they are trying to retain some
This makes me wonder if a decentralised, anyone-can-host-it third-party bridge that's only a bridge would be feasible.
Of course, it'd be the easiest to integrate such a bridge directly into Fediverse server software. But we've only got so many multi-protocol Fediverse server applications right now already, and the only one that's still occasionally adding new protocols or even a bridge is Friendica. It is therefore the only Fediverse server software that can connect to Bluesky without Bridgy Fed.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # #Looooong day
It says a lot that the character limit of 500 is hard-coded. It is not configurable. Digging into the source and modifying a file that'll be overwritten by git upon the next upgrade is not configuration, it's a fork. Also, Mastodon apparently keeps changing the way of raising the character limit, probably to keep admins from diverging from The Mastodon Way.
There is no technological reason within the Fediverse itself to limit posts to this length.
The software that I'm posting through is older than Mastodon by almost four years. It has been what it is now for ten months longer than Mastodon has existed. It was the first Fediverse software to adopt ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And, unlike Mastodon, it plays ActivityPub by the book as far as possible/feasible.
Still, it has a character limit of, wait for it, 16,777,215. That's the maximum size of the database field for the post text. These characters include alt-texts because images are embedded into posts by hotlinking to them rather than being file attachments, but they do not include summaries (= Mastodon CWs) because they've got their own database field.
Not only is it possible to practically not have a character limit at all, but it has actually been done, and it's fully compatible with Mastodon (only that Mastodon rejects posts with over 100,000 characters AFAIK, another arbitrary design decision which makes even less sense).
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # And yet, my long alt-texts are actually only the much shorter ones out of two descriptions for the same image. The long description always easily exceeds 1,000 words by far.
The only exception is when I post a meme. But even then I provide explanations in the post. If I can link to explanations, I do so. This is always the case with the meme templates themselves I simply link to KnowYourMeme. But as for the topic, if I can't link to explanations there, I have to give explanations in the post itself. I also have to explain how the template relates to the topic.
, I explained everything in the post itself. My impression was and still is that especially Mastodon users vastly prefer being explained stuff in the post to having to open links. So I gave a whole of nine explanations on up to four levels (= explaining an explanation of an explanation of an explanation) which took up some 25,000 characters.
I'm still torn between this notion and the one I got from a poll after this post. In that poll, not only did I ask people how and where they prefer explanations, but I also skewed the poll by estimating how many characters each variant would mean. The vast majority noped out when they read that a full set of explanations that wouldn't have them look up anything themselves would mean well over 10,000 characters.
My current guess is that at least a lot of people do want everything explained right in the post, but only until I directly confront them with how long these explanations would end up.
So for meme posts, my choice is to link where I can and explain what I can't link to, . For original images, my choice is to explain everything myself, partly because there is hardly anything I can link to anyway, partly because the visual description already grows so massive that 10,000+ characters of explanation don't make that much of a difference.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
I tend to describe my original images in extremely high details. Recently (for any definition of "recently" because I haven't posted a single image in over a year due to the huge effort of describing them), my alt-texts tend to reach 1,500 characters or one or a few below that. At least ca. 900 characters are actual image descriptions, sometimes up to ca. 1,400.
And that's what I consider a "short" description. Because the rest of the alt-text explains where to find the "long" description. It's in the post itself. It includes verbatim transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not. And it includes all explanations which I deem necessary for everyone to understand my images.
This long description exceeds any known arbitrarily defined character limit anywhere in the Fediverse by magnitudes. I can post such long image descriptions because the only character limit I have here on Hubzilla is the maximum size of the database field for the post text.
Yes, you've read that right. I describe each one of my original images twice.
And I must write my image descriptions that long. I don't post real-life photos, nor do I post social media screen shots. I post renderings from extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Maybe one in 200,000 Fediverse users has even only heard of the technology that drives them.
Thus, I cannot assume anything in my images to be familiar to anyone out there. I can't assume that anyone out there knows what anything in my images looks like, also because my images tend to contain things which simply do not exist in real life in any shape or form.
At the same time, my impression is that especially Mastodon users expect all information which they don't have to be served on a silver platter immediately with the image description. If you mention something in your image, and somebody doesn't know what it looks like, you're obliged to describe it right away. Expecting anyone to ask you anything about your image after the fact feels like being considered ableist. I mean, you could just as well expect people to ask you to describe the whole image in the first place, right
Same goes for explanations. Given the choice between looking stuff up themselves, being given links where they can look stuff up and being explained everything right there, right then, Mastodon users appear to greatly prefer the latter and only consider the latter really accessible.
And I have to explain a lot. When I tell you where I've taken an image, this alone takes me more characters than some of you use for a whole day's worth of alt-texts. The whole topic is so obscure that I have to explain explanations of explanations.
My personal record (warning: technically outdated image descriptions): . That's about 10,000 words. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the image descriptions. It takes a screen reader about three hours to read the long description out loud. But someone somewhere out there might be interested in all this information and displeased if they had to ask me about it to get it.
As for bilinguality, I should add to my WIP wiki on image descriptions and alt-texts that an alt-text must never include more than one image because screen readers cannot switch between languages mid-alt-text.
What I do, and I'm not even sure if that's such a good idea, is transcribe text in images that is not in English verbatim, literally letter by letter, and then translate it into English as closely as possible. I'm torn between a verbatim transcript which a screen reader cannot read out correctly and only giving a translation which would not be a verbatim transcript.
In fact, I've once had a situation in which I had to transcribe a sign in English, (broken) German and French. So I gave
Nowadays, I'd simply avoid posting images with non-English text anywhere in it like the plague.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # Important:
That's because . And those who can't can never read the extra stuff you've put into your alt-text. It's lost to them.
If you need more than 500 characters, you should instead
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Something that next to nobody knows:
You must never make information available only in the alt-text!
Not everyone can access alt-text. To access alt-text, it requires either a screen reader (which sighted people don't have) or at least one working hand.
If you have something to explain or any other information that is not available in/obvious from the image itself, this information goes into the post where everyone can access it.
Here are two articles in my (very early WIP) wiki on image descriptions and alt-text:
# # # # # # # # #
So I stand corrected: If you do use a title, and you haven't changed that part of the configuration of your account, then Mastodon will not show the title, but it will show the abstract and a link to your original Friendica post.
If you don't use a title, Mastodon will show your post itself. But it may "sanitise" as in deface it, e.g. only four images and only as file attachments instead of way more images strewn about your post. It will use your abstract as a CW. And Mastodon fundamentalists may mute or block or criticise or attack or dogpile you for having the audacity to send "long" posts with over 500 characters to Mastodon.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You've got two modes on Friendica.
Default behaviour:
Optionally, Friendica can be configured to always send everything as Note-type objects. If Mastodon shows all your posts, even those with titles, this is probably how you've configured your Friendica account.
Now, until recently, when you sent an Article-type object, Mastodon showed
With the recent change, Mastodon shows
The idea has always been that Mastodon leaves it to Friendica (or wherever an Article-type object comes from) to render the post in all its glory, with a title and text formatting and embedded images and so forth. But Mastodon was criticised for only giving a title as a preview for Article-type objects, just as it's still being criticised for largely defacing formatted long-form posts that come in as Note-type objects.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Okay, while this is not optimal, I'd say it comes close enough to an improvement to be of importance.
Some of us know what it's like to send Article-type objects (and long-form content should always be these according to the ActivityPub spec) to Mastodon. Now, Mastodon's handling of long-form content has changed, believe it or not. Something that neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) nor Forte could ever achieve happened under pressure from Flipboard (commercial player), Ghost (quickly growing Substack alternative that's trying to attract professional and commercial users), Automattic (the owner of WordPress) and NodeBB (fairly big bulletin-board forum player that added ActivityPub a while ago).
So much I should say in advance: No, Mastodon does not fully render Article-type objects in their full HTML-formatted glory from the title to dozens of embedded images. Mastodon's own Web interface isn't geared towards that, and neither is any Mastodon app, official or third-party.
Instead, Mastodon still handles Article-type objects by linking to the original like it used to. But it used to show only the title if there was one. If there was no title, all that Mastodon showed was a plain URL. If there was a summary, Mastodon did as Mastodon always does and has been done since 2017, regarded it as a content warning and hid the whole "post" with the title (if there was one) and the link behind it.
What Mastodon does now is finally acknowledge that some software out there actually uses the summary field as a summary field. The preview with the link to the original now also contains the summary, along with the title. If there is either, of course.
So if you're on something that can send or always sends Article-type objects (specialised blogging software, Friendica, (streams), Forte), it's well worth adding a summary to those posts that go out as Article-type objects.
(Speaking of Friendica: Dear Friendica users, please substitute any use of "summary" in this post with "abstract" if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
The difference is devs got together and pushed for changes, and got them done. Mastodon no longer treats articles the way they used to.
Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
The long form text FEP aims to provide a way to send an alternative representation for the ubiquitous microblog software on the fediverse, in the form of a note, while still maintaining the use of other objects types (e.g. article)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Who are the longformers anyway
They're those who either are commercial or looking for professional/commercial users or both. Flipboard. Automattic (WordPress). Ghost. These kinds.
They know themselves. They know each other. And they know Mastodon. And that's it.
None of them has ever heard of Pleroma or Akkoma.
None of them has ever heard of Misskey or the Forkeys.
None of them has ever heard of Mitra.
None of them has ever heard of GoToSocial.
None of them has ever heard of Hollo.
None of them has ever heard of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte, even though Friendica and Hubzilla are both older than Mastodon. And apparently, neither has . But then again, Friendica and its nomadic, security-enhanced descendants are being overlooked by almost everyone. That's why there's always on-going work for features to be "introduced to the Fediverse" which Friendica has had for a decade and a half.
Granted, the HTML support on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can be summarised with "yes". But elaborate tables that show what either of them supports how would be very useful.
Also, granted, everything I've mentioned above (normally) uses something else than HTML for formatting in the frontend. For example, Misskey and all Forkeys use MFM ("Misskey-Flavoured Markdown"). Friendica uses extended BBcode with the option to use Markdown instead. Hubzilla uses even more extended BBcode. (streams) and Forte can use the same even more extended BBcode and Markdown and HTML at the same time within the same post, although not all markup languages support all features.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Mastodon has misused summaries for content warnings since someone from the demo scene sent in a PR for Mastodon to do so in 2017.
So this means that Mastodon stopped doing so on Article-type objects and actually regards summaries as summaries and handles them accordingly instead
And when and with which version was this rolled out
Or did Mastodon insist in the creation of yet another text field which has to be rolled out to all macroblogging and long-form blogging server applications Even though ActivityPub does have a perfectly good summary field, only that Mastodon uses it for CWs
Although I must say that the step from displaying Article-type objects as title (if there is any) + link to displaying them as title (if there is any) + summary (if there is any) + link is not that big. Mobile users who see their Web browsers popping up as a nuisance will still ignore your content.
On the other hand, this does not only appease Eugen Rochko, the Lord and Creator of the Fediverse and all of its technology (according to the Gospel of Mastodon, anyway), but also those Mastodonians who demand there must not be any posts with over 500 characters in the Fediverse, and who immediately block everyone who exceeds 500 characters even only once even on the federated timeline.
Besides, there is still "long-form", multiple-paragraph content going out as Note-type objects. In general, I guess that comments always go out as Note-type objects.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Friendica and its descendants from the same creator, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, can produce long-form content just fine. With just about all bells and whistles from a title plus six levels of headlines to an unlimited number of images embedded within the text.
So yes, they can display it as well. However, outside of their own communities, hardly anyone knows what they're capable of. Thus, Fediverse developers often try to solve problems that aren't even really there because they were solved before they became problems.
Mastodon's lack of support for articles, linking to the originals instead, is not really a lack. It's a deliberate design decision from around 2017 or so.
See, the first ActivityPub implementation was on Hubzilla. That was in July, 2017. And Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub by the book.
Mastodon followed two months later. But Mastodon has always had its own "interpretation" of ActivityPub that was limited by Mastodon's own intentional design limitations in order to remain Twitter-like, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging with as few features that Twitter didn't have as possible.
This is also why Mastodon has a HTML "sanitiser" built in. Up until the release of Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022, that "sanitiser" reduced any and all incoming HTML to plain text. And it did so for all object types, including the Article-type objects which Hubzilla sent. After all, Hubzilla can act as a fully-fledged long-form blogging platform.
However, the ActivityPub spec defines Article-type objects as formatted long-form content. Still, Mastodon defaced Hubzilla's Article-type objects by reducing them to plain text.
So Mike Macgirvin got into contact with Eugen Rochko and told him to adhere to the spec and deactivate Mastodon's "sanitiser" and make it support full HTML rendering for Article-type objects.
And Eugen Rochko said that bold type and italics and bullet-point lists and images in the middle of the content have nothing to do with old-school microblogging, so they have no place on Mastodon, so he won't implement them.
This head-butting went back and forth. Eventually, Eugen presented a "solution". And that was not to render Article-type objects at all anymore. Instead, Mastodon links to them and adds their title above if they have one.
This was only done to shut Mike up so he'd stop complaining about Mastodon defacing Hubzilla posts and breaking the spec by doing so. From Mike's perspective, however, what Eugen did was flip Hubzilla the bird by completely refusing to show actual Hubzilla content and practically lock out a competitor.
Mike's reaction was to break the spec himself and switch Hubzilla from sending Article-type objects to sending Note-type objects, regardless of Mastodon still defacing them.
With the exception of a very short period after the release of Hubzilla 9.0 when Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsend learned the hard way that Mastodon still links to Article-type objects, Hubzilla has only sent its posts as Note-type objects ever since.
Mike's other creations have different ways of handling object types.
Friendica, by default, sends posts with titles as Article-type objects and posts without titles as well as comments as Note-type objects. This can be deactivated so that Friendica only sends Note-type objects.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
In at least one case, this goes all the way to classic, non-attachment "hair". That's probably because it has never been possible to recreate that individual look with a hair attachment, much less with a mesh body, a mesh head and mesh hair. The owner was the main tech in Metropolis before he left the sinking ship for OSgrid. That was around 2021, and yet, he styled his OSgrid avatar just like his Metro avatar.
In at least one more case, the hair is only a hairbase, and the avatar has never worn any attachments AFAIK. The owner seems to strongly oppose the idea of styling avatars, at least he doesn't understand why people do that, and I think he has only got that one avatar.
# # # # # # # # #Interesting stuff to see there.
On the one hand, Morning Glory shows a kind of beach house scene, very simple, built entirely from tinted prims with no textures, no transparency or anything. It's kind of reminiscent of screenshots from other virtual worlds. It's cute in a certain way, not to mention easy on your graphics hardware
On the other hand, ' display includes a working mirror, thanks to PBR. Of course, this requires dedicated graphics hardware.
# # # # # # # # # # #
However: The music of the first half matches the location. In other words, Schlager. Probably mostly from the 1970s. The first DJ has opened with four Chris Roberts songs.
What really gives me to think is that even has announced "Schlager" for the second half. Whatever that means in her case.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Aber die Bilder enthalten beide Augenkontakt. Und ich habe hier von Hubzilla aus keinerlei Mglichkeit, dafr zu sorgen, da die Bilder auf Mastodon ausgeblendet werden. Ich wrde potentiell haufenweise Leute damit triggern.
Also versuche ich es mal so in der Hoffnung, da Mastodon keine Linkvorschauen mit Bildern generiert.
Originaler Alt-Text:
Originaler Alt-Text:
Gemeinsame Langbeschreibung beider Bilder (ging in den Post direkt unter die Bilder):
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Wenn du Bildbeschreibungen so kritisch betrachtest, htte ich gern deine ehrliche Meinung zu meinem letzten Bilderpost, der jetzt auch schon wieder fast ein Jahr her sein drfte. Wrdest du sagen, die Bilder sind hinreichend detailliert und akkurat beschrieben, oder fehlt dir da etwas
Vorab: Das ist kein Mastodon-Trt, aber trotzdem ein Post im Fediverse, der auch nach Mastodon gekommen ist. Und er ist sehr lang.
Er enthlt zwei Bilder, die ich jeweils zweimal beschrieben habe: einmal "kurz" im Alt-Text, einmal sehr viel lnger und detaillierter mit Text-Transkripten im Post selbst inklusive einer gemeinsamen Prambel fr beide Beschreibungen, die auch alle ntigen Erklrungen enthlt.
Das Original findest du . Da wirst du erst die Zusammenfassung nebst Inhaltswarnung ffnen mssen, dann nach unten scrollen bzw. den Post ausklappen, dann ein Spoiler-Tag mit zustzlicher Inhaltswarnung ffnen, um die Bilder sehen zu knnen.
Wenn du an einem Computer bist, werden die Alt-Texte ganz klassisch angezeigt, wenn du den Mauscursor auf eins der Bilder schiebst. Was Smartphones oder Tablets angeht, bin ich berfragt.
Alternativ kannst du dir den Post ansehen auf Mastodons Weboberflche, indem du suchst. Da ist es dann der dritte Post von unten.
Du solltest sehr viel Zeit mitbringen. Der Alt-Text des ersten Bildes ist 1.500 Zeichen lang, der des zweiten Bildes 1.499, und die langen Beschreibungen messen insgesamt ber 20.000 Zeichen.
Ich arbeite seit Ende letzten Jahres immer mal wieder an den Bildbeschreibungen fr eine Reihe von Portraitbildern. Ich habe mich auch schon und . Trotzdem htte ich gern die eine oder andere Meinung zu meinen Bildbeschreibungen. Falls ich irgendwelche Fehler gemacht habe oder irgendwo nachlssig war, will ich das nicht wiederholen.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I'm trying to fulfill all image description requirements to a tee or even be way ahead of them anyway. That is, only as far as I can (it's often technically impossible to transcribe all bits of text within the borders of my original images verbatim in alt-text without exceeding the 1,500-character limit, much less keep the alt-text short, so text transcripts almost always only land in the additional long description in the post itself) and unless they contradict each other.
But seriously, I've only got exactly one image post which I don't consider so outdated that I have to warn people about how outdated it is. And that post isn't even on this channel. But I'm not going to upgrade all my image posts whenever I learn something new about describing images.
Also, I don't expect people to put more effort into image descriptions than I do. In fact, I couldn't seriously expect anyone to put my own amounts of effort into image descriptions because because that isn't even justified in most cases.
# # # # # # # # # # # There isn't much that we can do.
These standards, just like the various laws that triggered their creation, suppose that all social networks and social media are
For comparison, Hubzilla probably shows what's the best the Fediverse can do. It has an optional field for new registrations to confirm that they're over a certain age.
However, almost all Hubzilla hubs have a "staff" of exactly one. A hobbyist. Unlike Mastodon servers, Hubzilla hubs don't even have moderators because Hubzilla is all about self-empowerment and self-moderation.
Is that one admin honestly expected to verify the authenticity of the IDs and the birth certificates of newly-registrated users with the authorities in almost 200 different nations
There used to be a time when such regulations only applied to services from a certain size upward or from a certain revenue upward. But now something that can only be done by big corporations becomes mandatory for tiny hobbyist projects.
Besides, how are these measures supposed to keep 13-year-olds from spinning up their own single-user Fediverse servers on machines at home If this is supposed to be absolutely, 100% guaranteed to be absolutely, 100% water-tight, the two Hubzilla devs would have to check and verify the identity of everyone who wants set up their own hub before they allow the git-based installer to clone the repository from Framagit onto their servers.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # #
Of course, it'd be the easiest to integrate such a bridge directly into Fediverse server software. But we've only got so many multi-protocol Fediverse server applications right now already, and the only one that's still occasionally adding new protocols or even a bridge is Friendica. It is therefore the only Fediverse server software that can connect to Bluesky without Bridgy Fed.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # #Looooong day
they are trying to retain some relevancy but their licensing is bad compared to other options - they are trying to stay a 'frontier' model when really everybody wants local agi not agi in the cloud - its gonna be 10 years though for things to really really change for better or worse game
Yup. Mastodon clings hard to being purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. It's a miracle actually that Mastodon 4.0, released in October, 2022, introduced the displaying of some text formatting.It says a lot that the character limit of 500 is hard-coded. It is not configurable. Digging into the source and modifying a file that'll be overwritten by git upon the next upgrade is not configuration, it's a fork. Also, Mastodon apparently keeps changing the way of raising the character limit, probably to keep admins from diverging from The Mastodon Way.
There is no technological reason within the Fediverse itself to limit posts to this length.
The software that I'm posting through is older than Mastodon by almost four years. It has been what it is now for ten months longer than Mastodon has existed. It was the first Fediverse software to adopt ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And, unlike Mastodon, it plays ActivityPub by the book as far as possible/feasible.
Still, it has a character limit of, wait for it, 16,777,215. That's the maximum size of the database field for the post text. These characters include alt-texts because images are embedded into posts by hotlinking to them rather than being file attachments, but they do not include summaries (= Mastodon CWs) because they've got their own database field.
Not only is it possible to practically not have a character limit at all, but it has actually been done, and it's fully compatible with Mastodon (only that Mastodon rejects posts with over 100,000 characters AFAIK, another arbitrary design decision which makes even less sense).
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # And yet, my long alt-texts are actually only the much shorter ones out of two descriptions for the same image. The long description always easily exceeds 1,000 words by far.
The only exception is when I post a meme. But even then I provide explanations in the post. If I can link to explanations, I do so. This is always the case with the meme templates themselves I simply link to KnowYourMeme. But as for the topic, if I can't link to explanations there, I have to give explanations in the post itself. I also have to explain how the template relates to the topic.
, I explained everything in the post itself. My impression was and still is that especially Mastodon users vastly prefer being explained stuff in the post to having to open links. So I gave a whole of nine explanations on up to four levels (= explaining an explanation of an explanation of an explanation) which took up some 25,000 characters.
I'm still torn between this notion and the one I got from a poll after this post. In that poll, not only did I ask people how and where they prefer explanations, but I also skewed the poll by estimating how many characters each variant would mean. The vast majority noped out when they read that a full set of explanations that wouldn't have them look up anything themselves would mean well over 10,000 characters.
My current guess is that at least a lot of people do want everything explained right in the post, but only until I directly confront them with how long these explanations would end up.
So for meme posts, my choice is to link where I can and explain what I can't link to, . For original images, my choice is to explain everything myself, partly because there is hardly anything I can link to anyway, partly because the visual description already grows so massive that 10,000+ characters of explanation don't make that much of a difference.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Warriors playmaker Te Maire Martin decides NRL future, in against-the-odds move
Its quite a turnaround. Earlier this season it looked like Martin would almost certainly depart at the end
I tend to describe my original images in extremely high details. Recently (for any definition of "recently" because I haven't posted a single image in over a year due to the huge effort of describing them), my alt-texts tend to reach 1,500 characters or one or a few below that. At least ca. 900 characters are actual image descriptions, sometimes up to ca. 1,400.
And that's what I consider a "short" description. Because the rest of the alt-text explains where to find the "long" description. It's in the post itself. It includes verbatim transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not. And it includes all explanations which I deem necessary for everyone to understand my images.
This long description exceeds any known arbitrarily defined character limit anywhere in the Fediverse by magnitudes. I can post such long image descriptions because the only character limit I have here on Hubzilla is the maximum size of the database field for the post text.
Yes, you've read that right. I describe each one of my original images twice.
And I must write my image descriptions that long. I don't post real-life photos, nor do I post social media screen shots. I post renderings from extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Maybe one in 200,000 Fediverse users has even only heard of the technology that drives them.
Thus, I cannot assume anything in my images to be familiar to anyone out there. I can't assume that anyone out there knows what anything in my images looks like, also because my images tend to contain things which simply do not exist in real life in any shape or form.
At the same time, my impression is that especially Mastodon users expect all information which they don't have to be served on a silver platter immediately with the image description. If you mention something in your image, and somebody doesn't know what it looks like, you're obliged to describe it right away. Expecting anyone to ask you anything about your image after the fact feels like being considered ableist. I mean, you could just as well expect people to ask you to describe the whole image in the first place, right
Same goes for explanations. Given the choice between looking stuff up themselves, being given links where they can look stuff up and being explained everything right there, right then, Mastodon users appear to greatly prefer the latter and only consider the latter really accessible.
And I have to explain a lot. When I tell you where I've taken an image, this alone takes me more characters than some of you use for a whole day's worth of alt-texts. The whole topic is so obscure that I have to explain explanations of explanations.
My personal record (warning: technically outdated image descriptions): . That's about 10,000 words. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the image descriptions. It takes a screen reader about three hours to read the long description out loud. But someone somewhere out there might be interested in all this information and displeased if they had to ask me about it to get it.
As for bilinguality, I should add to my WIP wiki on image descriptions and alt-texts that an alt-text must never include more than one image because screen readers cannot switch between languages mid-alt-text.
What I do, and I'm not even sure if that's such a good idea, is transcribe text in images that is not in English verbatim, literally letter by letter, and then translate it into English as closely as possible. I'm torn between a verbatim transcript which a screen reader cannot read out correctly and only giving a translation which would not be a verbatim transcript.
In fact, I've once had a situation in which I had to transcribe a sign in English, (broken) German and French. So I gave
- a 100% verbatim transcript of the English text
- a 100% verbatim transcript of the German text, all mistakes included
- an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible
- a 100% verbatim transcript of the French text
- an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible
Nowadays, I'd simply avoid posting images with non-English text anywhere in it like the plague.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # Important:
That's because . And those who can't can never read the extra stuff you've put into your alt-text. It's lost to them.
If you need more than 500 characters, you should instead
- move to a Mastodon server with a higher character limit
- move to Misskey
3,000 characters (hard-coded)
fully federated with Mastodon - move to a Misskey fork like Sharkey
thousands of characters (configurable by admin without hacking into the source code)
fully federated with Mastodon - move to Pleroma or Akkoma
5,000 characters (configurable by admin without hacking into the source code)
fully federated with Mastodon - move to Friendica
16,777,215 characters (database field size)
fully federated with Mastodon - move to Hubzilla
16,777,215 characters (database field size)
optionally fully federated with Mastodon - move to (streams) or Forte
> 24,000,000 characters (database field size)
fully federated with Mastodon
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Alt text for calling out the relevant details you mistakenly assume are obvious to everyone
Alt text for explaining the joke to people that don't have the same background as you
Alt text for the 10,000 people learning something "everyone knows" for the first time today
Something that next to nobody knows:
You must never make information available only in the alt-text!
Not everyone can access alt-text. To access alt-text, it requires either a screen reader (which sighted people don't have) or at least one working hand.
If you have something to explain or any other information that is not available in/obvious from the image itself, this information goes into the post where everyone can access it.
Here are two articles in my (very early WIP) wiki on image descriptions and alt-text:
# # # # # # # # #
Teen boy housed in Tauranga motel by Oranga Tamariki for more than a year
During that year, Oranga Tamariki sent *Cody on a state-funded trip to a Pacific Island, with his now-estranged
So I stand corrected: If you do use a title, and you haven't changed that part of the configuration of your account, then Mastodon will not show the title, but it will show the abstract and a link to your original Friendica post.
If you don't use a title, Mastodon will show your post itself. But it may "sanitise" as in deface it, e.g. only four images and only as file attachments instead of way more images strewn about your post. It will use your abstract as a CW. And Mastodon fundamentalists may mute or block or criticise or attack or dogpile you for having the audacity to send "long" posts with over 500 characters to Mastodon.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # You've got two modes on Friendica.
Default behaviour:
- Post with title = Article-type object = Mastodon will show the title + a link to the original.
- Post without title, comment = Note-type object = Mastodon will show the post itself, but greatly deface it (no title, no embedded images, no tables etc. etc.).
Optionally, Friendica can be configured to always send everything as Note-type objects. If Mastodon shows all your posts, even those with titles, this is probably how you've configured your Friendica account.
Now, until recently, when you sent an Article-type object, Mastodon showed
- the title
- a link to your original post on Friendica
With the recent change, Mastodon shows
- the title
- the abstract if you give one (this is new)
- a link to your original post on Friendica
The idea has always been that Mastodon leaves it to Friendica (or wherever an Article-type object comes from) to render the post in all its glory, with a title and text formatting and embedded images and so forth. But Mastodon was criticised for only giving a title as a preview for Article-type objects, just as it's still being criticised for largely defacing formatted long-form posts that come in as Note-type objects.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Okay, while this is not optimal, I'd say it comes close enough to an improvement to be of importance.
Some of us know what it's like to send Article-type objects (and long-form content should always be these according to the ActivityPub spec) to Mastodon. Now, Mastodon's handling of long-form content has changed, believe it or not. Something that neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) nor Forte could ever achieve happened under pressure from Flipboard (commercial player), Ghost (quickly growing Substack alternative that's trying to attract professional and commercial users), Automattic (the owner of WordPress) and NodeBB (fairly big bulletin-board forum player that added ActivityPub a while ago).
So much I should say in advance: No, Mastodon does not fully render Article-type objects in their full HTML-formatted glory from the title to dozens of embedded images. Mastodon's own Web interface isn't geared towards that, and neither is any Mastodon app, official or third-party.
Instead, Mastodon still handles Article-type objects by linking to the original like it used to. But it used to show only the title if there was one. If there was no title, all that Mastodon showed was a plain URL. If there was a summary, Mastodon did as Mastodon always does and has been done since 2017, regarded it as a content warning and hid the whole "post" with the title (if there was one) and the link behind it.
What Mastodon does now is finally acknowledge that some software out there actually uses the summary field as a summary field. The preview with the link to the original now also contains the summary, along with the title. If there is either, of course.
So if you're on something that can send or always sends Article-type objects (specialised blogging software, Friendica, (streams), Forte), it's well worth adding a summary to those posts that go out as Article-type objects.
(Speaking of Friendica: Dear Friendica users, please substitute any use of "summary" in this post with "abstract" if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
Re: Long-form articles
The long form content "movement" (of which I'm adjacent to but not fully involved) started up because two big implementors, Ghost and WordPress, were running into the same issues AP devs have been seeing this whole time, that Mastodon reduces articles to a title and link.The difference is devs got together and pushed for changes, and got them done. Mastodon no longer treats articles the way they used to.
Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
The long form text FEP aims to provide a way to send an alternative representation for the ubiquitous microblog software on the fediverse, in the form of a note, while still maintaining the use of other objects types (e.g. article)
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Who are the longformers anyway
They're those who either are commercial or looking for professional/commercial users or both. Flipboard. Automattic (WordPress). Ghost. These kinds.
They know themselves. They know each other. And they know Mastodon. And that's it.
None of them has ever heard of Pleroma or Akkoma.
None of them has ever heard of Misskey or the Forkeys.
None of them has ever heard of Mitra.
None of them has ever heard of GoToSocial.
None of them has ever heard of Hollo.
None of them has ever heard of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte, even though Friendica and Hubzilla are both older than Mastodon. And apparently, neither has . But then again, Friendica and its nomadic, security-enhanced descendants are being overlooked by almost everyone. That's why there's always on-going work for features to be "introduced to the Fediverse" which Friendica has had for a decade and a half.
Granted, the HTML support on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can be summarised with "yes". But elaborate tables that show what either of them supports how would be very useful.
Also, granted, everything I've mentioned above (normally) uses something else than HTML for formatting in the frontend. For example, Misskey and all Forkeys use MFM ("Misskey-Flavoured Markdown"). Friendica uses extended BBcode with the option to use Markdown instead. Hubzilla uses even more extended BBcode. (streams) and Forte can use the same even more extended BBcode and Markdown and HTML at the same time within the same post, although not all markup languages support all features.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
Mastodon has misused summaries for content warnings since someone from the demo scene sent in a PR for Mastodon to do so in 2017.
So this means that Mastodon stopped doing so on Article-type objects and actually regards summaries as summaries and handles them accordingly instead
And when and with which version was this rolled out
Or did Mastodon insist in the creation of yet another text field which has to be rolled out to all macroblogging and long-form blogging server applications Even though ActivityPub does have a perfectly good summary field, only that Mastodon uses it for CWs
Although I must say that the step from displaying Article-type objects as title (if there is any) + link to displaying them as title (if there is any) + summary (if there is any) + link is not that big. Mobile users who see their Web browsers popping up as a nuisance will still ignore your content.
On the other hand, this does not only appease Eugen Rochko, the Lord and Creator of the Fediverse and all of its technology (according to the Gospel of Mastodon, anyway), but also those Mastodonians who demand there must not be any posts with over 500 characters in the Fediverse, and who immediately block everyone who exceeds 500 characters even only once even on the federated timeline.
Besides, there is still "long-form", multiple-paragraph content going out as Note-type objects. In general, I guess that comments always go out as Note-type objects.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
The dataset doesn't include some other popular platforms like Friendica, but I am sure they also display long form content just fine.
Friendica and its descendants from the same creator, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, can produce long-form content just fine. With just about all bells and whistles from a title plus six levels of headlines to an unlimited number of images embedded within the text.
So yes, they can display it as well. However, outside of their own communities, hardly anyone knows what they're capable of. Thus, Fediverse developers often try to solve problems that aren't even really there because they were solved before they became problems.
Mastodon's lack of support for articles, linking to the originals instead, is not really a lack. It's a deliberate design decision from around 2017 or so.
See, the first ActivityPub implementation was on Hubzilla. That was in July, 2017. And Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub by the book.
Mastodon followed two months later. But Mastodon has always had its own "interpretation" of ActivityPub that was limited by Mastodon's own intentional design limitations in order to remain Twitter-like, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging with as few features that Twitter didn't have as possible.
This is also why Mastodon has a HTML "sanitiser" built in. Up until the release of Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022, that "sanitiser" reduced any and all incoming HTML to plain text. And it did so for all object types, including the Article-type objects which Hubzilla sent. After all, Hubzilla can act as a fully-fledged long-form blogging platform.
However, the ActivityPub spec defines Article-type objects as formatted long-form content. Still, Mastodon defaced Hubzilla's Article-type objects by reducing them to plain text.
So Mike Macgirvin got into contact with Eugen Rochko and told him to adhere to the spec and deactivate Mastodon's "sanitiser" and make it support full HTML rendering for Article-type objects.
And Eugen Rochko said that bold type and italics and bullet-point lists and images in the middle of the content have nothing to do with old-school microblogging, so they have no place on Mastodon, so he won't implement them.
This head-butting went back and forth. Eventually, Eugen presented a "solution". And that was not to render Article-type objects at all anymore. Instead, Mastodon links to them and adds their title above if they have one.
This was only done to shut Mike up so he'd stop complaining about Mastodon defacing Hubzilla posts and breaking the spec by doing so. From Mike's perspective, however, what Eugen did was flip Hubzilla the bird by completely refusing to show actual Hubzilla content and practically lock out a competitor.
Mike's reaction was to break the spec himself and switch Hubzilla from sending Article-type objects to sending Note-type objects, regardless of Mastodon still defacing them.
With the exception of a very short period after the release of Hubzilla 9.0 when Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsend learned the hard way that Mastodon still links to Article-type objects, Hubzilla has only sent its posts as Note-type objects ever since.
Mike's other creations have different ways of handling object types.
Friendica, by default, sends posts with titles as Article-type objects and posts without titles as well as comments as Note-type objects. This can be deactivated so that Friendica only sends Note-type objects.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
<>
Currently getting a few streams on - the version of
Cardinals left tackle Paris Johnson Jr. hopes to take teachings from Bengals great Willie Anderson and reach elite status
The 15-year-old was exhausted, sitting beneath the tree next to the field at a high school in Atlanta,
-NewsHeadlines -Form .
Always on the trade block, never traded: How long will Walker Kessler be with the Utah Jazz
Gli algoritmi di trading AI stanno facendo cartello sui mercati finanziari
Connection is key for Patriots new punter-long snapper pairing
In its essence, football is a game of connection. Whether it is actual physical connection on the field,
-page -england-patriots-media-transcripts-statements-interviews -england-patriots-training-camp
Sidney Crosby kicking off long 2025-26 season later this month with Team Canada
Long hair Persian cat Grooming at home.
Because of their lavish coat, Persians are a one-of-a-kind and desirable breed.
A Long-Term Appraisal of the New Jersey Devils Defenders
I know quite a few avatars that seem not to have changed much since they first showed up, and that was before mesh became a thing.In at least one case, this goes all the way to classic, non-attachment "hair". That's probably because it has never been possible to recreate that individual look with a hair attachment, much less with a mesh body, a mesh head and mesh hair. The owner was the main tech in Metropolis before he left the sinking ship for OSgrid. That was around 2021, and yet, he styled his OSgrid avatar just like his Metro avatar.
In at least one more case, the hair is only a hairbase, and the avatar has never worn any attachments AFAIK. The owner seems to strongly oppose the idea of styling avatars, at least he doesn't understand why people do that, and I think he has only got that one avatar.
# # # # # # # # #Interesting stuff to see there.
On the one hand, Morning Glory shows a kind of beach house scene, very simple, built entirely from tinted prims with no textures, no transparency or anything. It's kind of reminiscent of screenshots from other virtual worlds. It's cute in a certain way, not to mention easy on your graphics hardware
On the other hand, ' display includes a working mirror, thanks to PBR. Of course, this requires dedicated graphics hardware.
# # # # # # # # # # #
Commission for RKosh
Art by Me
However: The music of the first half matches the location. In other words, Schlager. Probably mostly from the 1970s. The first DJ has opened with four Chris Roberts songs.
What really gives me to think is that even has announced "Schlager" for the second half. Whatever that means in her case.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Rockets are making a long-awaited return to the NBA Playoffs
NBAs 11 worst long-term team outlooks, ranked by who has the bleakest future
NBAs 11 worst long-term team outlooks, ranked by who has the bleakest future
HELLO EVERYONE!!!!! ITS BEEN SOOOOOOO LONG!!!!!!!
Long story on how i learned this rule bur yall should know it
Ich knnte sie auch hier und jetzt in einer Antwort posten mitsamt Alt-Texten.Aber die Bilder enthalten beide Augenkontakt. Und ich habe hier von Hubzilla aus keinerlei Mglichkeit, dafr zu sorgen, da die Bilder auf Mastodon ausgeblendet werden. Ich wrde potentiell haufenweise Leute damit triggern.
Also versuche ich es mal so in der Hoffnung, da Mastodon keine Linkvorschauen mit Bildern generiert.
Originaler Alt-Text:
Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin, brown eyes and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top with the logo of the 17th birthday of OSgrid on it, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace with the OSgrid logo. The OSgrid logo is made up from five identical parallelograms arranged in a circular, star-like pattern. It is also part of the birthday logo which is mostly two tones of yellowish orange. The writing on the birthday logo reads, from top to bottom, OSgrid, The Open Source Metaverse and 17th Birthday. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.
Originaler Alt-Text:
Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace. She is looking at the cover of the Leonard Cohen album Recent Songs on a white easel. The cover is a painting of the musician's face. He is shown to be a middle-aged man with light skin, green eyes and black hair in a black shirt. A hummingbird is drawn hovering above his shoulder to the left. The background is medium blue. Cohen's name and the album title are written in the top corners. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.
Gemeinsame Langbeschreibung beider Bilder (ging in den Post direkt unter die Bilder):
Image descriptions
The medium and the basic setup
Both images in this post are digital renderings from inside a 3-D virtual world, using shaders, simplified real-time reflections and an artificial sun as a directed light source for illuminating the scenery and casting shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows a digital avatar made to look like a fairly young woman. In the first image, she is standing at the end of a wooden pier. In the second image, she is standing next to a painted portrait of Leonard Cohen which he has used as an album cover.The locations
The images were created in two different places in OSgrid, known as sims. Both are linked to the 17th anniversary of OSgrid which is celebrated from July 22th to July 28th, 2024.
OSgrid is a virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on a virtual-world engine named OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life. It is not affiliated with Linden Lab, the creators and owners of Second Life.
Second Life is a centralised, commercial 3-D virtual world launched in 2003. It experienced a big hype starting in 2007 which faded away in 2008. It still exists, it is constantly evolving, and it is celebrating its 21st anniversary this month.
In early 2007, Linden Lab laid open the source code of the official Second Life viewer, the client application needed to access Second Life. This revealed large parts of Second Life's technology and made not only the development of third-party viewers possible, but also the creation of a server application that can be used to create virtual worlds similar to Second Life. This server application was eventually named OpenSimulator, and the first test releases still came out in the first half of 2007.
Second Life, as well as the worlds based on OpenSimulator, are referred to as "grids" because they are split into square regions of 256 by 256 metres or roughly 280 by 280 yards. This roughly corresponds to a bit more than three by two major-league football pitches or soccer fields or a bit less than three by two American football fields.
While Second Life is a walled garden with only one publicly accessible grid that is connected to nothing else, OpenSimulator can be used by just about anyone to create and run their own grid. In 2008, a new feature called the Hypergrid was introduced that allows avatars registered on one grid to visit other grids. Thus, OpenSim is not only decentralised, but actually mostly federated. There are currently over 3,000 active grids, maybe over 4,000, and especially most of the larger public grids are connected to the Hypergrid.
Sims, in turn, are short for simulators which have to run in regions for any kind of content to be able to exist in them and for avatars to be able to enter them. In Second Life, one sim always covers one region. OpenSim has so-called varsims which can cover multiple regions arranged in a square without having borders between the regions. The upper limit imposed by the software is 32 by 32 or 1,024 regions, but anything significantly larger than 16 by 16 or 256 regions has been proven to be highly impractical.
OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid. It was launched in July, 2007, as a proving ground for OpenSim's own development which it still is. Nonetheless, it was the first OpenSim grid to surpass Second Life in land area, and it currently is one out of two grids to have done so. Also, as early as 2007 already, OSgrid referred to OpenSim in general and then, by 2008, to itself as "the Open Source Metaverse". It has used this term for an actual virtual world 14 years earlier than Mark Zuckerberg. For about just as long, the word "metaverse" has been part of the standard vocabulary in the OpenSim community.The avatar in both pictures
The avatar shown in the image is Juno Rowland. She is, in fact, a backup avatar for my female alt, short for alternate avatar, that goes by the same name and looks the same while being at home on another grid.
Juno is built to look like a young woman. OpenSim does not explicitly support different ethnicities, but the basic avatar-building components available in OpenSim are almost exclusively geared towards avatars looking white or Latin American and in the 30s at most. She is 1.74 metres or 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall which is taller than the average real-life Western woman by about the length of an adult person's palm. She is fairly slim which is somewhat concealed by the loose fit of her clothes.
Juno's skin textures are light to medium-light. Highlights and partly also shades are part of the skin textures, but very subdued. Most shading on her is created by the shader built into the viewer.
She has brown eyes and black hair worn as a rather short bob that narrows downward from where her ears are and extends to a height halfway between her chin and her shoulders. Her bangs cover her forehead entirely. Strands of her bangs partly cover her eyebrows, and two of them extend down as far as her upper eyelids. On each side, a single thick lock extends forward and slightly inward. These locks occasionally cover parts of her lower cheeks.
Juno is wearing a loose-fitting black tank top with the official logo of the 17th grid birthday festivities on it. The logo stretches across about 90% of Juno's chest and from slightly higher than right below her breasts to slightly higher than the middle of the front of the shirt.
In the top left corner of the birthday logo, there is the OSgrid logo. It consists of five identical parallelograms. Each one of them resembles a rectangle which, when placed horizontally, has its short edges tilted to the right by 18 degrees. The long edges are longer than the short edges by about three quarters. These five parallelograms are arranged around a common centre at the same distance and at angles of 72 degrees from each other. There is always one pointed angle slipping under the long side of a neighbouring parallelogram. This way, the gap in the middle between the parallelograms is a five-point star. The outer short edge of each parallelogram is farther away from the centre than the parallel long edge of the neighbouring parallelogram by a bit over half the latter's width. The top right parallelogram is placed exactly vertically.
The whole logo has a light, yellowish orange tint. Size-wise, it takes up a bit more than 20% of the width and about 70% of the height of the entire birthday logo.
To the right of the OSgrid logo, there is the name of the grid, "OSgrid", written in all capitals in the same tint of orange as the OSgrid logo. The writing is about two thirds as tall as each parallelogram in the OSgrid logo is long. It starts to the right of the vertical top right parallelogram at roughly 80% of its width, and the top of the letters is slightly higher than the obtuse top right corner of the top right parallelogram. The typeface used is a heavy variant of the Futura typeface, a geometric sans-serif typeface known for fairly small lower-case characters and a lower-case "a" which is like a "d" with a shorter line, much like in hand-writing.
Right below, "The Open Source Metaverse" is written at a vertical distance that is roughly the same as the general thickness of the letters in the "OSgrid" writing. All four words start with capitals. The writing lines up with the "OSgrid" writing to the left. The typeface is the same as the one used for the "OSgrid" writing, only smaller by about 60%. It is small enough to not be easily readable in the image at the resolution at which the image was posted. The writing is tinted a light grey, resembling aluminium.
Most of the lower half is taken up by a horizontal rectangle, tinted a darker, slightly less saturated, slightly more brownish tone of orange. To the left, it lines up with the bottom pointy-angled corner of the bottom left parallelogram in the logo. To the right, it lines up with the end of the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". At the top, it almost touches the vertical line of the "p" in the same writing.
On this rectangle, "17th Birthday" is written in the same black as the rest of the tank top and the same typeface as the other two writings, but twice the height as the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". Vertically, this writing is slightly above the middle of the rectangle. Horizontally, it lines up with the other two writings on the left.
Below the tank top, Juno is wearing a straight, loose-fitting miniskirt which ends roughly the length of one of her hands above her knees. Its texture gives it a look like washed-out denim in various shades of slightly yellowish, medium-light-to-medium brown. Seams, pockets and the fly are all only part of the texture. The pocket on the front to the left from Juno's point of view is completely covered by the tank top, the pocket on the other side is mostly covered. The texture does not emulate any rear pockets.
Apart from the skirt, Juno's legs are bare. On her feet, she is wearing a pair of flat ballet shoes which mostly show a black texture, slightly lighter than the tank top, with a structure that resembles an unidentified fabric. The insides of the shoes are a medium-light, shaded tone of brown, suggesting some fabric or thin leather again. The soles are a medium-light, slightly reddish brown. They have very low heels.
Around her neck, Juno is wearing a necklace consisting what appears to be a single wire of solid gold of a similar thickness as the material used for clothes hangers plus an OSgrid logo made of gold as well. The logo is a bit over half as big as the one on her tank top. The eye through which the wire runs is attached near one of the outer obtuse-angled corners, so the logo is rotated to the left in comparison with the one on the tank top. Both the wire and the logo are glossy, the logo more than the wire, but the material appearance is textured onto both.
In both Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds, unlike most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars are not only highly configurable in-world, but also highly modular. Everything on Juno is an attachment. Her body is an attachment, the head included. Her feet are a separate attachment different feet for medium and high heels are available. The skin textures can be replaced, and standard skins can be worn on this body. The eye texture can be replaced, too. Eyelashes, fingernails and toenails are attachments, although the latter are fully concealed inside her shoes. Her hair is an attachment. The top, the skirt, each shoe and the necklace are separate attachments which makes it possible for her to wear all kinds of outfits. Her shape is configurable with over 80 parameters, and even that can be replaced with another one which is usually just as configurable.
Everything that Juno is made up from was made by users. Everything else, including the purpose-made texture on the tank top, was made directly for OpenSim.The scenery in the first image
The first image was created on a sim called Tropicana Tuneage, a multi-purpose sim which is regularly used for events, but which is also Juno's home in OSgrid.
The scenery is limited to a wooden pier which Juno is standing on. It takes up the lower 45% of the image. Its water-side end would line up with the lower side of Juno's butt if she was shown from behind. The top surface of the pier is textured in a way that suggests wooden planks that run transversally across the pier. The wood is very slightly less yellowish tone of brown than Juno's skirt and varies greatly between light-medium, almost light, and medium. The sides of the pier are outside the borders of the image.
The pier leads to the southwest. The camera angle follows it almost exactly in parallel. It is oriented farther to the right by about one degree. It is also roughly at the height of Juno's waist.
Beyond the pier and behind Juno, there is nothing but blue sea with gentle waves on it. The tone of blue has a fairly low saturation, and some of the waves are partly almost medium-dark grey. The horizon is at almost precisely two thirds of the height of the image, roughly below Juno's breasts, which shows that the camera is tilted downward by a few degrees.
The sky is a very pale, greenish blue with a very faint gradient towards the horizon that suggests haze. To Juno's right, there are some thin clouds which increasingly blend in with the sky, the lower they are. A bit of cloud is above her head as well. There are no clouds to her left.Juno in the first image
Juno is slightly left of centre, standing on her right foot while moving her left foot forward and turning it to the left. She is about to turn herself around. Her arms are on her sides, the left arm is moved a bit forward. Her hands are relaxed with both middle fingers bent inward a little more than the other fingers.
Juno's face is expressionless. Any expressions would require specific animations to be played, mostly manually which would be an extra effort. She is looking past a point slightly above the camera.
Her hair is fully covering her ears. The lock on the left of her face, the right for the on-looker, is in front of the lower parts of her cheek. So is the lock on the other side, but less so.Lighting in the first image
The simulated time of day is late afternoon. The sun is quite low already in the west. This can be told by the shadows which Juno's legs cast on the wooden planks texture on the pier as well as some narrow highlights on her neck, her arms and her legs. The sun itself is not in the image.
Apart from the sun, there is medium grey ambient light that shines the same from everywhere and therefore doesn't create any shadows.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.The scenery in the second image
The second image was created in a different place on the same grid named OSG17B2. The name refers to OSgrid's 17th birthday, OSG17B in short. It is the second one of four numbered exhibition sims created for the birthday, two of which were opened to the public while the other two remain unused.
In the second image, Juno is inside a building used as a gallery of music album covers.
Most of the right-hand 60% of the image are taken up by an art easel. It is about one and two thirds times as high as Juno is tall while appearing smaller due to the perspective. It is rotated to the right from the camera being directly aimed at its front by about 25 degrees.
The easel is a fairly stable and elaborate construction which looks like it is adjustable for various canvas sizes. Below where the canvas would be put, there is a shelf for painting utensils. The easel is mostly white with no texture on it. The exceptions are eleven slotted screw heads and a handle roughly shaped like a six-point star with which the easel can be adjusted to different canvas sizes. They have metal-like, partly light grey, partly light yellowish or brownish textures with medium-light orange spots hinting at corrosion. These textures include highlights and shading. The parts themselves are not shiny. Of the screw heads, only five are unobscured. One is holding the adjustment handle in place. Three are holding the almost vertical part of the easel together, one close to the top, two near the bottom. The fifth one connects the right-hand rear support to the foot.
The easel is adjusted for something way bigger than what it is carrying. It's the cover of the album Recent Songs by the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was released in 1979 as his sixth studio album, and it is not known for high-charting single releases. The cover is about half as high as Juno is tall. Again, due to the perspective, it appears to be smaller. Its aspect ratio is very slightly warped, it is a little wider than it is high.
The album cover is based on a frontal facial portrait painting of Cohen by Dianne Lawrence. It shows him as a middle-aged, light-skinned man with green eyes and black, medium-short hair which he wears in a somewhat asymmetrical hairdo that is slightly fuller on his left, the on-looker's right, than on the other side. The top of his hair is cut off by the top edge of the canvas. At the bottom, the portrait ends at Cohen's shoulders. He is wearing a black shirt which lacks too many details to be identifiable any further.
The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green.
Above his right shoulder, his left shoulder from the on-looker's point of view, there is a drawing of a hummingbird which is only black and background blue and about as long from beak to tail feathers as Cohen's mouth is wide. The bird seems to be hovering above his shoulder with no intention to touch down. Its beak is oriented to the right for the on-looker and tilted slightly downward to between Cohen's shoulder and the collar of his shirt.
Between the top left corner and Cohen's hair, his name is written, "Leonard Cohen". Likewise, between his hair and the top right corner, the title of the album is written, "Recent Songs". Both are in black, fairly small, in an unidentified, very heavy geometric sans-serif typeface and in all-caps.
The narrow right-hand side of the box that has the portrait on its front has a medium-dark wood texture, slightly reddish, slightly greyish, with the grain perpendicular to the long edges.
The wall behind the easel is mostly white with a black circular pattern on it. It consists of 39 concentric circles whose thickness increase from the outermost to the innermost circle. Instead of a 40th circle, there is a dot in the centre which is a little bigger than the thickness of the innermost circle. The texture itself is a bit over one and a half times as high as Juno is tall and twice as wide as it is high. Thus, it has ample of white space on both sides whereas the outermost 16 circles are more or less cut at the top and the bottom. Two of these patterns are within the border of the image above one another. The upper one is cut off by the upper edge of the image in such a way that only the two innermost circles are complete.
The wall makes up a bit less than the upper two thirds of the background of the image. Apart from Juno and the easel, everything below is ground. The edge between the wall and the floor shows that the camera is rotated from being perpendicular to the wall by some five degrees to the left. Thus, the easel is rotated to the right by about 20 degrees from being parallel to the wall. Besides, the camera is as high above the ground as Juno's waist and tilted downward only very minimally.
The ground is a medium orange in the bottom left corner of the image. It gets a little darker and more purplish towards the opposite corner where it meets the wall.Juno in the second image
Juno is on the left-hand side of the image. standing in front of the easel, a little left of its centre, and facing it. The image shows her to the left of the easel and from the rear right. Her head is tilted downward as if she was looking at the album cover. Her face is entirely on the far side of her head. The bottom of her hair is shifted to the back and to the left because she is actually in motion. Her right ear is still fully concealed under hair.
Her arms are relaxed on both sides. She is resting her weight on her right leg while having lifted up the heel of her left foot.
The right strap of her tank top is hovering above her right shoulder at a distance of a little more than the thickness of one of her fingers. The background appears through the gap.Lighting in the second image
The only light available in the image are the omnipresent medium grey ambient light and several white point light on the ceiling beyond the edges of the image, only one of which is on this side of the wall. The sun is fixed straight above the scene, but the roof of the building which is outside the image is in its way. Since shadows are on in this picture, the roof keeps the sunlight out. Point light sources like those on the ceiling don't cast shadows, so they add to the ambient light, but they only illuminate avatars, objects and the like from one side. The highlights on her legs hint at the position of the sole point light on this side of the wall, namely behind and slightly to the left of Juno.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Wenn du Bildbeschreibungen so kritisch betrachtest, htte ich gern deine ehrliche Meinung zu meinem letzten Bilderpost, der jetzt auch schon wieder fast ein Jahr her sein drfte. Wrdest du sagen, die Bilder sind hinreichend detailliert und akkurat beschrieben, oder fehlt dir da etwas
Vorab: Das ist kein Mastodon-Trt, aber trotzdem ein Post im Fediverse, der auch nach Mastodon gekommen ist. Und er ist sehr lang.
Er enthlt zwei Bilder, die ich jeweils zweimal beschrieben habe: einmal "kurz" im Alt-Text, einmal sehr viel lnger und detaillierter mit Text-Transkripten im Post selbst inklusive einer gemeinsamen Prambel fr beide Beschreibungen, die auch alle ntigen Erklrungen enthlt.
Das Original findest du . Da wirst du erst die Zusammenfassung nebst Inhaltswarnung ffnen mssen, dann nach unten scrollen bzw. den Post ausklappen, dann ein Spoiler-Tag mit zustzlicher Inhaltswarnung ffnen, um die Bilder sehen zu knnen.
Wenn du an einem Computer bist, werden die Alt-Texte ganz klassisch angezeigt, wenn du den Mauscursor auf eins der Bilder schiebst. Was Smartphones oder Tablets angeht, bin ich berfragt.
Alternativ kannst du dir den Post ansehen auf Mastodons Weboberflche, indem du suchst. Da ist es dann der dritte Post von unten.
Du solltest sehr viel Zeit mitbringen. Der Alt-Text des ersten Bildes ist 1.500 Zeichen lang, der des zweiten Bildes 1.499, und die langen Beschreibungen messen insgesamt ber 20.000 Zeichen.
Ich arbeite seit Ende letzten Jahres immer mal wieder an den Bildbeschreibungen fr eine Reihe von Portraitbildern. Ich habe mich auch schon und . Trotzdem htte ich gern die eine oder andere Meinung zu meinen Bildbeschreibungen. Falls ich irgendwelche Fehler gemacht habe oder irgendwo nachlssig war, will ich das nicht wiederholen.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I'm trying to fulfill all image description requirements to a tee or even be way ahead of them anyway. That is, only as far as I can (it's often technically impossible to transcribe all bits of text within the borders of my original images verbatim in alt-text without exceeding the 1,500-character limit, much less keep the alt-text short, so text transcripts almost always only land in the additional long description in the post itself) and unless they contradict each other.
But seriously, I've only got exactly one image post which I don't consider so outdated that I have to warn people about how outdated it is. And that post isn't even on this channel. But I'm not going to upgrade all my image posts whenever I learn something new about describing images.
Also, I don't expect people to put more effort into image descriptions than I do. In fact, I couldn't seriously expect anyone to put my own amounts of effort into image descriptions because because that isn't even justified in most cases.
# # # # # # # # # # # There isn't much that we can do.
These standards, just like the various laws that triggered their creation, suppose that all social networks and social media are
- commercial and corporate with loads of money behind them
- centralised silos
- staffed with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of employees in office blocks all around the world
For comparison, Hubzilla probably shows what's the best the Fediverse can do. It has an optional field for new registrations to confirm that they're over a certain age.
However, almost all Hubzilla hubs have a "staff" of exactly one. A hobbyist. Unlike Mastodon servers, Hubzilla hubs don't even have moderators because Hubzilla is all about self-empowerment and self-moderation.
Is that one admin honestly expected to verify the authenticity of the IDs and the birth certificates of newly-registrated users with the authorities in almost 200 different nations
There used to be a time when such regulations only applied to services from a certain size upward or from a certain revenue upward. But now something that can only be done by big corporations becomes mandatory for tiny hobbyist projects.
Besides, how are these measures supposed to keep 13-year-olds from spinning up their own single-user Fediverse servers on machines at home If this is supposed to be absolutely, 100% guaranteed to be absolutely, 100% water-tight, the two Hubzilla devs would have to check and verify the identity of everyone who wants set up their own hub before they allow the git-based installer to clone the repository from Framagit onto their servers.
CC:
# # # # # # # # # # #
American Airs New Airbus Jet Grounded by Supply Chain Issue
(Bloomberg) American Airlines Group Inc. finally has taken possession of its first long-range Airbus SE A321XLR aircraft,
-haulfleet
Last updated: 2025-08-14
All text and images © eLoc8.is-fabulous.com