@stefan
Having a specific feature for suggesting alt text on the fediverse would be helpful while avoiding the new users experiencing alt text nag negatively.
I.e. "This user suggests the following alt text for your image: Text. Accept, deny."
Clicking accept automatically edits your post and inserts what they wrote. If it already has an alt text you never get any notification.
@Cragsand :catjam: If you want to make this a Fediverse-wide feature that works the same everywhere across the Fediverse, you'd first have to add it to ActivityPub. And then you'll have to hope that over a hundred Fediverse projects implement it, most of which are developed completely independently from Mastodon.
If it becomes a Mastodon feature, it won't work outside Mastodon.
@Cragsand :catjam: 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.
@stefan I think mastodon at least only shares the app info for local posts, not federated posts. I'll see if I can find a doc saying one way or another.
You can still see some trends, for example, people who use Ivory for iOS posted 49% of their images with alt text, compared to Mastodon's 17.8% for Android and 20% for iOS users.
But I am not sure if there is enough data to draw solid conclusions.
@stefan The cost of #ivory is a major obstacle for me, and I imagine for many other Mastodon users as well. I find the prospect of having to pay for a “subscription” to a Mastodon client, when there are apps available that only have to be paid for once, upon purchasing (such as #Toot!), incredibly distasteful - and I imagine a lot of other users without much expendable income do as well
@johnjolley Yeah, I don't like everything turning into a subscription these days.
On the other hand, I do get the need for a sustainable business model that doesn't exploit their users through ads and data extraction, so I'm hoping that's what's going on here.
Either way, at least there's plenty of alternatives, so we can all find what best suits us.
@stefan#Toot! does heavily encourage alt-text when posting photos - it requires several steps to opt-out of posting without alt-text, which provides a lot of friction to users who’s prefer to post images without descriptions - anecdotally, I expect I’d post alt-text on my photos much less frequently if Toot! didn’t encourage users to add descriptions as heavily as it does
@johnjolley This is another thing I'd like to look into some day, the impact of required alt text on the quality of it. Would it encourage people to use generic, non-descriptive image description just to get past it?
@stefan AFAIK, the closest that Ivory comes to using AI/ML for alt text is the inbuilt iOS photo feature (Live Text) that'll detect words in an image and copy them over to the image description.
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