with a little bit of physics which is used for hair and skirts as well as for flags, but the physics don't have collision detection.
The next step was the introduction of mesh. Mesh allows the user to directly import 3-D files in the Collada format, texture mapping included, without having to resort to sculptmaps. Mesh came to Second Life in 2011, as did experimental mesh support in OpenSim. The first stable release of OpenSim with mesh support came out in 2014. On avatars, mesh was originally used for hair, shoes, jewellery and other accessories. It really started a revolution with the introduction of rigged mesh which automatically latches itself to multiple points on the avatar. This made it possible not only to create clothes that move with the avatar's movement, but even to create all-new, better-looking bodies and heads. Nowadays, most avatars consist entirely of mesh.
The newest technological advancement for avatars was Bakes-on-Mesh which came up from 2019 on. This allows classic layer textures to be put onto worn mesh, especially mesh bodies, and in greater numbers than on the system body. The main purpose was to get away from skin appliers, scripted devices that have to be put on and used to put a different skin onto the mesh body. Also, the remaining onion layers around mesh bodies that were necessary for tattoos, but made mesh bodies unnecessarily complex, had become obsolete because Bakes-on-Mesh allows for wearing classic layer tattoos on mesh bodies. But it also makes wearing layer clothes possible again which can make sense in the case of skin-tight clothes.
The latest version of the Universal Campus from 2012 already uses mesh for a few things, mostly rocks. The main building itself and everything else shown in this image is still put together from prims and sculpties.
As for the contents in the avatar vendor area, none of it is newer than from 2011. Everything is still from times before mesh. The complete avatars come with layer clothes, but no attachments. They, like the skins and hair attachments, were created by Ina Centaur under the OS Avatars label around the same time as the Universal Campus. Many of the other items, the majority of which were made by Nebadon Izumi himself, are even older. All of them are offered under free licenses, however. In order to announce their availability, three of the divider extensions have signs mounted above them which can be made out in the picture. They are oval, black with a stainless steel frame, and they have the glowing, but not light-emitting white word "AVATARS" written on them in all-caps and in a typeface which looks to me like a regular Linux Libertine. The writing even uses proper kerning between the "A"s, the "V" and the "T".
In the first two of the three avatar vendor rooms, the rear sides of four stainless steel vendors each, lined up on the outer side of the room along the longitudinal axis of the building, and especially the signs above them on thin cylindrical stands can be made out, the only ones that aren't hidden behind something. The first four vendors offer one female skin each, the other four offer one male skin each. The displays on these eight vendors are oriented away from the camera.
The outer edges of nearly all concrete surfaces on the island are lined with low walls of varying height and width. They all have the same concrete texture, but at a smaller scale and without the light grey tint so it appears almost white. The main landing area actually has two rows of walls around it. The inner walls are a bit over 1.20 metres or four feet high and about 1.50 metres or five feet wide. The outer walls at a distance of roughly three metres or ten feet are about 1.65 metres or five and a half feet high and about 1.80 metres or six feet wide.
At the ends, the gaps are closed with walls a bit lower than the inner walls and roughly 90 centimetres or three feet wide. The spaces between the walls are filled with dirt. They form planters with identical shrubs in them the short planters in the northwest and the northeast visible in the image have five plants each. These shrubs are not named in-world. They appear to be of tropical origin, and they have flowers with petals that are mostly white, yellow towards the centre and magenta along their edges. Like all trees on this sim, the shrubs are made of simple, textured sculpty prims for the trunks and branches, and the twigs, leaves and flowers are semi-transparent textures on intersecting two-dimensional surfaces, a popular way to make plants in Second Life and OpenSim before the arrival of mesh. The textures used for all plants on this sim are photo-realistic as far as the maximum possible or feasible texture resolution allows.
On the left-hand edge of the image, in front of the northwestern planter, there is another teleporter which is almost identical to the one that can be seen inside the building. There are two differences, however: Its current location is number 1, and the selected location in the image is number 4. Another one of the unidentified shrubs appears between the teleporter and the left-hand edge of the image, partly hidden behind the teleporter.
Another single-target teleporter is standing on its right. It is a custom addition to this particular instance of the Universal Campus. It was built by Neovo Geesink, formerly of Metropolis Metaversum fame and now involved in OSgrid, in his trademark style. This style includes a particular brushed stainless steel texture which, unlike those used by Nebadon Izumi, emulates the surface having been brushed circularly. The stand under the panel is a simple cone, flattened to an extremely elliptical footprint. The panel is as high as that of the original teleporter, but only slightly wider as it is high. The frame around the image in the centre is slightly narrower than that on the original teleporter.
The image itself shows an aerial view of its single hard-coded target, a sim named TeleHub, built and operated by Neovo. It is nothing more than a single region, a square of 256 by 256 metres or 280 by 280 yards, surrounded by blue ocean and a wall made of beige bricks which is about ten metres or 33 feet high. The ground is tan and divided into four triangular areas by two diagonal lines. In each area, there are 141 single-target teleporters similar to this one, but with a higher panel, in rows of eleven. A few show previews of their targets, but most are unused with black screens. In the very centre, there is a small circular platform on which avatars land after teleporting in. It has a beige top surface with a hexagonal tile pattern and a woodgrain texture on the sloped surface all around. Four arches with textures resembling rough taupe stones and black signs on them lead to one triangular area each. The position of the camera is off one of the corners and pointing diagonally downward to one of the yellow division lines.
Yet another one of the identical unidentified shrubs is behind this teleporter and shown to its right.
In the background, the low walls on the sides of a path appear between the shrub behind the teleporter to TeleHub and the main building. The path is straight and leads northward along the western side of the building.
Even farther in the background, behind the two teleporters, there is some vegetation. From left to right, it starts with an unidentified tree of about eight metres or 26 feet of height. It has reddish-brown bark, medium green leaves in pairs and what could be taken for pale yellow-ish fruit. Below it, there is a large bushel of khaki-coloured grass that stands about two and a half metres or more than eight feet high. The tree intersects with another maple tree with brown and tan leaves that is about ten metres or 33 feet tall with more massive greyish trunk and branches. Immediately to the right again and partly intersecting with the maple tree, there is an even unidentified tree, about 17 metres or 56 feet tall, with grey bark on a fairly slim trunk and a messy crown of dark, brownish-green leaves which are so small that the texture makes it impossible to tell individual leaves. This tree is partly hidden behind the building already. It has another two bushels of the same tall grass underneath it which, due to the point of view, only seem to stand immediately to the right of the trunk.
Behind this vegetation, right below the crowns of the trees, the horizon separates the sky from the sea. What little sea the image shows is medium light blue. The sky right above the horizon is very light cyan, and around half the height of the image, it gradually changes into a tone of blue similar to that of the sea. From the top left corner of the image downward and to the right, more than half of the sky is covered by a cirrus-like thin cloud with a small hole above the roof end of the main building. On the right, the cloud dissolves into smaller clouds above the geodesic dome and the surrounding thin cones.
Further additions to the Universal Campus include five easels of the same type as seen inside, but with custom writing in it. They are lined up next to each other in front of the northeastern planter, starting right next to the wide path towards the main entrance. The writing on all five easels is done in black and in an unidentified humanist sans-serif typeface which appears condensed due to the texture having been stretched vertically, thus losing its original aspect ratio. Only the writing on the first of the five is visible from the camera's point of view, though. It reads in three lines, "To download a free copy of the Universal Campus Var Region." This is followed by a blank line and one more line that reads, "Click here for notecard". Upon clicking the easel, it gives the avatar a notecard with an Amazon cloud storage URL following an explanation that it contains the Universal Campus as a varregion archive and followed by a full copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
On the outer corner of the northeastern planter on the eastward path, there is a lamp post standing on an almost white, cylindrical concrete block of about 1.80 metres or six feet of both height and diametre. From the camera perspective, it is in front of the main building and near the westernmost front column. It appears to be almost parallel with the column, but the lamp post is vertical while the column is tilted roughly northwestward.
The lamp post itself is about seven and a half metres or 25 feet high and very slightly conical with an elaborately-shaped round foot. At the top, it describes a sharp 90-degree angle towards the path, rounded on the outside, forming a corner on the inside. It then extends conically towards the path by another roughly 1.50 metres or five feet before ending in a small sphere. The bottom of the sphere is flattened, and the actual light source is installed on this flat surface. It is round, glowing and emitting slightly yellowish light. The rest of the lamp post is light grey or white and highly glossy.
The walls lining the paths to the sides of the main landing area rise no more than about 30 centimetres or one foot above the paths themselves while being twice as wide.
In the bottom right corner of the image, the path to the east intersects with a circular path around the main landing area that begins and ends near the southern side entrances of the main building. Its centre is some ten metres or 33 feet north of that of the main landing area, and its outer diametre is about 100 metres or 330 feet. Due to the aforementioned limitations, it is a little bit higher than the trapezoid spoke path at the bottom. Its walls rise about 60 centimetres or two feet above itself and about 80 centimetres or a little less than three feet above the path to the east, and they are about 2.40 metres or eight feet wide.
Between the main building, the path to the main building, the planter northeast of the main landing area, the path in the very foreground and the circular path on the right, a large patch of sim ground is still unused. It shows a green texture with some slightly darker or minimally more yellow-ish areas. The texture has a fairly low resolution. It is coarse and blurry, and at the same time, even this patch of ground reveals the repeating texture tiles. The ground itself is rather bumpy as though it has been manually treated to be like this. All the same applies to the corresponding area to the west of the path to the main building of which fairly little of it is revealed in the image.
Right before its end near the right-hand entrance, the circular pathway first branches diagonally to the right to another path three small steps down. On both corners of this junction, there are fairly cylindrical platforms inserted into the walls. Both have a diametre of about 3.60 metres or twelve feet and a height of about 1.20 metres or four feet above the branched-off path or a bit under 90 centimetres or three feet above the circular path. The walls along the branched-off path are fairly small, only some 45 centimetres or one and a half feet high and about 60 centimetres or two feet wide.
After about 15 metres or 50 feet of length, the branched-off path continues down a set of stairs. Due to how low the camera position is, the stairs itself are hidden from the camera, but the block and guide rails along the far side of the stairs, the northwestern side, are not. The block is the same shade of grey as the surfaces of the paths. It serves as a primary guard on the sides of the stairs. It is about 90 centimetres or three feet wide. It ascends from the usual wall on the side of the path which it overlaps by the same amount on both sides, and it does so at an angle of roughly 25 degrees. It reaches its peak right above where the stairs start at a height of about two metres or six and a half feet above the path. From there, it descends at an angle of about 35 degrees which, curiously, is a little less steep than the stairs themselves.
The guide rails are dark blue flat slabs, about 30 centimetres or one foot wide and about seven and a half centimetres or three inches thick. They come in stacks of four, arranged above one another with round about one and a half times the thickness of one rail worth of space between them. They are parallel to the descending surface of the block. The lowest one has a distance to the block of circa 30 centimetres or one foot. Each set of rails is held together and in place by two shiny, textureless blocks of 120 centimetres or four feet of height and a square top surface which, however, slightly narrows downward to the large concrete block below when looked at from parallel to the rails. Upstairs, the four rails extend beyond the stairs by roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet. Their upper ends are lined up almost exactly vertically. The whole arrangement is slightly shifted out of centre on top of the block, away from the stairs. A second, identical set of rails is installed further downstairs for no apparent reason other than looks. Such rails are actually on both sides of the stairs, but the image only shows them on one side.
Shortly before the stairs, one lamp post like the one is installed on the wall on each side of the path towards the stairs, complete with the cylindrical block underneath. In the image, the lamp post on the right with the exception of the foot and the cylindrical concrete block underneath is almost entirely obscured by two trees. One is identical to the tree with the chaotic brownish-green leaves to the left that is partly hidden behind the main building. It has another bushel of grass around where its roots were if it had any. Another much larger one is standing to its right, its trunk and most of its crown outside the image already. It is unidentified, too, but it shows some signs of being an acacia tree. Its bark is mostly greyish-brown with some rusty red patches on it. Its leaves are long, pointy and various tones of pale light to not-quite-as-pale medium green.
Immediately after the path towards the stairs branches off, the circular path leads into a straight path that runs parallel to the eastern side of the main building. The walls on its side have the same size as those on the sides of the circular path. On both of its ends, short, wide platforms lead to the side entrances of the building, connected to the path via two small steps each. These platforms do not have walls on their sides. At the far end, the straight path leads into another circular path, this time around the conference hall.
Some more vegetation is to the right of the path along the eastern side of the main building, all standing on sim ground. Right behind the unobstructed lamp post next to the path that leads downstairs, there is a fairly large unidentified tree that almost reaches the edge of the roof of the building. Its crown has rather dense foliage in a quite saturated medium green tone. The bark texture on its thin trunk and branches is mostly taupe with bits of copper brown and fairly smooth except for long dark rifts along the trunk and the branches as well as a few dark holes.
Behind the block and the dark blue rails along the stairs by the right-hand edge of the image, a gigantic version of the unidentified shrubs in the planters is located on the edge of the downhill slope which necessitates the stairs. It is about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high, and its flowers are up to 60 centimetres or two feet in diametre.
Farther in the background, also behind the lamp post and a little behind the shrubs, there is a group of seven pine trees of varying size. They have semi-transparent, conical surfaces around their trunks with textures which give the impression of very dark green needles. There are also bushels of tall grass on the ground between the pines.
Lastly, one of the four main light sources is the simulated Sun. Since it is shortly before noon, it is standing almost vertically above the sim and shining what is technically grey light down on it. The sim uses OpenSim's default daycycle in which the Sun always goes through the zenith. The same applies to all converted older daycycles originally available in OpenSim. The Sun is also the only light source on the sim whose light casts shadows. The other four main light sources are three types of ambient light in darker taupe, bluish slate grey and Prussian blue. These three neither have a specified direction of light, nor do they produce any shadows.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #VirtualPhotography #VirtualArchitecture #Sim #Varsim #OAR #NebadonIzumi #UniversalCampus #OSgrid #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
You can't really discuss anything on Mastodon because Mastodon isn't made for discussions and completely unfit for group discussions. Besides, you can't really discuss the greater Fediverse with people who only know Mastodon, and who want Mastodon's culture as it is right now applied all over the Fediverse instead of questioned and discussed.
You can't discuss Fediverse accessibility anywhere else either. That's because you'll end up amongst people who don't know Mastodon beyond having read that name somewhere, who often actually don't even care. And yes, this includes . Judging by that name, you should expect people to know something about the Fediverse. Turned out all they know beyond the name is Lemmy and maybe /kbin.
Also, users on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) take accessibility in the Fediverse for just another stupid fad from Mastodon if they learn about its existence.
On Lemmy, they don't even know about its existence. In fact, since both Reddit and Lemmy don't provide the means to make posts accessible, the very concept of end users making their own content accessible is so incredibly alien and unimaginable to Lemmy users that they automatically assume everyone who starts talking about accessibility is a developer.
Mastodon: "Why, of course, everything has to go into the alt-text! How could you even possibly question this This is how we've always done it, and it's impossible to do any differently anyway. What do you mean, you can post over 500 characters What do you mean, you aren't on Mastodon And you've been on something that isn't Mastodon all the time So it's a Mastodon fork What do you mean, it isn't a Mastodon fork either"
Friendica: "We aren't Mastodon, and Mastodon is dumb anyway. Besides, Friendica's alt-text is buggy. Don't bother. Do your own thing."
Hubzilla: "Mastodon does what Really And you say it's mandatory there Meh. Just another fad they try to push upon everyone else. We won't let them push it upon us. Can Hubzilla even do alt-text One more good reason to keep PubCrawl off."
(streams): "Mastodon and everything else that goes against the ActivityPub standard can go burn in hell."
Lemmy: "You want to do what Put alt-text in a social media post Not a social media frontend that you're developing, but... in... a frigging post! Wait, you're not a dev after all How could you even do that if you aren't a dev You can't do that here on Lemmy. So you're saying they do that on Mastodon Really WTF Like, why would they do that Who needs that What do you mean, it's mandatory there Really It is You're saying you can be, like, banned for not doing something that's technically impossible on Lemmy WTH! This can't possibly be real!"
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #A11y #AccessibilityDas ist zu groen Teilen immer noch eine Eindeutschung des englischsprachigen Hubzilla-Lemma. Und beide triefen nur so vor Entwicklersprech, das von (potentiellen) Endnutzern, die keine Backend-Entwickler sind, berhaupt nicht verstanden wird.
Ich kenne das englischsprachige Lemma. Das wurde ursprnglich 1:1 ins Join the Fediverse Wiki gecopypastet, weil es da unbedingt einen Hubzilla-Artikel brauchte, aber die gerade mal zwei oder drei Leute im Wiki alle praktisch nur Mastodon kennen. Das war so grausig und unbrauchbar, da ich mich hingesetzt und es komplett neu geschrieben habe, und zwar von einem Endanwender fr Endanwender.
, .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Wikipedia
Neither have anything to do with Mastodon. The streams repository is the latest in a series of developments that started yesterday 14 years ago with Mistpark. That was six years before Mastodon when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid. And Hubzilla is one of the stopovers on this path and ten months older than Mastodon itself, created by Mike as well.
Not to mention that both have absolutely nothing in common with Mastodon, technologically-wise, except for supporting ActivityPub. And both Mike and Mario hate Mastodon and its home-brew, non-standard, proprietary wanna-be "standards" while rejecting actual standards with a flaming passion because it hinders innovation in the Fediverse.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMetaYou think decentralised social networking was invented with Mastodon Think twice.
It was almost exactly 14 years ago, on May 13th, 2010, that Mike Macgirvin conceived Mistpark. All by itself revolutionary and with features which no-one else has ever built into a decentralised project until today, it was only the first step of a long journey which led to , , , all three still before Mastodon, and eventually .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)
And I mean the effort of describing the image.
Since the sims of 3rd Rock Grid are being rescued and largely already have been, there's no point in showing one of them anymore. So I'm looking for a motive elsewhere.
It's hard to find something that's interesting to look at while still not impossible for me to describe adequately before the end of the day.
I'm currently looking around NyAlfheim in OSgrid. I've found a scene that's absolutely gorgeous. But it'd also absolutely be hell to describe, what with all the different buildings and what's inside the buildings and the furniture in front of the buildings and the boats and all the other decoration.
Also, there are static human figures plus one human animesh figure in the scene which means eye contact which, in turn, means I'd have to link to the image instead of embedding it because that's the only way I have to hide the image from sensitive Mastodon users.
On the other hand, I don't want to show something that's so simple that it's lacklustre and not a bit interesting.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
The big event that Alia wanted never had a chance to materialise. All they managed to do was a farewell party in 3RG yesterday. Today there's nothing. And the welcome party in ZetaWorlds will be at some point in the next weeks.
They didn't even manage to advertise or communicate anything. I guess they had no Hypergridders yesterday, only residents.
Oh well, good thing there are more events around the Hypergrid this evening.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #3rdRockGrid Bei ActivityPub-basierten Microbloggingprojekten haben im allgemeinen alle Instanzen desselben Projekts denselben Funktionsumfang. Vielleicht unterscheiden sie sich mal in der Auswahl der Emojis oder der maximalen Postlnge.
Aber Riesenunterschiede von Instanz zu Instanz in den Features wie bei den modular aufgebauten Friendica, Hubzilla und (streams) hast du da nicht.
Und die Unterschiede zwischen Mastodon einerseits und z. B. Misskey oder Pleroma andererseits haben nichts mit Instanzen zu tun. Das sind vllig unterschiedliche, voneinander unabhngige Projekte, also noch nicht mal Hardforks voneinander.
Bei vielen Apps ist der Grund, warum sie keine Funktionen ber Mastodon 3.x hinaus untersttzen, ganz einfach: Als der Entwickler anfing, kannte er nur Mastodon. Als der erste stabile Punktrelease raus war, kannte der Entwickler immer noch nur Mastodon. Als der Entwickler erfuhr, da es im Fediverse auch noch was anderes als Mastodon gibt mit ganz anderen Fhigkeiten, war es zu spt, die zu implementieren.
Es gibt aber nicht nur Entwickler, die nur gegen Mastodon bauen, weil sie nur Mastodon kennen. Es gibt auch Entwickler, die sagen: "Das ist 'ne iPhone-App, iPhone-Nutzer haben's gern total simpel, also bau ich nur das Allerntigste ein, um die App schn einfach zu halten. Listen und Filter und Einstellungen braucht man eh nicht tglich, die machen alles nur komplizierter, also bau ich die nicht mit ein."
Und es gibt Apps, die "opinionated" sind: Die ganze App ist nur auf den Geschmack des Entwicklers abgestimmt. Was der Entwickler doof findet, kommt nicht rein. Z. B. wenn der Entwickler das bichen Textformatierung, das Mastodon 4.0 eingefhrt hat, schon doof findet, kann die App nur Plaintext anzeigen, egal, was reinkommt. Und was der Entwickler geil findet, wird unabschaltbar hartgecodet. Wenn der Entwickler z. B. total auf diesen "Hackerlook" mit roter Monospace-Konsolen-Schrift auf schwarzem Grund steht, sieht die App auch immer so aus.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonAppsBill Statler What I meant is, for example:
On Hubzilla, I can deny the permission to send me posts in my channel role. Then I can grant that permission to certain connections per contact role.
However, if I grant that permission in my channel role, I cannot configure a contact role so that it denies that permission.
Permissions granted by the channel role are always inherited by contact roles and cannot be overridden. A contact role can't deny a permission which the channel role grants.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Mastodon refuses to implement full HTML rendering for content, including a larger set of text formatting and embedded images because that wouldn't be purist, old-school, Twitter-like microblogging. So if Mastodon actually tried to render fully formated blog posts, it'd mangle them. Linking to the original is a compromise.
As for blogging solutions, there's also Plume, but while it has more features than WriteFreely, it's so sparsely developed that its own devs recommend WriteFreely.
Or you could use Friendica, Hubzilla or the streams repository for blogging. Friendica even lets you "switch" between blog-like Article-type objects (with a title) and microblog-like Note-type objects (without a title). And all three can cover microblogging as well.
However, all three handle dramatically differently from Mastodon. Only Friendica has partial support for the Mastodon API, but Friendica doesn't support polls, neither locally nor in-bound, and Friendica handles Mastodon-style content warnings with BBcode tags. All three require getting your hands dirty on markup code for alt-text. But if you're a blogger, that shouldn't be such a big issue, and at least (streams) also supports Markdown in posts.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Blog #Blogging #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Plume #WriteFreely My current issue with Wayland, at least under Plasma on Debian testing, is that keyboard levels beyond Shift stopped working in Firefox installed natively, as in the Mozilla way, not through apt.
The slight performance improvements in the Firestorm Viewer on Wayland as opposed to X, and even Firestorm has an issue with Wayland which I've had to fix myself, don't justify permanently putting up with this inconvenience.
Installing Firefox through apt is out of question. Anything Debian delivers is painfully outdated, and again, I'm on testing and not on stable. And the Ubuntu PPA is not only not recommended, but it has actually given me headaches in the past.
Also, since I've got Plasma on a 14" laptop, and since Wayland zooms the whole desktop environment by a percentage rather than matching text with a dpi setting, I only get two panes in Hubzilla in Firefox on Wayland on the internal screen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Linux #Debian #KDEPlasma #Firefox #Firestorm #FirestormViewer #Wayland
Its basic functionality is to keep at least one clone of your identity on another server.
On most Fediverse projects, e.g. Mastodon, your identity is in your account and thus bound to one specific server.
Hubzilla and (streams) put "identity containers" into your account, so-called channels. Your identity is not directly put into your account, but into one of these channels. The channel separates your identity, your connections, your posts, your settings, your files etc. etc. from your login credentials.
This makes two things possible. One, you can have multiple, completely separate identities (channels) on one and the same account, accessible through one and the same login.
Two, and here does nomadic identity come into play: A channel can be cloned to another server.
Such a clone is not a dumb copy like when you move from one Mastodon server to another Mastodon server. It's a real-time, bidirectional, live, hot backup. And it's fully identical to the main instance of your channel, down to the identity, at least as perceived by server applications that know nomadic identity. Anything that happens on the main instance is mirrored to all clones, and anything that happens on a clone is mirrored to the main instance and the other clones.
For example: The main instance of my channel is on hub.netzgemeinde.eu. Thus, my identity is jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu.
I've got one clone on hub.hubzilla.de. Hubzilla and (streams) understand nomadic identity. They know that this clone is the same jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu. Even if I should send something from my clone which I've actually done once when Netzgemeinde was acting up, Hubzilla and (streams) connections still perceive it as coming from jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu.
The big advantage of this is resilience against server shutdowns. This is actually the very reason why Mike invented nomadic identity in the first place: He saw Mistpark/Friendica nodes disappearing into thin air upon short notice or spontaneously. He saw users lose everything from one day or hour or minute to the next and always have to start over from zero. And he knew that the only solution for this problem would be if a user's identity resided on multiple servers simultaneously.
Nomadic identity makes channels even resilient against the shutdown of the server that contains the main instance. You can always declare any clone the main instance. If you still have a main instance, it's demoted to clone. All of your connections on Hubzilla and (streams) are automatically changed accordingly. The only difference in practice between the main instance and a clone is that the main instance is the one that defines the identity.
A byproduct of nomadic identity is that it provides the best way to move an identity from one server to another. It first creates a clone. Then it declares the clone the new main instance, turning the old instance into a clone. Then it deletes the old instance. If the account on the old server doesn't hold any more channels, the whole account is deleted.
So not only can you move with actually absolutely everything, a Mastodon user's wet dream that will probably never come true, but you can do so with relative ease and quite safely, and most of all, you don't leave a dead identity/account behind.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zot #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Nomad #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity Either the Bluesky devs genuinely have never heard of Mike Macgirvin , nomadic identity, the Zot protocol, Red/the Red Matrix or Hubzilla, much less of the Nomad protocol or the streams repository. This is actually rather believable because next to nobody outside the bubble around Mike's creations knows about them.
Or, worse yet, they have caught wind of them. But nonetheless, they want to pose as the inventors of a revolutionary, ground-breaking innovation in social networking that has never been done before. You know, like Microsoft invented gloss and transparency effects in operating systems. Never would they admit that a competitor had done it before. And that whoever has done it before is even competition.
And since mass media, tech media, tech bloggers etc. have never heard of Mike's works, just like they've never heard of Compiz and often not even of Linux back in the 2000s, they will all just believe and regurgitate it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zot #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Nomad #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity
But Diaspora* of 2024 is no match for Mistpark of 2010, feature-wise. Mistpark, on the other hand, evolved into Friendica which federated with everything that moved, then into Hubzilla, the nomadic Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, and lastly, into the streams repository which is the home of the technologically most advanced Fediverse software to date.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)Meine Basis-Contact Roles sind erstmal aufgeteilt in nomadisch und nichtnomadisch und in "darf mir Posts schicken" und "darf mir keine Posts schicken". Das ist nmlich in meiner Channel Role deaktiviert, damit das nicht jeder darf. Ein hlicher Hack eigentlich, aber solange Hubzillas Filter nicht so tun, wie ich will...
Ich habe auch noch zwei mit erweiterten Privilegien. Die hchsten hat die Familien-Role, in der nur meine In-world-Schwester Juno Rowland ist.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ContactRole #ContactRoles #Hubzilla Ich wrde Blogposts immer verlinken, selbst wenn das Blog selbst im Fediverse ist. Das heit, die meisten Projekte, die Blogposts im Fediverse versenden, machen das automatisch so, da Mastodon nur den Titel (so vorhanden), eine Zusammenfassung (so vorhanden) bzw. die ersten Zeilen und einen Link zum Original anzeigt.
Zum einen kann gerade Mastodon keine Blogposts mit allen Schikanen so darstellen wie im Original. Z. B. entfernt es Inline-Bilder ersatzlos.
Zum anderen gibt's auf Mastodon Leute, die, ohne ein Wort zu sagen, jeden blockieren, von dem ber 500 Zeichen in einem einzigen Post kommen. Manche machen das nur, wenn berlange Posts keine entsprechende Content Warning haben, aber wie willst du die sauber in einen Blogpost einflechten
berall sonst ist es den Leuten egal, wieviele Zeichen du postest. Und einige Serveranwendungen beherrschen in ihren Webinterfaces volles HTML-Rendering, stellen also auch selbst den aufwendigsten Blogpost noch so dar wie im Original.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Fediquette The eternal question is: Is the Fediverse defined as everything that's decentralised in some way Then e-mail, XMPP, Matrix, OpenSimulator, Vircadia and Overte are parts of the Fediverse, too, and the Fediverse is several decades old. Oh, by the way, Friendica and Hubzilla can directly federate with e-mail.
Is it defined as everything that's connected to anything that uses ActivityPub in some way Then Twitter and Tumblr are/used to be parts of the Fediverse, connected directly to Friendica and Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediverseDie Standard-Einstellung von Hubzilla ist, dass Beitrge Dritter, mit welchen man nicht verbunden ist, in denen man selbst erwhnt wird, nicht in der Timeline angezeigt, also nicht akzeptiert werden. Damit beschrnkt man den Empfang von Postings durch Erwhnung auf diejenigen Kanle/Nutzer, mit welchen man verbunden ist.
ber die Einstellungen lsst sich der eigene Kanal aber auch so konfigurieren, dass man Postings auch von "Fremden" empfngt, also von Nutzern, die nicht in der Kontaktliste sind. Dies berschreibt die Standard-Berechtigungen fr den Nachrichtenempfang.
Diese Einstellung lsst sich ber "Einstellungen" (Hauptmen oben links) -> "Privacy-Einstellungen" -> "Accept all messages which mention you This setting bypasses normal permissions" vornehmen.
#FediTips #FediverseTips #hubzilla #hubzillahppchen #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
the snow monkeys of nagano japan (in japan!) it took us 13 years but we finally made it to check out them famous snow apes. itspretty amazing, yo
In such a way that everyone gets what's in the picture Without ever Googling or asking me anythingThen go ahead and give me a good, informative image description of no more than 200 characters that's up there with the best of the best on Mastodon and potential material. One that won't leave any blind user asking, "Yeah, that's fine and dandy, but what does it look like!"
Without reading my long description or my alt-text first, that is.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextHallOfFame Interesting how this article doesn't mention the one implementation of federated identity that is in daily stable use right now: , as invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011, five years before Mastodon. It is now implemented on from 2015 as well as from 2021.
Currently, nomadic identity requires special protocols, and it's limited to within Hubzilla or within (streams). But Mike is working on implementing it across project borders and using only ActivityPub right now.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentityAnd here, for comparison, is the description of the image in the parent post by an AI, namely v1.6. The prompt was, "Describe the image in detail." Half a minute later, the result happens to still be short enough for a Mastodon alt-text.
The image depicts a modern architectural structure with a distinctive design. The building features a large, curved roof that appears to be made of a reflective material, possibly glass or polished metal. The roof is supported by several tall, slender columns that are evenly spaced and rise from the ground to the roof's edge. The structure has a circular emblem on the front, which includes a stylized letter 'M' and a series of concentric circles, suggesting it might be a logo or emblem of some sort.
The building is situated on a landscaped area with a well-maintained lawn and a few trees. There is a paved walkway leading up to the entrance of the building, which is not visible in the image. The sky is clear with a few scattered clouds, indicating fair weather conditions. The overall style of the image is a digital rendering or a photograph of a 3D model, as indicated by the smooth surfaces and the absence of any visible texture or imperfections that would be present in a real-world photograph. There are no visible texts or brands that provide additional context about the building's purpose or location.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLaVAIt's almost hilarious how clueless the AI was again. And how wrong.
First of all, the roof isn't curved in the traditional sense. The end piece kind of is, but the roof behind it is more complex. Granted, unlike me, the AI can't look behind the roof end, so it doesn't know.
Next, the roof end isn't reflective. It isn't even glossy. And brushed stainless steel shouldn't really reflect anything.
The AI fails to count the columns that hold the roof end, and it claims they're evenly spaced. They're anything but.
There are three letters "M" on the emblem, but none of them is stand-alone.There is visible text on the logo that does provide additional context: "Universal Campus", "patefacio radix" and "MMXI". Maybe LLaVA would have been able to decipher at least the former, had I fed it the image at its original resolution of 2100x1400 pixels instead of the one I've uploaded with a resolution of 800x533 pixels. Decide for yourself which was or would have been cheating.
"Well-maintained lawn". Ha. The lawn is painted on, and the ground is so bumpy that I wouldn't call it well-maintained.
The entrance of the building is visible. In fact, three of the five entrances are. Four if you count the one that can be seen through the glass on the front. And the main entrance is marked with that huge structure around it.
The "few scattered clouds" are mostly one large cloud.
At least LLaVA is still capable of recognising a digital rendering and tells us how. Just you wait until PBR is out, LLaVA.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #LLaVA Long Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.
On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.
For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).
And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.
If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.
It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.
This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"
On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.
They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.
If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.
At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.
Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.
The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.
However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.
There's . "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about
Hahahaha... no.
Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.
If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.
If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.
At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.
So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts
Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.
And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #A11y #Accessibility
Golf Girl VS Long Drive Champion! 9 Hole Strokplay Match Sabrina Andolpho
This first left me a little bit confused. Why would your screen reader read first the actual post text, then the alt-text of the image, then the full image descriptionYes, I have embedded the image in my original post. I'm on Hubzilla where this is as normal as posts with thousands or even tens of thousands of characters. Hubzilla is influenced by neither Twitter nor Mastodon.
But Mastodon would normally remove all traces of embedded images from posts including the alt-text. And Hubzilla always converts copies of all embedded images into file attachments, alt-text included, when sending a post via ActivityPub.
Your screen reader should normally only present to you the content warning plus the image with the alt-text. And when you open the content warning, your screen reader should read the post text and then immediately afterwards the full image description.
Then I realised that both tweesecake.social and dragonscave.space don't run vanilla Mastodon. They run Glitch. And while Glitch does remove embedded images from posts, it does not remove their alt-texts. You can't know that, but where your screen reader reads an alt-text within the post, there is no image. There is only the alt-text which Glitch has left in.
Still, the order in which I've composed the post, including both the image being embedded in the post and the length of the text before and after the image, is deliberate. Hubzilla is fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles, far beyond what Mastodon or Glitch can render. And as strange as this may sound to a Mastodon user, Hubzilla's culture does not rule out making use of these features.
Solving the second problem you've mentioned would require me to put the full image description before the actual post text. And everyone who comes across the post would first have to read or scroll through an hour worth of image description before they'd read what I actually want to say in the post.
In a sense, what I've posted is actually a blog post. I think the confusion might come from Mastodon users, including Glitch users, expecting everything in their timelines to be a native Mastodon toot.
Also, from what I've read elsewhere, having the image descriptions and all explanations in the very same place as the image itself is the most accessible way. It's much more convenient and less cumbersome than having to navigate elsewhere to get a description plus explanations. Replies in a thread already fall under "elsewhere".
Also, I do have the technical means of putting the full description into a separate document without even having to leave Hubzilla. But for one, that would be just as cumbersome and inconvenient. And besides, a while ago, a blind Mastodon user told me that Hubzilla articles apparently don't work in their screen reader. So I can't rely on them for accessibility purposes anyway.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta I'm genuinely surprised you like it.
I mean, I had to cut down on the alt-text a whole lot to squeeze it into 1,500 characters.
And then there's still the full image description. It's in the post, and the post is hidden behind a content warning because it's so excessively long. I would have mentioned in the alt-text that the full image description is hidden behind a content warning, but, well, 1,500 characters. It was that or cutting away fewer details in the short image description.
Have you checked the full description in the post yet
And do you really think nothing is missing from either
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility Just to be on the safe side: I've just posted an image. I've described it in the alt-text the best I can within the 1,500-character limit, and the alt-text is actually exactly 1,500 characters long. So I had to limit myself.
In addition, I've described it in greater and more appropriate detail, including all necessary explanations, in the post. All in all, the full image description in the post is a bit over 60,000 characters long. The description is so long because what is in the image is extremely obscure, and I can't expect anything in it to be known to anyone. And I've actually limited myself again.
Could you please check whether the descriptions are sufficiently detailed and sufficiently accessible Again, I can't possibly fit any more into the alt-text itself, but I could expand upon the full description if there is something missing that needs to be described.
You can find the post under the hashtag #. The link might not work, so you might want to type the hashtag into the search yourself. There should only be one post under that hashtag. I can't link to it directly because, although it was federated to Mastodon, it isn't on Mastodon itself.
I'm absolutely serious, and I'm honestly and sincerely asking for serious feedback by a blind user. I don't have any blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users as connections who could otherwise give me feedback, and I guess you are serious enough yourself, and your standards are high enough to not ignore any shortcomings and be critical where it's appropriate.
Thanks in advance.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility My contribution is my first image post in three months. As usual, I've described the image appropriately. This, however, led to me outdoing myself again.
The alt-text with the "short" description is precisely 1,500 characters long. The actual image description in the post is over 60,000 characters long. And I've had to limit myself in both cases.
. Or try to find it under the hashtag
#UniversalCampus if it has found its way to your instance.#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaAnd speaking of eye contact: I've made another picture of the same building, an aerial view. The alt-text for it is actually done.
The reason why I haven't posted it may sound crazy: When I returned to this place to writen the full image description for the second image, I took a closer look at the image. And I discovered that two of the skin vendors are visible from ahead. With a preview image of the skin. All safe for work because they only show the face, but they show the face! Rather clearly even.
Two words: eye contact.
I could not have posted this image. Not unless I could get Mastodon to blank it out. And I can't get Mastodon to blank it out.
I immediately abandoned the image-describing endeavour. That is, even though that description would have been substantially shorter than the first one because I could have referenced the first one, I'm not even sure if I had managed to complete it in time for today.
It's actually a pity because the aerial view is even more spectacular, but that's the way it is.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #EyeContact #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMetaI've actually limited myself in this post.
For example, I'd normally describe an image in my images at roughly the same level of detail as my images themselves. I didn't do that this time. That's also because it would have gone completely out of hand. One of the teleporters has a preview image on it that shows lots of similar teleporters, many of which have their own preview images. If I had wanted to go all the way, I would have had to describe all the preview images on the teleporters in the preview image on the teleporter in my image.
If I look at the preview image on that teleporter in my own image, what I see looks more like a beige kite in front of a blue background. The 564 (!) individual teleporters in that preview image are so tiny, they aren't even visible. And my local copy of the image has a higher resolution than the one that I've uploaded. I can only see these teleporters when I'm in-world, and I move the camera so close to the teleporter that the preview image fills the viewport of my viewer almost entirely.
If I really wanted to see what's on these teleporters, I'd have to go where they are standing and look at each one of them individually up close. In fact, I've done so. And when I was there, I discovered just how many of them also have text on their preview images. Some of them even show images or other textures on these preview images which, in turn, have text on them.
Strictly speaking, I would have had to describe dozens of images in all details. Strictly speaking, I would have had to transcribe hundreds of bits of text. Text in an image in an image in an image. Sometimes text in an image in an image in an image in an image.
And strictly speaking, I should not even have embedded this image in my post. I should have linked to it. That's because some of the preview images on these teleporters have avatars on them. With faces. With eyes.
If I were on Mastodon, I would have to flag this image sensitive because there are images in an image in this image that have eyes on them and added a "CW: eye contact" content warning. I could have done the latter here on Hubzilla, but I decided not to let anyone know what's in this image on a microscopic sub-pixel level. And here on Hubzilla, I don't have the means to do the former.
So I decided to only describe one image in detail, namely the one that I've posted. And it took me a few days, and it took over 60,000 characters to only even do that. Call me ableist, but I wasn't too keen on spending weeks technically only describing one image, just to find out that my image description of hundreds of thousands of words happens to exceed the maximum number of characters which the Web server underneath this Hubzilla hub can handle at once. Then all the work would have been in vain.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta is my contribution to World Sight Day in the Fediverse and Global Accessibility Awareness Day, just to show that I do describe my images, and that I do so in a way that I think is appropriate, considering how niche my images are. It is my first image post in three months.
There is only one image in this post, but with an alt-text of precisely 1,500 characters plus a long image description of 60,553 characters. That's more than 50% longer than my previous record.
I don't know how many hours exactly I've invested into describing this image. But I started writing the description on Monday. I missed some nice, sunny, warm days because I had to describe this image. I did the last edits today.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #WorldSightDay #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDayIt's one of the most well-known OARs, and I guess every OpenSim user with a little more experience has come across at least one instance of it: the .
It was built by Michael Emory Cerquoni, an early OpenSimulator developer first known in-world as Nebadon Izumi who released his creations under the Oni Kenkon Creations brand, and who is also the builder of Wright Plaza, OSgrid's famous old freebie sim. The project was a collaboration with the now-defunct Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds at the University of California in Irvine, and it was designed and intended to act as an actual virtual campus.
Due to the size of the project as a whole and the main building in particular, Nebadon built the Universal Campus as a mega-region, an OpenSim hack from around 2009 that made it possible to stretch a build across multiple standard regions, in this case two by two. So the Universal Campus is not one OAR, it's four, one for each region.
The first publicly available version of the Universal Campus was released in 2011, so as futuristic as it looks, it is already roughly 13 years old.
The main building shown here is outright gargantuan. It is still one of the biggest buildings around the Hypergrid. At a length from north to south of over 200 metres, it actually had to be built across a region border. Today, a decade after the introduction of varsims, this is no longer a problem.
Although it's possible to walk from everywhere on the island to everywhere else, a network of custom-made teleporters with ten destinations reduces travel time greatly. One destination is right in front of the main building, and two more are inside, the only two in-door destinations, such is the immense size of the building.
Image description
The picture in this post is a digital rendering from inside a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator, generated in a regular client for this kind of virtual worlds, also known as a viewer, using shaders and generated shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows the main building of the Universal Campus as mentioned in this post.What OpenSimulator is
, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, cross-platform server-side re-implementation of the technology of . The latter is a commercial 3-D virtual world created by Philip Rosedale, also known as Philip Linden, of Linden Lab and launched in 2003. It is a so-called "pancake" virtual world which is accessed through desktop or laptop computers using standard 2-D screens rather than virtual reality headsets. Second Life had its heyday in 2007 and 2008. It is often believed to have shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 when the constant stream of news about it in mainstream media broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.OpenSimulator was first published in January, 2007. It was made possible when, in 2006, Linden Lab open-sourced the official Second Life viewer, which is how client applications for Second Life and OpenSim are called, thus laying its viewer API open. This led to the development of third-party viewers. After the development of third-party viewers had started, OpenSim was developed against them and the Second Life viewer API. It does not have its own official viewer, but most of the popular third-party Second Life viewers are compatible with OpenSim as well.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.
What grids, regions and sims are
Second Life and the OpenSim-based worlds are called "grids" because they are flat worlds divided into square areas of 256 by 256 metres each which is roughly 280 by 280 yards. These areas are called "regions". Regions can be empty, in which case they're shown as ocean, but they can't be entered. In order for any actual content to exist in a region and for avatars to be able to enter regions, a simulator, sim in short, has to run in a region.In Second Life, a sim is always one region. OpenSim had a hack from 2009 on that was called "mega regions". It exploited a feature in third-party Second Life viewers that was not used by Second Life itself, and that made it possible to extend a sim across multiple regions in a square arrangement. The Universal Campus itself is built as a mega region of two by two standard regions. Since this hack was buggy and limited, varregions, now known as varsims, were first developed for the OpenSim fork Aurora-Sim. Eventually, they were officially introduced into OpenSim in 2014. They theoretically allow for a sim to stretch across as many as 32 by 32 standard regions with no borders in-between.
Unlike Second Life, OpenSim also has the option to save entire sims into archives and load them from archives, so-called OARs which is short for OpenSimulator Archives. Many of these are available online. Mega regions are saved in one OAR for each region, and as the Universal Campus was designed as a mega region and pre-dates varsims, it is divided into four individual OARs. A varsim, on the other hand, can be entirely saved in and loaded from one OAR.
Where the pictures were made
Particularly, the picture was created at UniCampus, an instance of the Universal Campus in OSgrid () owned by one of the grid admins. Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid and intended as a testbed for OpenSim's development. Next to Wolf Territories Grid from 2021 (, ), it is one of the two biggest OpenSim grids each one of these two grids has more landmass than Second Life.OSgrid also adopted the early OpenSimulator slogan "The Open Source Metaverse" immediately after its launch. It still uses that slogan, and the term "metaverse" has been commonly used by the OpenSimulator community ever since.
Camera position and general setting
The picture was taken from a point of view higher than the eyes of an avatar, ca. three metres or ten feet above the ground. The position of the camera is near the inner edge of a wide path that describes an eccentric path of three quarters of a circle around the likewise circular main landing zone as well as just a bit south of the southern edge of a wide, straight path that least eastward fromo the main landing zone. The direction of view is almost northward and slightly to the west. Also, the camera is tilted upward by a few degrees due to its low position and the height of the building.All dimensions in this description are estimated.
Main building, southern end and main entrance
The main building of the Universal Campus is the centre-piece of the image. It is a gigantic building that towers high above all surrounding trees, although it is not actually a tower, nor does it have one. It is rather a lengthy building that stretches from north to south. In the image, the middle of its front is at one third of the width of the image from the left-hand edge, reaching to the left as far as one sixth of the width of the image from the left-hand edge. The conference hall at the far end is at one third of the width of the image from the right-hand edge with parts of the building almost reaching the edge. Its supporting structure mostly shows textures with highlights included which suggest that it was made of stainless steel. Otherwise, glass with a horizontal gradient between lighter grey and darker grey on the outside and a plain darker grey tint on the inside is the most commonly used material. The building does not have any exterior walls.The southern entrance, the main entrance to the building with the main landing area right outside the doors, is surrounded and marked by a tall geometrical structure which is rather complex in spite of only having straight edges. It resembles a spaceship from an early video game as roughly as it resembles the letter A or an upside-down V. It is almost perfectly symmetrical around both vertical planes. Its medium grey surfaces are untextured otherwise and don't mimic any particular material.
On each far side is a vertical "column" with a footprint with the shape of a trapeze, very roughly four metres or thirteen feet wide and four metres or thirteen feet thick. The short side of the trapeze, measuring only a bit over three and a half metres or twelve feet, is on the outside. These columns rise up some nine metres or 30 feet on the inside. The top slopes downward towards the outsides, so the columns are less than eight or about a half metres or 27 feet high on the outside.
The centre and top piece of the structure, right above the doors and roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet above the ground, is roughly ten metres or 33 feet tall and roughly four and a half metres or fifteen feet wide. It has a rectangular cross-section when looked at from inside the building or from the main landing area, but a heptagonal cross-section when looked at from the sides. Its seven visible faces are all rectangular. At the bottom, it is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick with only one surface. The top is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick, too, but with a pair of surfaces of the same size at an angle of under five degrees, forming a slight ridge at the top.
The inner and outer sides of this centre-piece are each made up from an upper surface which is a square and sloped outward from the top and a lower surface which is a rectangle and sloped outward from the bottom. They meet at an angle of roughly 20 degrees.
On each side, two irregularly-shaped structures of seven surfaces each connect the seven edges of the sides of the centre piece with the four edges of the inner sides of the columns. Six of these surfaces are more or less slightly twisted because they connect edges at different angles with each other. The only planar surface is the one that connects the bottom edges which are all horizontal.
Two pairs of double glass doors make up the actual main entrance. Each door blade is about two and a half metres or eight feet wide and about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high. The glass has the same horizontal gradient texture both on the inside and on the outside so that all door blades can be identical. The only difference between the door blades is whether the door script opens them clockwise or counter-clockwise. The texture is arranged in such a way that there are narrow lighter areas along both vertical edges when the hinge is on the left, and there is a wide lighter area on the lock side and a narrow lighter area on the hinge side when the hinge is on the right. The narrow sides of the door blades are opaque when looked at from the outside but, due to OpenSim's limitations, not when looked at from the inside. The doors open inward by 90 degrees, and they do so when they're clicked, or when an avatar approaches them. They can be closed manually by clicking them again, otherwise they close automatically after ten seconds.
Each door blade has one simple door handle on the inside and the outside tinted the same generic grey as the large structure surrounding the doors. The handles are only a few centimetres wide. The grips have a square cross-section. Above and below, there are thicker parts which connect the grips to the doors while being flush with them on the sides and facing away from the door blades. Altogether, each handle is half a metre or one and five eighths feet long. The top of each handle is about one and three quarters metres or five and three quarters inches above the ground.
Between the two door pairs and on their sides, there are altogether three columns with a rectangular footprint of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet width by 30 centimetres or one foot thickness, each roughly seven and a quarter metres or 24 feet tall. Above each pair of doors, they are connected with a horizontal beam that fits between the top surfaces of the columns and the top edges of the doors while being half as thick as the columns.
The spaces between the large structure around the entrance, the columns and the horizontal bars are filled with glass panes.
The whole door ensemble does not sit exactly at half the thickness of the large structure. It is shifted outward by about half a metre or one and five eighth feet.
A structure shaped like an almost flat pyramid, but with a flattened top, is mounted upside-down against the bottom surface of the centre of the large structure around the main entrance. The glass pane above the doors passes right through its middle. A square light is installed on the flattened top which is actually the bottom now, illuminating the entrance area when it is dark. Otherwise, this flat structure has the usual brushed stainless steel texture which appears rather dark here.
On each side of the entrance area, a cylindrical column with a diametre of roughly four metres or thirteen feet rises some 20 metres or 66 feet upward. Each column is slightly tilted inward along the longitudinal axis of the building and outward to the sides. On each side, farther outside, there is another, even taller column, easily over 30 metres or 100 feet tall. These columns are tilted along the longitudinal axis of the building at the same angle, but outward to the sides at a smaller angle. They make up the southern corners of the main building. All four columns are textured to resemble brushed stainless steel.
A semi-cylindrical structure connects the complex main entrance structure through the inner columns with the outer columns on the ground. Its diametre is roughly 2.40 metres or eight feet. It uses the usual brushed stainless steel texture, but the brushing direction is radial, and the texture is stretched along the axis of the cylinder so much that its nature is anything but obvious.
Between the columns and the main entrance structure, there are three more glass panes. The panes between the inner and outer columns are mounted halfway into the building whereas the one around the main entrance structure is almost all the way inside the building. Three horizontal stainless steel rods of about 30 centimetres or one foot lead through each pane. They are roughly evenly spaced, but closer to the upper and lower edges of the glass panes than to each other. The rods that pass through the panes between the columns grow to a diametre of roughly 45 centimetres or one and a half feet towards their ends before ending in short cylinders with diametres of about 1.80 metres or six feet.
On top of the inner columns and partly intersecting with the outer columns, a massive, upright, flat structure with stainless steel textures serves as the southern end of the roof. It has to be about 50 metres or 160 feet wide, about 15 metres or 50 feet tall and about 3.60 metres or 12 feet thick. The front and rear surfaces are slightly countersunk with margins of slightly varying thickness all around except for the bottom. The top edge has a fairly short horizontal section of ten metres or 33 feet in the middle from which it curves downward in sections of ellipses. The bottom edge is almost horizontal and leads to corners from which short 45-degree slopes lead upward. The slopes from the bottom and the ellipses from the top meet in rounded corners. Unlike the columns below, this roof end is mounted vertically.
Main building, Universal Campus logo
The roof end also carries the logo of the Universal Campus, sitting at half the height of the outer countersunk area of the roof end and ever so slightly to the left of its middle. Its base is a circular, conical structure with a diametre of ten metres or 33 feet, the sloped edge being black. The actual logo is part of the texture on the front surface of the cone. It has a diametre of about seven metres or 23 feet.The inner 80% of its diametre are filled with a gradient from medium dark grey at the top to medium light grey at the bottom. Three shaded three-dimensional primitive shapes are displayed in this area, a cube with one corner each pointed to the top and the bottom at the top, a sphere in the bottom left, a tetrahedron in the bottom right. At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source". Below, the Roman number MMXI, 2011, marks the year of the first public release of the Universal Campus.
A thin dark grey circle separates this area from the outer 20% which are light grey. Re-using the same typeface as in the inner part, and in dark grey with blue shading, "Universal" is written at the top and "Campus" at the bottom, both capitalised with otherwise small caps and following the circular shape of the logo.
29 identical black circular spots, very roughly evenly spaced, protrude from underneath the logo all around it by a bit more than their own diametre. They separate the logo from the surrounding white area which, in turn, is surrounded by the aforementioned black conical slope.
The Universal Campus logo is illuminated from below. The light source sits in a slot in a cylinder on top of the main entrance structure, about two metres or six and a half feet long and a diametre of about 30 centimetres or one foot. This cylinder has spherical end pieces, and the whole arrangement has a simple, glossy, medium grey surface.
Main building, side
Each side of the building, all the way to the conference hall at the northern end, is tilted outward at the same angle as the corner columns around the front and much simpler in design. Starting north of the side entrances right behind the front, a semi-cylindrical structure on the ground, similar to those at the front, extends northward towards the conference hall, only interrupted by another set of side entrances shortly before the conference hall. Farther up, there is another cylindrical structure of the same diametre and with the same texture on each side, but with a cutout on the upper inner side of a bit over 90 degrees to help carry the upper floor on the right, actually semi-cylindrical on the left and stretching all the way between the columns on both sides. Even farther up, right below the roof, another cylindrical structure is installed, but cut out on the inside by 60 degrees upward and 75 degrees downward.Eight cylindrical beams with a diametre of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet and the usual stainless steel texture serve as the near-vertical supports. Nearly evenly spaced, except for the first being closer to the second, and running from the bottom to the top, they divide each side into eight full-sized sections and one small section right in front of the conference hall.
As mentioned above, the building has four sets of side entrances. One on each side is right behind the front behind the colour and the first support beam, one on each side is just south of the conference hall between the seventh and eighth support beams. The doors are identical to the ones that make up the main entrance, but each side entrance has three pairs of doors instead of two.
Between the three double doors, there is a filler column with a rectangular vertical cross-section, a width of about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet and a thickness at ground level that is slightly less than the width. While the inside surface is vertical, the outside surface is sloped in parallel to the outward tilt of the side of the building. Similar but wider columns are installed on the sides of the doors, being the closest that the building has to outer walls. Another structure with a rhomboid north-south cross-section sits on top of each set of four pillars, connecting them and carrying a glass pane on top. Its inside surface is sloped outside, its outside surface has a stronger slope than the outer side of the building. Also, its texture is lighter than that of the pillars.
Everything else between the vertical and horizontal structures on the sides of the building is filled with glass panes, all with a light vertical streak down their centres, blurred by the gradients on its sides.
Main building, roof
On the visible right-hand side of the building, right above the positions of the first seven of the eight support beams, curved brackets reach down from the roof, holding the upper horizontal cylindrical beam from the outside. They appear to be dark grey, but they actually have the usual brushed stainless steel texture. These brackets are installed on both sides across the outer parts of the roof, and slightly larger versions span across the centre of the roof as can be seen from below through the windows of the building.A little bit of roof is visible underneath these brackets. The roof has four identical sections from its end to the conference hall. All are mostly planar with a rounded outer side. From above, they have the most elaborate surface of the whole building. It is almost black. A bump map or a normal map divides it into slightly embossed and slightly less rough rectangles, slightly countersunk and slightly rougher rectangles and the another bit smoother lines in-between. The rectangles are of varying size. They have an aspect ratio of four to five along the building's longitudinal axis by three to four along its transversal or vertical axis. In addition, the texture on these roof segments is glossy, giving it a plastics-like appearance. From below, however, it is smooth and transparent with the same tint of grey as the glass panes.
Between the inner and outer sections of this kind on each side, there is one long textured strip, on top of which rest the larger brackets across the centre of the roof. Its texture is slightly glossy, but hard to identify as resembling something: It consists of stretched rectangular fields of medium grey, arranged transversally, with very thin dark grey outlines, surrounded and interrupted by narrow areas of medium light grey which are emphasised by bump-mapping or normal-mapping which makes them appear embossed as well as specular-mapping which makes them appear glossier than the rest. Within these fields, but at some distance from its outlines, there are more nested rectangles, from outermost to innermost: medium dark grey, dark grey, medium dark grey, medium grey and slightly bumpy, medium light grey and bumpier as well as appearing to be slightly countersunk, light grey and appearing to be even more countersunk. This pattern repeats over a hundred times over the length of the southern part of the building. It is on the bottom face of these two strips as well, but not on its narrow sides.
The very middle of the roof is simply one long glass pane. It is separated from the dark sections to its side by what seems to try to resemble rectangular aluminium profiles with the long sides oriented vertically. On each side, at a height right above the glass pane, there is a stripe that glows white in the dark while not actually being a light source this is another OpenSim limitation.
Main building, domed conference hall
Beyond these parts of the building, a large geodesic dome rises up, below which is the conference hall. It is assembled from triangular glass panes in seven rows, four of which the image shows from outside, and untextured light grey cylindrical rods. The glass panes have the same tint or texture on both sides. The ones in the two bottom rows have the usual grey tint. The two rows above have the same lighter texture which most of the other panes on the building have on the outside. Unusually, this geodesic dome has no points at which five triangular panes meet. On all points which aren't on the bottom edge, six panes meet except for the very top where only four panes meet.The dome is surrounded by a huge, disc-like object of varying thickness, but very thin on the eastern side which is revealed in the image, that is well over a hundred metres or 330 feet in diametre. It is bascially an eccentrical cone with a circular outer shape and a way off-centre hole towards it slightly slopes down. The geodesic dome mostly rests on the edge of the hole which means that the outer edge of the disc is shifted way to the east. There is also a cutout towards the south all the way to the circular hole, uncovering the roof of the southern part of the building. The western edge of the cutout deviates from being parallel to the longitudinal axis of the building by a few degrees to the right. The eastern edge of the cutout points at the centre of the circular hole.
Along the outer edge, the top surface of the disc is tapered over a distance of about seven and a half metres or 25 feet so that the outer edge is almost razor-sharp. For unknown reasons, the western edge of the cutout shows a similar sharpness by being tapered at the bottom.
The upper and lower surfaces of the disc shows variations of the usual brushed stainless steel texture. The cutout faces, however, show a dark grey texture with four darker grey grooves upon zooming in.
Right below, there is a second, similar asymmetrical cone, but smaller in diametre, even thinner and with a bigger slope. Its outer edge touches the first disc from below. Being dark coffee brown, it is the only outward part of the building that is not a shade of grey. Also, while it is half-transparent like tinted glass from above, all other surfaces are opaque and glossy, so it's possible to look through it from above, but not from below.
The inner edge of the brown cone connects to a ring around the conference hall at about roof height on the outside or the top. The ring describes about three quarters of a circle with the opening oriented towards the southern parts of the building. It has a slightly darker tint on its brushed stainless steel texture.
The ring also serves as the upper connection between the seven cylindrical pillars that surround the conference hall, four of which are hidden behind the building itself in the image. They have a diametre of about six metres or 20 feet, and they vary in length by a few metres. They all stand on the ground, and they are sloped outward from the conference hall, partly intersecting with the two cones above.
Main building, interior
Since the outer surfaces of the building are mostly glass, more can be seen inside the building than just the underside of the roof. Horizontal support cables are mounted between the textured roof strips and underneath each of the seven central roof brackets. They are similar to those through the side window-panes in the front, but longer and thinner. From all of these but the southernmost one, two darker, thinner and shorter support cables lead downward. Another pair is mounted farther south against the textured roof strip on its side. These fourteen vertical cables support the upper floor on its inner sides.The upper floor is roughly U-shaped with the opening towards the south and the main entrance. It also serves as the ceiling for the ten seminar rooms on the ground floor, five on each side, above each of which it extends inward with a semi-elliptic shape. Its bottom side, the ceiling, is light grey. It has a bump map or a normal map which not only roughens it up but also divides it into octogonal pads with rectangular spaces in-between. The vertical surfaces towards the aisle have a texture that simulates small, square, dark grey panels in four rows held in place with one rivet in each corner. The seams between the panels are black. On some surfaces, the textures have obviously been stretched horizontally, making the panels rectangular, the rivet heads elliptical and the vertical seams wider than the horizontal seams. The upper side with its bluish-grey patterned carpet texture cannot be seen in the image.
The entire inner edge of the upper floor is protected by a railing. It consists of one mostly light grey rail with a rectangular cross-section on the floor, an identical rail that is a bit over 1.20m or four feet high above the floor and a number of small, slightly darker grey vertical beams with a square cross-section which connect them. The whole railing lacks texture and gloss.
Of the seminar rooms on the right, only the separation walls can be seen through the panes on the right of the building. These have mostly tan textures but with coarse and blurry stripes of various greys at the top and bottom.
Through the right-hand pane in the front, two seminar rooms on the left are visible, the rooms A7 and, north or to the right of it, A8. The seminar rooms A7 through A9, as well as A2 through A4 on the right, have a variety of untinted glass doors each: one in the northern corner towards the central aisle, another one in the southern corner, and one in each of these two corners that leads to the neighbouring seminar room. Apart from the lack of tint or texture, the glass doors are identical to the entrance doors.
The aisle-side wall of each seminar room can be described as convex although it is not rounded. It rather consists of four segments separated by narrow vertical columns with square footprints. They are connected by a number of horizontal rods with a rectangular cross-section. One is always right under the ceiling. Three more are roughly at 65%, 50% and 33% height above the ground. For the outermost segments, this is the height of the glass doors, so underneath the rod at 33% height above the ground, they have another vertical rod to separate the doorway from a narrower piece of wall. At some 12 or 13% height above the ground, there is another rod, and the last one is on the ground, in both cases except where there's a doorway.
The space between the latter two horizontal rods is filled with a wooden panel, showing the same reddish wood grain as all wooden-textured furniture in the building and on the sim. The other spaces have untinted glass panes in them. To illustrate the dimensions: The wooden panels are about 1.80 metres or six feet high, so for realistically-sized avatars, the only way to look into or out of the seminar rooms is through the doors.
On the vertical rod next to each aisle door, a sign with the room number is installed. The sign itself is simple, flat and rectangular. It is entirely black except for the white room number written on it in a regular Helvetica sans-serif typeface. It is attached through a glossy white cuboid that serves as a very simple mounting bracket.
Furthermore, there is an easel with a blank whiteboard standing next to each aisle door. It is a simple construction from cuboids, cylinders, a tetrahedron at the top and small spheres for feet and joints. Apart from the whiteboard which is mostly white and untextured except for the plywood texture on the back, the whole thing shows a brushed stainless steel texture with some gloss added.
Inside each seminar room, visible through the window-pane behind the easels, there is a whiteboard which is a much more elaborate construction. Each room has two of these. There is also a dark grey HDTV screen attached to the middle one of the three columns with a wall-mount swivel arm. A bit of furniture is barely visible through the closed glass door: Each room has seven quite long tables with elliptical ends, one long light grey foot on two legs with a wooden plank between them and a dark grey surface surrounded by wood grain. Six of these tables are for seminar participants with two chairs each. These chairs consist of two wooden parts in the shape of a stretched U with rounded sides and dark grey padding, two small metal rods connecting them and four conical metal legs. The seventh table is for the teacher whose chair is identical to those for the participants, only that it has an extra headrest in the same style as the rest of the chair plus a pair of elliptical armrests.
Main building, further interior objects
The large object that appears to be standing in front of seminar room A7 is a teleporter that was specifically designed for the Universal Campus due to its size. It is actually standing in the middle of the aisle, the control panel turned southward towards the main entrance. It is mainly a rectangular console on a massive angled stand. The frame around the control panel included, the console itself is about one and a half metres or five feet high and about three metres or ten feet wide. Above the control panel, there are two tiny spherical light sources on small trapezoid arms. They actually emit light to illuminate the control panel of the teleporter.The control panel is labelled in a typeface not entirely dissimilar from Futura. On its left, there is a top-down view of the entire Universal Campus with the north oriented to the left. It shows the various buildings and other places. Ten circular markers are placed on the map, all with a glossy grey frame and a black number from one to ten. All markers but one are yellow one is always glow-in-the-dark green. In this case, it is marker number 6 to the right of a rectangular building with a circular extension in its bottom corner. Below the aerial view, there is another, slightly bigger yellow circular marker, but with a red frame surrounded by a glowing red aura while not glowing itself. It has the number 2. Next to it is a label with an arrow-like point to the left that reads, black on white, "This is currrent (sic) location". It is up to the user, however, to find the marker with the same number on the map.
On the right of the control panel, there is a touchable list of destinations with their numbers in markers of the same size as the glowing red one in the bottom left, but with the usual shiny grey frame. The labels with the names of the destinations are identical in style with the current location marker:
- 1: Main Landing Zone
- 2: Main Building Lobby
- 3: Main Conference Hall
- 4: Recreation and Conference Center
- 5: Observation Deck and Sea Lab
- 6: Science Lab and Conference Room
- 7: Campfire and Beach Zone
- 8: The Light House
- 9: Engineering Conference Center
- 10: Helicopter Landing Pad
The background of the control panel is glossy medium grey. The rest of the structure is glossy with a gunmetal-like dark grey texture.
There are also quite a few potted plants inside the building. On the sides of the teleport panel, there are two identical aa palms in square terracotta pots with wide rims. Like the other potted plants, these mostly dark green plants with long pointy leaves are kept at an indoor-compatible size, namely about three and a half metres or eleven and a half feet tall. Also, like the other potted plants, they are made of only four flat and surfaces with partially transparent pictures of the plant on them, arranged in angles of 45 degrees to one another.
Through the main entrance, a slightly taller Jacaranda tree with dark lilac flowers can be seen. It is planted in a bulgy terracotta pot with a smaller rim than the square ones which is supposed to be round. In order to reduce the impact on graphics performance, however, the pot is actually hexagonal. There is also one of the two angled flights of wooden stairs leading to the upper floor and, outside the building again, a small but wide maple tree with brown autumn leaves. A look through the side entrance to the right shows an even slightly taller Bougainvillea with purple flowers. Above these doors, the underside of the upper half of the other flight of stairs is shown. The steps are not covered from below, and the spaces between them are open.
Some of the unusual dividers on the upper floor can be seen through the windows, too. The main element is a half-arch of a bit over 90 degrees from the floor to the tilted structures on the side of the building. Its core is a thin, roughly 1.80 metres or six feet wide circle segment with an inner radius of about four and a half metres or fifteen feet and a dark grey texture which resembles some kind of rock. It is lined on both the inside and the outside with arches with a brushed stainless steel texture. The inner arch is about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet wide, the outer arch is slightly narrower, and both are significantly thicker than the core arch. From both ends of the arch, narrow brushed stainless steel bars extend to the centre of the arch where they meet. They are thinner than the stainless steel arches, but thicker than the core arch. Finally, the area between the two bars and the inner arch is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.
On each side of the upper floor, there are six such dividers. The southernmost ones are installed right above and north of the stairs and attached directly to the vertical structures on the sides. Between the other ten and the side structures, there are horizontal extensions in much the same style. The arches themselves are extended to the sides by two rhomboids in the same style, a longer one of some four and a half metres or fifteen feet with four cylindrical connectors of roughly 60 centimetres or two feet of diametre on its corners underneath which avatars can pass and a shorter one of some three metres or ten feet which connects to the vertical structures. The latter one also has a third stainless-steel-framed rhomboid all the way down to the floor underneath itself which is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.
Avatars in OpenSim and the avatar vendor rooms
On the eastern side of the building, barely visible through the large glass surfaces, there is an area that offers complete classic avatars as well as classic avatar accessories.Unlike in most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars in OpenSim-based worlds, just like Second Life, are not monolithic. They are highly modular, they are highly configurable, and they have evolved over the years. The most basic classic avatar consists of five components that always have to be there. The only one that cannot be replaced is the system body which is automatically generated by the viewer application. OpenSim has the same system body as Second Life. The four components that can be replaced but never removed are the shape which greatly defines the look of the avatar with 88 parametres, the skin which is a set of three textures for the head and which can be tinted with parametres, the upper body and the lower body, the hair which defines the shape and length of the classic hairdo growing out of the head as well as its texture, and the eyes which are basically only a texture again.
Classic clothes are also referred to as layer clothes because they are just that, layers of textures painted onto the system body. Their order is defined by nine categories, in each of which a classic avatar can only wear one kind of clothing. A few of these have an influence on the shape of the avatar: The shirt and the jacket can widen the arms to simulate sleeves. Likewise, the pants can widen the legs downward to simulate pants legs and even bell-bottoms. And the shoes can both raise the avatar in general and grow a sort of spike out of the heel, lift the whole avatar except for the toe area because the system body does not actually have toes and thus generate high heels. A separate layer is for skirts it textures a part of the system body which is usually fully transparent and thus invisible. In 2011, four tattoo layers were added between the skin and the two underwear layers.
It is also possible to attach objects to an avatar at 30 different points, and it has been for as long as OpenSim was around. This was quickly used not only for things carried by the avatar, jewellery or other accessories, but also for more realistic hair, for better-looking shoes in comparison with the painted-on classic shoes, for various ways of having new shapes of skirts, for collars, for pants legs et cetera.
Originally, these attachments were made from primitive objects or "prims" in short: basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cones and the like which can be generated and manipulated a lot in-world without needing external software except for making textures. Since building complex objects from them is somewhere between highly complicated and impossible, it was made possible to import sculptmaps as exported from 3-D software like Blender and use them to create more complex prims. All kinds of prims can be made flexible with a little bit of physics which is used for hair and skirts as well as for flags, but the physics don't have collision detection.
The next step was the introduction of mesh. Mesh allows the user to directly import 3-D files in the Collada format, texture mapping included, without having to resort to sculptmaps. Mesh came to Second Life in 2011, as did experimental mesh support in OpenSim. The first stable release of OpenSim with mesh support came out in 2014. On avatars, mesh was originally used for hair, shoes, jewellery and other accessories. It really started a revolution with the introduction of rigged mesh which automatically latches itself to multiple points on the avatar. This made it possible not only to create clothes that move with the avatar's movement, but even to create all-new, better-looking bodies and heads. Nowadays, most avatars consist entirely of mesh.
The newest technological advancement for avatars was Bakes-on-Mesh which came up from 2019 on. This allows classic layer textures to be put onto worn mesh, especially mesh bodies, and in greater numbers than on the system body. The main purpose was to get away from skin appliers, scripted devices that have to be put on and used to put a different skin onto the mesh body. Also, the remaining onion layers around mesh bodies that were necessary for tattoos, but made mesh bodies unnecessarily complex, had become obsolete because Bakes-on-Mesh allows for wearing classic layer tattoos on mesh bodies. But it also makes wearing layer clothes possible again which can make sense in the case of skin-tight clothes.
The latest version of the Universal Campus from 2012 already uses mesh for a few things, mostly rocks. The main building itself and everything else shown in this image is still put together from prims and sculpties.
As for the contents in the avatar vendor area, none of it is newer than from 2011. Everything is still from times before mesh. The complete avatars come with layer clothes, but no attachments. They, like the skins and hair attachments, were created by Ina Centaur under the OS Avatars label around the same time as the Universal Campus. Many of the other items, the majority of which were made by Nebadon Izumi himself, are even older. All of them are offered under free licenses, however. In order to announce their availability, three of the divider extensions have signs mounted above them which can be made out in the picture. They are oval, black with a stainless steel frame, and they have the glowing, but not light-emitting white word "AVATARS" written on them in all-caps and in a typeface which looks to me like a regular Linux Libertine. The writing even uses proper kerning between the "A"s, the "V" and the "T".
In the first two of the three avatar vendor rooms, the rear sides of four stainless steel vendors each, lined up on the outer side of the room along the longitudinal axis of the building, and especially the signs above them on thin cylindrical stands can be made out, the only ones that aren't hidden behind something. The first four vendors offer one female skin each, the other four offer one male skin each. The displays on these eight vendors are oriented away from the camera.
Main building, upper floor, western side
The first two rooms on the western side of the building are conference areas, the other two are empty. Not much of them is visible except for three of the dividers, a semi-circular couch with a wooden frame and ten seats, a small banana tree in a hexagonal white concrete pot, another whiteboard and two HDTV screens in stainless steel casings on floor stands. One of them shows the monochrome test pattern which is actually on all of them, and which includes several screen-testing elements as well as a large medium grey circle in the middle with a white, a black and a thinner medium grey border around it and the digit 2 in black and in a heavy, condensed sans-serif typeface and a white square grid on medium grey ground with the capital letter "C" in two combined fields at the bottom.The main landing area outside the main entrance
In front of the main entrance, there is the main landing area of the sim, a part of which is still within the image towards its bottom left. It is circular in shape with a diametre of about 40 metres or 130 feet. The centre of this circle is about 35 metres or 115 feet south from the main entrance of the main building. It shows the same light grey texture reminiscent of concrete that is used on most paths on the island. The texture is not shrunk to a realistic size, so it appears coarse and having a low resolution.The outer edges of nearly all concrete surfaces on the island are lined with low walls of varying height and width. They all have the same concrete texture, but at a smaller scale and without the light grey tint so it appears almost white. The main landing area actually has two rows of walls around it. The inner walls are a bit over 1.20 metres or four feet high and about 1.50 metres or five feet wide. The outer walls at a distance of roughly three metres or ten feet are about 1.65 metres or five and a half feet high and about 1.80 metres or six feet wide.
At the ends, the gaps are closed with walls a bit lower than the inner walls and roughly 90 centimetres or three feet wide. The spaces between the walls are filled with dirt. They form planters with identical shrubs in them the short planters in the northwest and the northeast visible in the image have five plants each. These shrubs are not named in-world. They appear to be of tropical origin, and they have flowers with petals that are mostly white, yellow towards the centre and magenta along their edges. Like all trees on this sim, the shrubs are made of simple, textured sculpty prims for the trunks and branches, and the twigs, leaves and flowers are semi-transparent textures on intersecting two-dimensional surfaces, a popular way to make plants in Second Life and OpenSim before the arrival of mesh. The textures used for all plants on this sim are photo-realistic as far as the maximum possible or feasible texture resolution allows.
On the left-hand edge of the image, in front of the northwestern planter, there is another teleporter which is almost identical to the one that can be seen inside the building. There are two differences, however: Its current location is number 1, and the selected location in the image is number 4. Another one of the unidentified shrubs appears between the teleporter and the left-hand edge of the image, partly hidden behind the teleporter.
Another single-target teleporter is standing on its right. It is a custom addition to this particular instance of the Universal Campus. It was built by Neovo Geesink, formerly of Metropolis Metaversum fame and now involved in OSgrid, in his trademark style. This style includes a particular brushed stainless steel texture which, unlike those used by Nebadon Izumi, emulates the surface having been brushed circularly. The stand under the panel is a simple cone, flattened to an extremely elliptical footprint. The panel is as high as that of the original teleporter, but only slightly wider as it is high. The frame around the image in the centre is slightly narrower than that on the original teleporter.
The image itself shows an aerial view of its single hard-coded target, a sim named TeleHub, built and operated by Neovo. It is nothing more than a single region, a square of 256 by 256 metres or 280 by 280 yards, surrounded by blue ocean and a wall made of beige bricks which is about ten metres or 33 feet high. The ground is tan and divided into four triangular areas by two diagonal lines. In each area, there are 141 single-target teleporters similar to this one, but with a higher panel, in rows of eleven. A few show previews of their targets, but most are unused with black screens. In the very centre, there is a small circular platform on which avatars land after teleporting in. It has a beige top surface with a hexagonal tile pattern and a woodgrain texture on the sloped surface all around. Four arches with textures resembling rough taupe stones and black signs on them lead to one triangular area each. The position of the camera is off one of the corners and pointing diagonally downward to one of the yellow division lines.
Yet another one of the identical unidentified shrubs is behind this teleporter and shown to its right.
In the background, the low walls on the sides of a path appear between the shrub behind the teleporter to TeleHub and the main building. The path is straight and leads northward along the western side of the building.
Even farther in the background, behind the two teleporters, there is some vegetation. From left to right, it starts with an unidentified tree of about eight metres or 26 feet of height. It has reddish-brown bark, medium green leaves in pairs and what could be taken for pale yellow-ish fruit. Below it, there is a large bushel of khaki-coloured grass that stands about two and a half metres or more than eight feet high. The tree intersects with another maple tree with brown and tan leaves that is about ten metres or 33 feet tall with more massive greyish trunk and branches. Immediately to the right again and partly intersecting with the maple tree, there is an even unidentified tree, about 17 metres or 56 feet tall, with grey bark on a fairly slim trunk and a messy crown of dark, brownish-green leaves which are so small that the texture makes it impossible to tell individual leaves. This tree is partly hidden behind the building already. It has another two bushels of the same tall grass underneath it which, due to the point of view, only seem to stand immediately to the right of the trunk.
Behind this vegetation, right below the crowns of the trees, the horizon separates the sky from the sea. What little sea the image shows is medium light blue. The sky right above the horizon is very light cyan, and around half the height of the image, it gradually changes into a tone of blue similar to that of the sea. From the top left corner of the image downward and to the right, more than half of the sky is covered by a cirrus-like thin cloud with a small hole above the roof end of the main building. On the right, the cloud dissolves into smaller clouds above the geodesic dome and the surrounding thin cones.
Further additions to the Universal Campus include five easels of the same type as seen inside, but with custom writing in it. They are lined up next to each other in front of the northeastern planter, starting right next to the wide path towards the main entrance. The writing on all five easels is done in black and in an unidentified humanist sans-serif typeface which appears condensed due to the texture having been stretched vertically, thus losing its original aspect ratio. Only the writing on the first of the five is visible from the camera's point of view, though. It reads in three lines, "To download a free copy of the Universal Campus Var Region." This is followed by a blank line and one more line that reads, "Click here for notecard". Upon clicking the easel, it gives the avatar a notecard with an Amazon cloud storage URL following an explanation that it contains the Universal Campus as a varregion archive and followed by a full copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Around the main landing area and the main building
Due to limitations in construction with prims, the ground of the main landing area is slightly higher than that of the three paths which lead away from it. The widest one of these paths is about one third of the diametre of the landing area in average width that leads to the main entrance. It is trapezoid in shape, and its sides line up with the centre of the main landing area. Two more trapezoid paths, also widening with the distance from the centre of the main landing area but only half as wide as the first one, lead westward and eastward from an imaginary point a little north from the centre of the main landing area. The western one is not visible in the image except for on the aerial view on the teleporter. The eastern one makes up most of the foreground along the bottom edge of the image.On the outer corner of the northeastern planter on the eastward path, there is a lamp post standing on an almost white, cylindrical concrete block of about 1.80 metres or six feet of both height and diametre. From the camera perspective, it is in front of the main building and near the westernmost front column. It appears to be almost parallel with the column, but the lamp post is vertical while the column is tilted roughly northwestward.
The lamp post itself is about seven and a half metres or 25 feet high and very slightly conical with an elaborately-shaped round foot. At the top, it describes a sharp 90-degree angle towards the path, rounded on the outside, forming a corner on the inside. It then extends conically towards the path by another roughly 1.50 metres or five feet before ending in a small sphere. The bottom of the sphere is flattened, and the actual light source is installed on this flat surface. It is round, glowing and emitting slightly yellowish light. The rest of the lamp post is light grey or white and highly glossy.
The walls lining the paths to the sides of the main landing area rise no more than about 30 centimetres or one foot above the paths themselves while being twice as wide.
In the bottom right corner of the image, the path to the east intersects with a circular path around the main landing area that begins and ends near the southern side entrances of the main building. Its centre is some ten metres or 33 feet north of that of the main landing area, and its outer diametre is about 100 metres or 330 feet. Due to the aforementioned limitations, it is a little bit higher than the trapezoid spoke path at the bottom. Its walls rise about 60 centimetres or two feet above itself and about 80 centimetres or a little less than three feet above the path to the east, and they are about 2.40 metres or eight feet wide.
Between the main building, the path to the main building, the planter northeast of the main landing area, the path in the very foreground and the circular path on the right, a large patch of sim ground is still unused. It shows a green texture with some slightly darker or minimally more yellow-ish areas. The texture has a fairly low resolution. It is coarse and blurry, and at the same time, even this patch of ground reveals the repeating texture tiles. The ground itself is rather bumpy as though it has been manually treated to be like this. All the same applies to the corresponding area to the west of the path to the main building of which fairly little of it is revealed in the image.
Right before its end near the right-hand entrance, the circular pathway first branches diagonally to the right to another path three small steps down. On both corners of this junction, there are fairly cylindrical platforms inserted into the walls. Both have a diametre of about 3.60 metres or twelve feet and a height of about 1.20 metres or four feet above the branched-off path or a bit under 90 centimetres or three feet above the circular path. The walls along the branched-off path are fairly small, only some 45 centimetres or one and a half feet high and about 60 centimetres or two feet wide.
After about 15 metres or 50 feet of length, the branched-off path continues down a set of stairs. Due to how low the camera position is, the stairs itself are hidden from the camera, but the block and guide rails along the far side of the stairs, the northwestern side, are not. The block is the same shade of grey as the surfaces of the paths. It serves as a primary guard on the sides of the stairs. It is about 90 centimetres or three feet wide. It ascends from the usual wall on the side of the path which it overlaps by the same amount on both sides, and it does so at an angle of roughly 25 degrees. It reaches its peak right above where the stairs start at a height of about two metres or six and a half feet above the path. From there, it descends at an angle of about 35 degrees which, curiously, is a little less steep than the stairs themselves.
The guide rails are dark blue flat slabs, about 30 centimetres or one foot wide and about seven and a half centimetres or three inches thick. They come in stacks of four, arranged above one another with round about one and a half times the thickness of one rail worth of space between them. They are parallel to the descending surface of the block. The lowest one has a distance to the block of circa 30 centimetres or one foot. Each set of rails is held together and in place by two shiny, textureless blocks of 120 centimetres or four feet of height and a square top surface which, however, slightly narrows downward to the large concrete block below when looked at from parallel to the rails. Upstairs, the four rails extend beyond the stairs by roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet. Their upper ends are lined up almost exactly vertically. The whole arrangement is slightly shifted out of centre on top of the block, away from the stairs. A second, identical set of rails is installed further downstairs for no apparent reason other than looks. Such rails are actually on both sides of the stairs, but the image only shows them on one side.
Shortly before the stairs, one lamp post like the one is installed on the wall on each side of the path towards the stairs, complete with the cylindrical block underneath. In the image, the lamp post on the right with the exception of the foot and the cylindrical concrete block underneath is almost entirely obscured by two trees. One is identical to the tree with the chaotic brownish-green leaves to the left that is partly hidden behind the main building. It has another bushel of grass around where its roots were if it had any. Another much larger one is standing to its right, its trunk and most of its crown outside the image already. It is unidentified, too, but it shows some signs of being an acacia tree. Its bark is mostly greyish-brown with some rusty red patches on it. Its leaves are long, pointy and various tones of pale light to not-quite-as-pale medium green.
Immediately after the path towards the stairs branches off, the circular path leads into a straight path that runs parallel to the eastern side of the main building. The walls on its side have the same size as those on the sides of the circular path. On both of its ends, short, wide platforms lead to the side entrances of the building, connected to the path via two small steps each. These platforms do not have walls on their sides. At the far end, the straight path leads into another circular path, this time around the conference hall.
Some more vegetation is to the right of the path along the eastern side of the main building, all standing on sim ground. Right behind the unobstructed lamp post next to the path that leads downstairs, there is a fairly large unidentified tree that almost reaches the edge of the roof of the building. Its crown has rather dense foliage in a quite saturated medium green tone. The bark texture on its thin trunk and branches is mostly taupe with bits of copper brown and fairly smooth except for long dark rifts along the trunk and the branches as well as a few dark holes.
Behind the block and the dark blue rails along the stairs by the right-hand edge of the image, a gigantic version of the unidentified shrubs in the planters is located on the edge of the downhill slope which necessitates the stairs. It is about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high, and its flowers are up to 60 centimetres or two feet in diametre.
Farther in the background, also behind the lamp post and a little behind the shrubs, there is a group of seven pine trees of varying size. They have semi-transparent, conical surfaces around their trunks with textures which give the impression of very dark green needles. There are also bushels of tall grass on the ground between the pines.
Lastly, one of the four main light sources is the simulated Sun. Since it is shortly before noon, it is standing almost vertically above the sim and shining what is technically grey light down on it. The sim uses OpenSim's default daycycle in which the Sun always goes through the zenith. The same applies to all converted older daycycles originally available in OpenSim. The Sun is also the only light source on the sim whose light casts shadows. The other four main light sources are three types of ambient light in darker taupe, bluish slate grey and Prussian blue. These three neither have a specified direction of light, nor do they produce any shadows.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #VirtualPhotography #VirtualArchitecture #Sim #Varsim #OAR #NebadonIzumi #UniversalCampus #OSgrid #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
: continued through a considerable tine, or to a great length
- French: long
- German: lang
- Italian: lungo
- Portuguese: longo
- Spanish: largo
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Discussing Fediverse accessibility isn't possible anywhere. Now I know. Try your best to prove me wrong.You can't really discuss anything on Mastodon because Mastodon isn't made for discussions and completely unfit for group discussions. Besides, you can't really discuss the greater Fediverse with people who only know Mastodon, and who want Mastodon's culture as it is right now applied all over the Fediverse instead of questioned and discussed.
You can't discuss Fediverse accessibility anywhere else either. That's because you'll end up amongst people who don't know Mastodon beyond having read that name somewhere, who often actually don't even care. And yes, this includes . Judging by that name, you should expect people to know something about the Fediverse. Turned out all they know beyond the name is Lemmy and maybe /kbin.
Also, users on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) take accessibility in the Fediverse for just another stupid fad from Mastodon if they learn about its existence.
On Lemmy, they don't even know about its existence. In fact, since both Reddit and Lemmy don't provide the means to make posts accessible, the very concept of end users making their own content accessible is so incredibly alien and unimaginable to Lemmy users that they automatically assume everyone who starts talking about accessibility is a developer.
Mastodon: "Why, of course, everything has to go into the alt-text! How could you even possibly question this This is how we've always done it, and it's impossible to do any differently anyway. What do you mean, you can post over 500 characters What do you mean, you aren't on Mastodon And you've been on something that isn't Mastodon all the time So it's a Mastodon fork What do you mean, it isn't a Mastodon fork either"
Friendica: "We aren't Mastodon, and Mastodon is dumb anyway. Besides, Friendica's alt-text is buggy. Don't bother. Do your own thing."
Hubzilla: "Mastodon does what Really And you say it's mandatory there Meh. Just another fad they try to push upon everyone else. We won't let them push it upon us. Can Hubzilla even do alt-text One more good reason to keep PubCrawl off."
(streams): "Mastodon and everything else that goes against the ActivityPub standard can go burn in hell."
Lemmy: "You want to do what Put alt-text in a social media post Not a social media frontend that you're developing, but... in... a frigging post! Wait, you're not a dev after all How could you even do that if you aren't a dev You can't do that here on Lemmy. So you're saying they do that on Mastodon Really WTF Like, why would they do that Who needs that What do you mean, it's mandatory there Really It is You're saying you can be, like, banned for not doing something that's technically impossible on Lemmy WTH! This can't possibly be real!"
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #A11y #AccessibilityDas ist zu groen Teilen immer noch eine Eindeutschung des englischsprachigen Hubzilla-Lemma. Und beide triefen nur so vor Entwicklersprech, das von (potentiellen) Endnutzern, die keine Backend-Entwickler sind, berhaupt nicht verstanden wird.
Ich kenne das englischsprachige Lemma. Das wurde ursprnglich 1:1 ins Join the Fediverse Wiki gecopypastet, weil es da unbedingt einen Hubzilla-Artikel brauchte, aber die gerade mal zwei oder drei Leute im Wiki alle praktisch nur Mastodon kennen. Das war so grausig und unbrauchbar, da ich mich hingesetzt und es komplett neu geschrieben habe, und zwar von einem Endanwender fr Endanwender.
, .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Wikipedia
Mr. 's Wish seems to come true for you George ( and ) so Keep going on with that.
Best to your !
:gnomeHey:
You won't get Mario Vavti and Mike Macgirvin to build Hubzilla and the streams repository respectively against the Mastodon API any more than necessary. Read, ideally at all.Neither have anything to do with Mastodon. The streams repository is the latest in a series of developments that started yesterday 14 years ago with Mistpark. That was six years before Mastodon when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid. And Hubzilla is one of the stopovers on this path and ten months older than Mastodon itself, created by Mike as well.
Not to mention that both have absolutely nothing in common with Mastodon, technologically-wise, except for supporting ActivityPub. And both Mike and Mario hate Mastodon and its home-brew, non-standard, proprietary wanna-be "standards" while rejecting actual standards with a flaming passion because it hinders innovation in the Fediverse.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMetaYou think decentralised social networking was invented with Mastodon Think twice.
It was almost exactly 14 years ago, on May 13th, 2010, that Mike Macgirvin conceived Mistpark. All by itself revolutionary and with features which no-one else has ever built into a decentralised project until today, it was only the first step of a long journey which led to , , , all three still before Mastodon, and eventually .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)
Pipeline release! nf-core/mag v3.0.0 - mag 3.0.0 - Magenta Magpie!
Please see the changelog:
-read-sequencing -sequencing
I've launched my next image post project. Yes, what'd take you seconds will take me at least one day. And what you may do every couple of minutes, I haven't done in over three months due to the effort.And I mean the effort of describing the image.
Since the sims of 3rd Rock Grid are being rescued and largely already have been, there's no point in showing one of them anymore. So I'm looking for a motive elsewhere.
It's hard to find something that's interesting to look at while still not impossible for me to describe adequately before the end of the day.
I'm currently looking around NyAlfheim in OSgrid. I've found a scene that's absolutely gorgeous. But it'd also absolutely be hell to describe, what with all the different buildings and what's inside the buildings and the furniture in front of the buildings and the boats and all the other decoration.
Also, there are static human figures plus one human animesh figure in the scene which means eye contact which, in turn, means I'd have to link to the image instead of embedding it because that's the only way I have to hide the image from sensitive Mastodon users.
On the other hand, I don't want to show something that's so simple that it's lacklustre and not a bit interesting.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Weekly Sketch #205 - 12th of May. A Classic Chinese Dragon, drawn in my style (I used the photo of a Chinese Dragon statue from a temple in Hongkong for reference).
Okay, the mystery is solved. I've managed to catch someone from 3RG.The big event that Alia wanted never had a chance to materialise. All they managed to do was a farewell party in 3RG yesterday. Today there's nothing. And the welcome party in ZetaWorlds will be at some point in the next weeks.
They didn't even manage to advertise or communicate anything. I guess they had no Hypergridders yesterday, only residents.
Oh well, good thing there are more events around the Hypergrid this evening.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #3rdRockGrid Bei ActivityPub-basierten Microbloggingprojekten haben im allgemeinen alle Instanzen desselben Projekts denselben Funktionsumfang. Vielleicht unterscheiden sie sich mal in der Auswahl der Emojis oder der maximalen Postlnge.
Aber Riesenunterschiede von Instanz zu Instanz in den Features wie bei den modular aufgebauten Friendica, Hubzilla und (streams) hast du da nicht.
Und die Unterschiede zwischen Mastodon einerseits und z. B. Misskey oder Pleroma andererseits haben nichts mit Instanzen zu tun. Das sind vllig unterschiedliche, voneinander unabhngige Projekte, also noch nicht mal Hardforks voneinander.
Bei vielen Apps ist der Grund, warum sie keine Funktionen ber Mastodon 3.x hinaus untersttzen, ganz einfach: Als der Entwickler anfing, kannte er nur Mastodon. Als der erste stabile Punktrelease raus war, kannte der Entwickler immer noch nur Mastodon. Als der Entwickler erfuhr, da es im Fediverse auch noch was anderes als Mastodon gibt mit ganz anderen Fhigkeiten, war es zu spt, die zu implementieren.
Es gibt aber nicht nur Entwickler, die nur gegen Mastodon bauen, weil sie nur Mastodon kennen. Es gibt auch Entwickler, die sagen: "Das ist 'ne iPhone-App, iPhone-Nutzer haben's gern total simpel, also bau ich nur das Allerntigste ein, um die App schn einfach zu halten. Listen und Filter und Einstellungen braucht man eh nicht tglich, die machen alles nur komplizierter, also bau ich die nicht mit ein."
Und es gibt Apps, die "opinionated" sind: Die ganze App ist nur auf den Geschmack des Entwicklers abgestimmt. Was der Entwickler doof findet, kommt nicht rein. Z. B. wenn der Entwickler das bichen Textformatierung, das Mastodon 4.0 eingefhrt hat, schon doof findet, kann die App nur Plaintext anzeigen, egal, was reinkommt. Und was der Entwickler geil findet, wird unabschaltbar hartgecodet. Wenn der Entwickler z. B. total auf diesen "Hackerlook" mit roter Monospace-Konsolen-Schrift auf schwarzem Grund steht, sieht die App auch immer so aus.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonAppsBill Statler What I meant is, for example:
On Hubzilla, I can deny the permission to send me posts in my channel role. Then I can grant that permission to certain connections per contact role.
However, if I grant that permission in my channel role, I cannot configure a contact role so that it denies that permission.
Permissions granted by the channel role are always inherited by contact roles and cannot be overridden. A contact role can't deny a permission which the channel role grants.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
nagano, japan. what we did for our anniversary! (its alpacas) (in japan!) weve been married for 13 years so we went and had some fun. hel
Admissions suspension at Peterborough long-term care part of systemic challenges, advocates argue
Advocacy groups Concerned Friends and the Ontario Association of Residents Councils weigh in on the admissions suspension issue May 2 for St. Joseph's at Fleming in Peterborough.
-termCare -TermCare
Mastodon refuses to implement full HTML rendering for content, including a larger set of text formatting and embedded images because that wouldn't be purist, old-school, Twitter-like microblogging. So if Mastodon actually tried to render fully formated blog posts, it'd mangle them. Linking to the original is a compromise.
As for blogging solutions, there's also Plume, but while it has more features than WriteFreely, it's so sparsely developed that its own devs recommend WriteFreely.
Or you could use Friendica, Hubzilla or the streams repository for blogging. Friendica even lets you "switch" between blog-like Article-type objects (with a title) and microblog-like Note-type objects (without a title). And all three can cover microblogging as well.
However, all three handle dramatically differently from Mastodon. Only Friendica has partial support for the Mastodon API, but Friendica doesn't support polls, neither locally nor in-bound, and Friendica handles Mastodon-style content warnings with BBcode tags. All three require getting your hands dirty on markup code for alt-text. But if you're a blogger, that shouldn't be such a big issue, and at least (streams) also supports Markdown in posts.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Blog #Blogging #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Plume #WriteFreely My current issue with Wayland, at least under Plasma on Debian testing, is that keyboard levels beyond Shift stopped working in Firefox installed natively, as in the Mozilla way, not through apt.
The slight performance improvements in the Firestorm Viewer on Wayland as opposed to X, and even Firestorm has an issue with Wayland which I've had to fix myself, don't justify permanently putting up with this inconvenience.
Installing Firefox through apt is out of question. Anything Debian delivers is painfully outdated, and again, I'm on testing and not on stable. And the Ubuntu PPA is not only not recommended, but it has actually given me headaches in the past.
Also, since I've got Plasma on a 14" laptop, and since Wayland zooms the whole desktop environment by a percentage rather than matching text with a dpi setting, I only get two panes in Hubzilla in Firefox on Wayland on the internal screen.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Linux #Debian #KDEPlasma #Firefox #Firestorm #FirestormViewer #Wayland
MySQL 8.4.0
LTS Percona distribution
MySQL 8.0 EoL 2026/04/30
8.4What Is New in MySQL 8.4 since MySQL 8.0 8.0
InnoDB
MySQL Replication: tagged GTIDs re
#84
Deprived of interruptions, away from podcasts or audio books I try to use the sudden opportunity and think about something meaningful, but the silence doesn't work as expected making me formulate sentences like: 'German shepherds have beauty spots. Very much like Eva Mendes''.
Its basic functionality is to keep at least one clone of your identity on another server.
On most Fediverse projects, e.g. Mastodon, your identity is in your account and thus bound to one specific server.
Hubzilla and (streams) put "identity containers" into your account, so-called channels. Your identity is not directly put into your account, but into one of these channels. The channel separates your identity, your connections, your posts, your settings, your files etc. etc. from your login credentials.
This makes two things possible. One, you can have multiple, completely separate identities (channels) on one and the same account, accessible through one and the same login.
Two, and here does nomadic identity come into play: A channel can be cloned to another server.
Such a clone is not a dumb copy like when you move from one Mastodon server to another Mastodon server. It's a real-time, bidirectional, live, hot backup. And it's fully identical to the main instance of your channel, down to the identity, at least as perceived by server applications that know nomadic identity. Anything that happens on the main instance is mirrored to all clones, and anything that happens on a clone is mirrored to the main instance and the other clones.
For example: The main instance of my channel is on hub.netzgemeinde.eu. Thus, my identity is jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu.
I've got one clone on hub.hubzilla.de. Hubzilla and (streams) understand nomadic identity. They know that this clone is the same jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu. Even if I should send something from my clone which I've actually done once when Netzgemeinde was acting up, Hubzilla and (streams) connections still perceive it as coming from jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu.
The big advantage of this is resilience against server shutdowns. This is actually the very reason why Mike invented nomadic identity in the first place: He saw Mistpark/Friendica nodes disappearing into thin air upon short notice or spontaneously. He saw users lose everything from one day or hour or minute to the next and always have to start over from zero. And he knew that the only solution for this problem would be if a user's identity resided on multiple servers simultaneously.
Nomadic identity makes channels even resilient against the shutdown of the server that contains the main instance. You can always declare any clone the main instance. If you still have a main instance, it's demoted to clone. All of your connections on Hubzilla and (streams) are automatically changed accordingly. The only difference in practice between the main instance and a clone is that the main instance is the one that defines the identity.
A byproduct of nomadic identity is that it provides the best way to move an identity from one server to another. It first creates a clone. Then it declares the clone the new main instance, turning the old instance into a clone. Then it deletes the old instance. If the account on the old server doesn't hold any more channels, the whole account is deleted.
So not only can you move with actually absolutely everything, a Mastodon user's wet dream that will probably never come true, but you can do so with relative ease and quite safely, and most of all, you don't leave a dead identity/account behind.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zot #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Nomad #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity Either the Bluesky devs genuinely have never heard of Mike Macgirvin , nomadic identity, the Zot protocol, Red/the Red Matrix or Hubzilla, much less of the Nomad protocol or the streams repository. This is actually rather believable because next to nobody outside the bubble around Mike's creations knows about them.
Or, worse yet, they have caught wind of them. But nonetheless, they want to pose as the inventors of a revolutionary, ground-breaking innovation in social networking that has never been done before. You know, like Microsoft invented gloss and transparency effects in operating systems. Never would they admit that a competitor had done it before. And that whoever has done it before is even competition.
And since mass media, tech media, tech bloggers etc. have never heard of Mike's works, just like they've never heard of Compiz and often not even of Linux back in the 2000s, they will all just believe and regurgitate it.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zot #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Nomad #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity
Last updated: 2024-05-22
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