Some parts of the Mastodon community are hostile towards VC Funding, AI, and cryptocurrency, particularly because of their entanglement with enshittification and hype cycles. These people are worried that this relationship will lead Mastodon down an unhealthy path that prioritizes the wrong things. It’s a totally understandable concern, but it’s important to remember the mission and purpose of Mastodon’s US entity: to manage and raise donations in the United States. This is not an executive department making decisions for the Mastodon project, and they aren’t shareholders expecting to make some kind of financial returns. A healthy board requires a diverse set of opinions and experiences that educate the real decision-makers so they can get multiple perspectives on problems they need to solve. It seems like this board’s variety of backgrounds has been set up to do exactly that.
…This really doesn’t soothe my concerns at all! Actually, up until right now, I hadn’t even been paying enough attention to have concerns. So… if anything, this article has inspired concerns I didn’t already have.
It’s like if the server at a restaurant came up to you and said “now I know what you’re thinking… we did in fact recently hire some cannibals. But they only work in the business office, not the kitchen!”
Yeah I had no idea. Now I have one and I’m immediately considering moving to a different fedi microblog platform. I’ve already lost quite a bit of trust for Rochko due to his extreme eagerness to federate with Meta.
This is silly. The web is not in decline and Google is not at fault. Most of the web is garbage, and Google helps us find the information buried in a sea of ads and repetitively copied/reworded content. We are moving to a world where putting up a plagiarized page with tons of ads will not be profitable. The sooner that day arrives, the better.
and you know why all the copying/rewording or why all recipes include three paragraphs about how the author first discovered the dish during their trip to Toscania in 1997? because they’re trying to game Google’s requirements and get included in their search results.
I was reading some people on Mastodon mentioning that Meta might try to push ads into the fediverse via Threads. Something about pushing ads to federated instances that opt in and compensating the admins.
Not sure how I feel about this if it’s true. I can see people defederating to escape the Meta ads and we end up having a huge fragmentation issue where Meta owns the largest fediverse instance and we have some smaller clusters that avoid it.
*Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself. *
I had actually read this article the day it came out, but I didn’t think too much of that paragraph until a couple days later at a dinner full of folks working on decentralization. Someone brought up that quote, though paraphrased it slightly differently, claiming Casey was saying that Google was actively putting* the web into managed decline*.
Whether or not that’s very different (and maybe it’s not), both should spark people to realize that this is a problem.
Our bots have sucked up everyone’s sites, so screw your web we got it all at the Evil Store.
I think you should talk about accessibility here, and everywhere else you visit on the fediverse. Especially here though. Accessibility isn’t just an ethical impetus to make community spaces accessible to everyone not just ~90% of people.
I am not dyslexic but I use the Open Dyslexic font all the time because it is easy to read when my brain’s word processing neurons are totally fried from a stressful day.
I am not color blind but I love color blind options in games for the UI since it often simplifies the AI’s color scheme down to a point that makes me feel more relaxed.
I am not deaf, but I love closed captions as they let me watch things at any volume, and allow me to process what people are saying better.
I am not a wheelchair user, but I can’t count the amount of times wheelchair ramps have been useful and helpful in my life (especially when moving big bulky things on wheels).
I am not someone who typically gets powerfully triggered by things that evoke a past trauma, but I find content warnings have massively improved my mental health when using social media because they bring agency into the microblogging/twitter form, an agency I never thought about not having, where I don’t get ambushed by real world, depressing news that I want to learn about but need to check in with myself before processing (especially if I went onto mastodon for cute cat pics, not to catch up on the latest shitty thing).
I am not queer, but every single fucking piece of accessibility accommodation that queer people and their allies have fought for has meaningfully made my life better. You know what drops the bottom out of toxic masculinity violently forcing men into super unhealthy and emotionally stunted existences? A bunch of queer and proud people drilling holes into the foundations of binary gender and blowing it the fuck up so toxic men are too busy panicking about trans people to keep building the widely accepted definition of masculinity towards even more toxic places.
I am ADHD and the world shits on actually accommodating me everyday, to the point that loved ones hurt me constantly even when they are trying to do the right thing because that hatred of ADHD people goes so deep down into the US protestant work ethic hellscape… that it is like a really bad trip that people don’t seem to be able to escape even if they wanted to.
I know what it is like to not be accommodated at a very deep level. It is violence.
I also know what it is like to be in a community that prioritizes accommodating the “edge cases” of humans (I mean that in a kind way), i.e. making sure the people most sensitive to overstimulation have a space they can retreat to and chill for a bit, or making sure the person in the wheelchair can access the building, or making sure that images have image descriptions for blind people. It is missing the point to lament “oh but these people are outliers from the dataset of humans, we shouldn’t waste too much time accommodating them”. Accommodation is HOW we innovate and evolve the Fediverse, and the barometer for how well we are doing can be almost directly translated into how well the Fediverse accommodates those with disabilities and specific needs (and also how suffocatingly white a space we make the Fediverse by tone policing black and brown people from life experience’s we don’t know shit about).
It is funny how people will readily agree that the challenges NASA has faced and overcome with putting a measly handful of spaceships and humans into space has had many indirect, but nonetheless MAJOR benefits to our society in the development of technologies that went on to be useful for entirely different contexts. The challenges of making the Fediverse (or any community space) accessible are no different except though they are far more diverse and far more vital.
At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter.
Judging by the history of this community, I’d say you’re invited to discuss it here. But it won’t change anything. You’d get back a few random opinions of other Lemmy users. But I’m not sure if anyone concerned with the development process reads this. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
And I’m not sure about the Lemmy software. The developers always say they have enough on their plate. UI changes are rare. And they mostly implement what’s on their agenda, not what users wish for.
If I were you, I’d take this to one of the newer projects that’s going to replace Lemmy at some point. That would be PieFed for example. They’re pretty active and welcoming and open to suggestions. I think accessibility is already on their agenda: see piefed.social/post/17408
Another tip: The real discussions regarding software development usually don’t happen on social media. You’d need to go to the project page on GitHub or Codeberg (in this example) if you want to get in contact with the development community.
I wasn’t talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.
I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.
Thing is, on Mastodon, it’s pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone’s just got “the Mastodon way” stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.
And everywhere that isn’t Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it’s another stupid Mastodon fad.
Alright. I didn’t get that. But I think my recommendation still holds true. As you found out already, it’s not happening unless the UI incentivises the users to do so. I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject. It’s just not something within their lives/perspective. So I think if you want to solve that issue, it has to happen in the UI and the software developers have to nudge people to do it.
If you want to talk to a few users, I think this place is as good as any.
I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject.
On Mastodon, this happens much more quickly than you might imagine.
Post an image without alt-text, especially on a big, general-purpose, notorious newbie instance, and there’ll likely be someone who asks you to add an alt-text to your image.
Unless you keep yourself inside a small special interest bubble with no contact to the outside Fediverse, you will be educated on the subject, whether you want or not.
And Mastodon users don’t care if whoever they educate about alt-text and image descriptions is on Mastodon or elsewhere because they can’t see where someone is, at least not at first glance.
Would you happen to know why that is? Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention? Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?
Unlike other places, Mastodon is not “everyone for themselves” and “hey, let’s shitpost about minorities for the lulz”. While Lemmy is trying to be Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo, Mastodon is trying to be nega-Twitter. Except for Gargron and the other devs who are trying to make Mastodon Twitter with sprinkles.
The Mastodon community is trying hard to make Mastodon feel nice and comfortable and welcoming for everyone, just like Mastodon felt nice and comfortable and welcoming to them after they had freshly arrived from that rampantly ultra-fascist hellhole that’s called 𝕏 now. They’re trying hard, and I mean hard, not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist.
This includes lots of things that are completely unthinkable on Reddit because they are technically impossible. Alt-text on images, for example, for which Mastodon offers a whopping 1,500 characters per image. Content warnings for sensitive posts in what’s actually the summary field. Hiding sensitive images which is actually something non-standard and semi-proprietary by Mastodon that hardly anything else out there supports.
Many instances actually make alt-text on images and content warnings for specific topics mandatory in their instance rules. Which topics require CWs partly differ from instance to instance; instances with a focus on neurodivergence/autism, for example, require a CW for eye contact in addition to the usual. Instances only enforce these rules on local users and local posts and not on what’s happening in the federated timeline, but they do have these rules, and they enforce them to the point of permanently banning users.
At the same time, however, these things have become part of Mastodon’s culture. You simply do that stuff, lest you’re at least shunned by “the Mastodon community”. At least. Or you’re being lectured about having to add actually useful alt-text to images and content warnings to sensitive posts. Or you’re muted or blocked outright.
Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention?
If an image has alt-text, the Web interface shows a little rectangle with “ALT” in it in one corner. Mobile apps tend to do the same. You immediately see upon first glance whether an image has alt-text or not.
Beware if someone catches your post with an image without that “ALT” marker.
Mastodon’s goal, not defined by the devs but by the end users, is for 100% of all images that appear on Mastodon to have alt-text. There are daily stats on which Mastodon instance has how high a percentage of image posts with alt-text. I think mastodon.social, the notorious newbie and “I keep using Mastodon like Twitter” instance, is somewhere between 10% or 20% or so. By Lemmy standards, this may seem mind-boggling high, but by Mastodon standards, it’s embarrassingly low. Some instances reach 80%, and by Mastodon standards, this means there are still 20% image posts that aren’t accessible.
Oh, and there being an “ALT” marker is not enough. If there is an “ALT” marker, people will go check the alt-text. If it doesn’t actually sufficiently describe the image, or if the image is predominantly text, and the alt-text doesn’t contain a full, verbatim transcript, that’s just as bad as there not being any alt-text, and it’s treated just like there was no alt-text.
On Mastodon, alt-text is absolutely. Serious. Muthafscking. Business. Full stop. To the point that you may have mods at your throat if you don’t provide it.
On a side-note, most Mastodon users can’t tell whether a post came from Mastodon or not. They treat posts in their timelines that came from Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Friendica or Hubzilla or whatever just like native Mastodon posts. Except for sometimes at least being highly annoyed if a post goes over 500 characters, that is. But they aren’t like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Misskey, and Misskey doesn’t have an alt-text culture,” or like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Friendica, and you have to program alt-text into your posts on Friendica, and even that is buggy.”
If your post appears on Mastodon, it’d better integrate with Mastodon’s culture or else. Also, Mastodon users don’t know anything about anything outside Mastodon, neither cultural differences nor technological differences.
Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?
My estimation is rather that 70% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and 25% are on Android phones, always with dedicated Mastodon apps. Hardly anyone seems to use Mastodon on a computer.
There are actually many blind or visually-impaired Mastodon users. It seems to naturally attract them, just like 𝕏 repels them.
However, there are also people with bad Internet connections for whom images often don’t load at all. Remember that everyone’s on phones, and they don’t have 4G or 5G everywhere.
And there are even people with no disabilities who say that alt-text helps them understand what an image shows. I think that should be the task of explanations in the post because not everyone can access alt-text, but that’ll never be engrained in Mastodon’s culture because you can only explain so much in 500 characters minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus the content warning and minus the actual toot.
Hmmh. I’ve advocated for more nuanced content warnings here on Lemmy. Didn’t resonate well with neither the community nor the developers. I dropped the topic. I’m waiting for PieFed to come along and bring me an alternative backend for the Threadiverse.
Thanks for the summary. I don’t really use Mastodon so I wouldn’t know. But I’m all for alt-text to images. I set them on every website I’m involved with…
I’m not sure about Lemmy. I use this more for textual conversation. But now that I’ve learned how to do it in Markdown, I’ll add the description to the 5 (or so) pictures I post every year.
I don’t think other places on the Fediverse have a distinct culture or vision. Like Mastodon has. For example Lemmy is quite random. And still dominated by the lots of ex-Reddit-users who migrated here. And we often can not agree on where we’d like to go. And I perceive a split/separation between the developers and the users. There isn’t really a conversation going on. Neither between users and developers, nor between the users themselves. So my prediction is: As of now we’re not going anywhere. Lemmy is going to stay relatively random and will also stay about the same size, until someone steps in and changes this place.
Do you have a vision? Is there a reason why you started this conversation? Something you’d like us to do?
(I mean you could post your comprehensive perspective in a post/thread here, and then also toot the link to Mastodon, or boost it or whatever that’s called. I think this is just a meta discussion and it’s probably not going anywhere… You got a bit of attention here, but ultimately we’re still not discussing the actual topic. At least I didn’t yet understand if you have a need or a proposal to make.)
Is there a reason why you started this conversation? Something you’d like us to do?
Yes.
When I post images on Hubzilla, I always describe them. I have connections not only within Hubzilla, but mostly on Mastodon and also elsewhere (Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish etc. etc., all over the place).
The problem I have is three-fold: One, my images are extreme edge-cases topic-wise. They’re about 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. As in, maybe one out of 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying system, and I’m not even talking about the specific place where I’ve taken an image. This makes very extensive image descriptions necessary because I can’t suppose that people already know what whatever is in the images looks like. And it makes very extensive explanations within the image descriptions necessary so that people get the images in the first place.
I can’t take anything about my pictures for common knowledge. I need over 1,000 characters alone to explain where an image is from.
Two, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Fediverse user when it comes to describing the image. I don’t only look at the image when I’m describing it. I look at the real deal in-world when I’m describing it. This gives me an almost infinite zoom factor. I can see things in-world that are so tiny in the image that they’re invisible. I can describe and actually have described in the past images within my image. And nearly on the same level as the image that I was actually describing.
Three, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Mastodon user when it comes to posting an image description. I am bound to the 1,500-character alt-text limit because Mastodon truncates longer alt-text and throws the excess characters away. But I do not have a 500-character limit. I don’t have any character limit at all. I can post 80,000 characters, and Mastodon will show these 80,000 characters, all of them, and so will other Fediverse projects.
So I can put full, detailed image descriptions of nearly any length into the post text body. This is completely unimaginable on Mastodon. And that’s why I can’t discuss these things with Mastodon users: They can’t even imagine what I’m doing.
Anyhow, this leads me into situations which are just as completely unimaginable for Mastodon users, which I therefore can’t discuss with people who only know Mastodon. And this raises questions for me which people who only know Mastodon can’t answer because they can’t even imagine why I’d ask something like that, because the very concept is alien to them.
This started early on in last summer when I started to seriously describe my images after I had found out that many Mastodon users like highly detailed image descriptions. My first attempt at writing one ended with over 13,000 characters of image description, and I couldn’t possibly reduce them without losing content. So I wanted to know where the best place to put such a long image description would be. I didn’t even get an answer. So I had to figure out from other posts and their replies that it’s always best to keep image descriptions and explanations as close to the image as possible, i.e. in the same post. I’m still not sure if that’s what Mastodon users, especially disabled users, would prefer in my case.
Then more and more questions came up.
Do I have to describe images in images? Images in images in images?
For example, the rule is that if there’s text within the borders of the image, it must be transcribed. However, this rule does not define edge-cases because it doesn’t take edge-cases into consideration. What about text that’s so small in the image that it’s visible, but illegible (3 pixels high)? Or text that’s so small in the image that it’s invisible (less than a pixel high)? Or text that’s partly obscured in the image (poster-sized sign with a tree trunk in front of it)? Must I, may I or mustn’t I transcribe it? Again, let’s suppose that I can read it in-world with no problems.
Or from which point on is it required to warn about eye contact? (I actually got an answer to this from someone who knows. If an eye can be made out in an image, then an eye contact warning is necessary. I was told that, yes, there are autistic persons who are triggered by an eye that’s 1/100th of a pixel high and 1/100 of a pixel wide.)
All stuff that you never think about when all you ever post are fairly simple real-life photographs.
I do not want to discuss these topics in this thread! If anything, my plan is to start separate threads for each of these.
My goal is simply to find a place where I can discuss them with people who know enough to be able to give me sensible answers that I can work with.
If you think this Lemmy community is such a place, then I’ll stay and ask away, and then and only then I’d like to see competent answers to my questions.
But if you think that nobody here will be able to understand what I want because what I’m asking is just too alien for everyone here, then it doesn’t make sense to try and ask.
Oh well. That’s a bit more complicated than I thought.
First of all, it might be true that people here won’t understand you. And I’m not sure if Lemmy is the right choice for you anyways. The OpenSim community doesn’t seem very active. And since you’re talking about 13.000 character descriptions… That will also not fly on Lemmy. I think we have a 10k character limit for posts and comments here. You’d exceed that here, too.
And then Mastodon is a microblogging platform. Originally intended for short messages. I know some people use it for a different purpose. And some people go there because of the short and concise messages. So I’m not really sure if that’s your place either. It might be you using the wrong tool for your task, since it’s intended for a different purpose and you’d need a different tool.
I mean I don’t know where the community of 3D worlds mingle… Maybe you can take some inspiration from them if you’re not the only one.
But it could very well the case that the alt-text and character limits of the platforms aren’t the issue here. But you choosing platforms that are not suited for your task. I’d say if your texts regularly exceed a few thousand characters, you don’t want a microblogging platform, but a macro-blogging (or just blogging) platform. There are some that are meant for long texts. And you can even use Wordpress or something like that, do your own blog and install an ActivityPub plugin if you want a connection to the Fediverse. I mean in the old times, people used more than social media and shared their thoughts in forums or on a personal blog, or a website dedicated to a topic. That comes with almost no restrictions.
Ultimately, I haven’t seen your posts/toots. And I don’t really know the alt-text culture on Mastodon. Maybe my advice isn’t that good.
Another thing: Is it really necessary to write that super detailed description in an alt-text? As far as I’ve learned about alt-text in webdesign, that is originally intended to give a concise description of the image in the context regarding the rest of the text. It is meant to be short and concise, like a tweet. It’s read by screenreaders and displayed if the image didn’t load. It’d be more something like: “a medieval market squares with dozens of booths, bustling with player activity.” But you won’t describe what’s sold in the market stand at the bottom right, or the portal on the left, unless it’s important in the context of the rest of your post. If you want to do a comprehensive analysis or a discussion like in art class, I’d say that goes into the main body text, and not into the alt-text. I’d consider that “abuse” of the alt tag. And it might even do a disservice to people who need accessibility, who now get a completely different experience than everybody else. I’d put that detailed description into the normal text. Maybe make it a spoiler so it collapses.
In the end I’m not part of that community, and everything depends on what you’re trying to achieve. But that’d be my perspective: A blog would be better suited. And long descriptions go into the body text, not the alt-text. And if you choose to write longer blog posts, you can still link them on Lemmy, or post a link to it on Mastodon.
Then allow me to make it less complicated. Or even more complicated.
And I’m not sure if Lemmy is the right choice for you anyways. The OpenSim community doesn’t seem very active. And since you’re talking about 13.000 character descriptions… That will also not fly on Lemmy.
It has never been my plan to post images with such massive descriptions on Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t require image descriptions. It doesn’t require alt-text either. It doesn’t even officially support alt-text. Lemmy doesn’t live and enforce a culture of accessibility.
Most importantly, though: The OpenSim community has no subscribers on general-purpose Mastodon instances. What’s posted there will most likely never appear in the federated timeline of e.g. mastodon.social where people could get all riled up about the lack of alt-text and image description.
Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already. My image descriptions have grown since then. 25,000 characters, 40,000 characters, and yesterday, I’ve posted a 60,000-character description for an image that also got an alt-text precisely at Mastodon’s limit of 1,500 characters.
And then Mastodon is a microblogging platform. Originally intended for short messages.
**I don’t intend to post my images on Mastodon either.
Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon. It was first released in 2015, ten months before Mastodon. It was renamed and repurposed from the Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010.
Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in just about everything. Like its predecessors, it has never had a character limit, and it has always had the full set of features of text formatting and post design as any full-blown long-form blogging platform out there. In fact, maybe even more than that.
Hubzilla is not a microblogging project. It can work as one, but it can seamlessly transition between microblogging and fully featured long-form blogging and everything in-between. Hubzilla is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, renamed from a fork of a Facebook alternative that was created also with blogging in mind.
So I want to post my images on Hubzilla.
What does this have to do with Mastodon then?
It has to do with Mastodon that I’ve got lots of Mastodon connections. All my OpenSim connections except for one are on Mastodon, and I think all of these are on one and the same OpenSim-themed instance. But on top of that, I’ve got hundreds of Mastodon connections all over the place, including mastodon.social and other big general-purpose instances.
And all those non-OpenSim Mastodon connections came to exist because they followed me. It was not my decision to follow them. They followed me because they expected me to explain the Fediverse beyond Mastodon to them because I had recently done so. Or they followed me because they had freshly arrived from Twitter, and they desperately needed Mastodon to feel like Twitter, including lots of uninteresting background noise in their personal timeline, so they followed everyone and everything they came across in the federated timeline.
So my image posts on Hubzilla will automatically federate to Mastodon and appear in people’s Mastodon timelines. And it isn’t my decision.
Sure, on Hubzilla, I have the power to limit precisely who can see my posts by only sending them to specific connections. But I want the Fediverse world out there to see the marvels of OpenSim, to learn that free, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds have been reality since 2007, that “the metaverse” is anything but dead and not invented by Zuckerberg. I don’t want to remain stuck in an echo chamber.
Oh, and by the way: Mastodon can receive posts up to a maximum length of 100,000 characters by default. Also, Mastodon does not truncate long posts. It only truncates alt-text that exceeds 1,500 characters. But it leaves posts up to 100,000 characters as intact as any other post and probably simply rejects longer posts.
It might be you using the wrong tool for your task, since it’s intended for a different purpose and you’d need a different tool.
My tool of choice is Hubzilla. And there’s hardly anything better in the Fediverse for what I do than Hubzilla.
But it could very well the case that the alt-text and character limits of the platforms aren’t the issue here.
They’re only indirectly. With that, I mean that Mastodon’s default limit of 500 characters is deeply engrained in Mastodon’s culture, and Mastodon’s culture is influenced by this limitation. For example, 500 characters make image descriptions in the post impossible. Thus, they’re not part of Mastodon’s culture. Thus, the very concept, the very idea is completely unimaginable to Mastodon users. Because as per Mastodon’s unwritten rules, “alt-text” and “image description” are mutually synonymous. They mean the exact same thing. Everything that describes the image goes into the alt-text, and that’s the way it is, full stop.
There are some that are meant for long texts.
Hubzilla is meant for long texts. It has always been.
And you can even use Wordpress or something like that, do your own blog and install an ActivityPub plugin if you want a connection to the Fediverse.
And Hubzilla is every bit as capable of long-form blogging as WordPress.
There’s no need to have one separate tool for each task if you already have one tool that can cover all these tasks. And Hubzilla can.
60,000+ characters of full image description, my longest one so far. Plus precisely 1,500 characters of alt-text. And I actually had to limit myself in comparison to earlier posts. No detailed descriptions of images within the image. No transcripts of text on images within the image. No mentioning in the alt-text where exactly to find the full description.
And I don’t really know the alt-text culture on Mastodon.
And I’m trying to explain it to you.
Maybe it’s easier to experience first-hand, to see it with your own very eyes. Go through what appears on mastodon.social under certain hashtags and do so regularly for a few weeks or months:
Is it really necessary to write that super detailed description in an alt-text?
In the case of the image I’ve posted yesterday, and seeing as that post went out to general-purpose Mastodon instances and into the realm of Mastodon culture, definitely yes.
Oh, and in case you haven’t understood that yet because it’s so out-of-whack: I describe my images twice. One, a short description with no explanations in alt-text. Two, a full, detailed description with all necessary explanations in the post text body itself. The latter has to be even more detailed. And here’s my explanation why.
As far as I’ve learned about alt-text in webdesign, that is originally intended to give a concise description of the image in the context regarding the rest of the text. It is meant to be short and concise, like a tweet.
Alt-text rules for webdesign are halfway useless in social media.
And alt-text rules for webdesign, as well as alt-text rules for corporate American social media silos, are even more useless on Mastodon. Mastodon’s alt-text culture has nothing to do with that.
I’d put that detailed description into the normal text.
Again, I already do that with the full description.
But Mastodon insists, insists, insists in an actually descriptive image description in alt-text, no matter what. For one, out of principle. Besides, they can’t imagine there being an image description in the post text (which I hide behind a summary/content warning that they have to click to open first) because this is technically impossible on Mastodon.
So I have to describe the same image once more, this time in the alt-text, in addition to the full description in the post.
Maybe make it a spoiler so it collapses.
I can do that on Hubzilla. But Mastodon doesn’t support spoiler tags.
Most frontends for Mastodon collapse longer posts, the official Web interface as well as probably all third-party mobile apps, only the official mobile app doesn’t.
Content warnings which are the same as summaries on StatusNet/GNU social/Friendica/Hubzilla collapse posts, too, or rather hide them. I always give one of these when I post over 500 characters, so my image posts do collapse for just about everyone.
And long descriptions go into the body text, not the alt-text.
And once again, that’s what I already do. In addition to the shorter description in the alt-text.
In the end I still don’t understand that specific culture. I’ve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them I’d shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what they’re trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think that’s making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on what’s really going on in the picture, what’s important, because there’s so much noise added.
But some of the descriptions are really next level good. I wouldn’t have expected that. I think I need some more time to familiarize myself with that culture. I can’t tell if it’s some people being ultra good at it and some people mimicking it without really understanding its purpose… Or it’s me not grasping the concept / culture.
If you say you’re already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body text… Seems I’ve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what you’ve already been doing.
I see now why you’d like to talk about the Fediverse as you originally said. Seems to me like a matter of the Fediverse not interconnecting the way you’d need it to. And I see a fundamental problem here. I got that you’re using Hubzilla. But we’ve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there. And that platform is meant for short chunks of text. The whole platform and interface is designed to cater to that. And you’re doing long blog posts. There is a fundamental split between the two. Yet the platforms interconnect. I don’t see a way to make messages short and long at the same time. And the Fediverse is about connecting a diverse set of platforms. There is bound to be some difficulty and I don’t know if there is a good solution.
And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since you’re on Hubzilla and that’s meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microblogging… It’s kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lot’s of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesn’t translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it get’s problematic when interconnecting to users of “narrower” platforms. It’s always been that way. And I don’t see a way around that. At least fundamentally.
And this manifests in the smaller issues you’re having. Like alt-text and culture that’s different amongst platforms. It’s all consequence of connecting diverse places. With your added explanation, I think I’ve now homed in on your issue…
Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it. I don’t see the users here have and particular knowledge about such topics. And Lemmy doesn’t federate in any unique way that’d make it stand out concerning this. It’s a good place for discussion, though. Mastodon’s choice to narrow down social media is valid. So if they like not to have long text, it’s their choice. And I applaud them for developing their own culture. I’m not sure if there is a good place to discuss this. Maybe within the “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla. You’re bound to find more people with the same struggles there. But you also want to reach us and the Mastodon users. I mean these places are also about linking external content and blog posts. So linking a Hubzilla blog post starting a discussion about this is the best thing I can come up with. But you need to lay down the groundworks properly. I mean it also took me several back and forths to understand the core of the issue. And it’s kind of a niche topic in a niche. So brace for little engagement or interest.
In the end I still don’t understand that specific culture. I’ve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them I’d shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what they’re trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think that’s making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on what’s really going on in the picture, what’s important, because there’s so much noise added
By professional Web design standards, you’re right. But this is part of Mastodon’s culture, too: detailed image descriptions that nobody would ever put on a Web site. As long as more people praise than directly criticise it, this won’t change.
The people who introduced alt-text to Mastodon and cultivated its alt-text culture were complete amateurs on smartphones who wanted to do something good for blind or visually-impaired users so that they can participate, too. And not professional Web designers who live and breathe WCAG 2.2.
If you say you’re already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body text… Seems I’ve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what you’ve already been doing.
Yes, I do, and I gave you a link as proof. If you don’t know how to access alt-text, and you’re on a computer, then hover your mouse cursor steadily above the image, and the alt-text will appear.
I got that you’re using Hubzilla. But we’ve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there.
Exactly this is how Mastodon tries to force its culture upon the whole rest of the Fediverse. For example, this is how Mastodon tries to force Friendica to abandon its own culture which is six years older than Mastodon’s culture and adopt Mastodon’s culture instead.
“We’re the majority, so we get to decide how things are done! This is our territory, our Fediverse now!”
If Lemmy had better federation with Mastodon, Mastodon would try to do the same thing with Lemmy.
And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since you’re on Hubzilla and that’s meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microblogging… It’s kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lot’s of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesn’t translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it get’s problematic when interconnecting to users of “narrower” platforms. It’s always been that way. And I don’t see a way around that. At least fundamentally.
In other words, the whole Fediverse should succumb to both technological limitations/limitations in concept and cultural limitations on Mastodon. If Mastodon can’t do it, or if Mastodon users don’t like it, users of Pleroma and Akkoma and Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Sharkey and Friendica and Hubzilla etc. etc. pp. must not make use of it.
In which way should Mastodon adjust itself to the technology and culture of non-Mastodon projects? And do you honestly believe Mastodon would actually do any of that?
Speaking of technological limitations on Mastodon, I have pretty few to worry about.
If I post 60,000+ characters, Mastodon display the very self-same 60,000+ characters. No problem.
If I put 1,500 characters into the alt-text, Mastodon takes over all 1,500 characters. No problem. That is, if I write more, they’re truncated, but Misskey and its forks does the same.
If I put a Mastodon-style content warning into the summary field, Mastodon users get their content warning. No problem.
It’s only inline images that are a bit of a problem. Hubzilla has to turn a copy of the image into a file attachment and also copy the alt-text from the image embedding code into the attached image file so that Mastodon has at least got one way to show the image. But still, Mastodon gets the image, and Mastodon gets the alt-text.
Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it.
Well, then there isn’t any place at all in the Fediverse or on the Web where I can go and ask e.g. whether illegible text in an image that I can read just fine at the source must, may or mustn’t be transcribed when writing an image description for a Fediverse post. There’s no such place at all.
Maybe within the “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla. You’re bound to find more people with the same struggles there.
Nope. What few Hubzilla users know Mastodon’s culture despise it deeply because Mastodon is trying to force it upon them. The vast majority of Hubzilla’s users knows nothing about Mastodon’s culture.
Also, I’m very very likely the only Hubzilla user who puts alt-text on images. And I’m definitely the only Hubzilla user who adds a long, detailed image description in the post itself on top.
Hubzilla’s culture doesn’t know accessibility, and it doesn’t care. Same goes for Friendica. Friendica’s alt-text handling is actually buggy, but the only Friendica user who even only tries to write alt-text apparently doesn’t know how to file a bug report on a Git repository.
In fact, throughout the Fediverse, Mastodon is the only project for whose users alt-text and image descriptions are really serious business. For people everywhere else, it’s largely a stupid gimmick or completely unknown.
But you need to lay down the groundworks properly.
I’ve learned that much. If I want to discuss something concerning Mastodon someplace else than Mastodon, I’ll first have to explain how Mastodon works and how Mastodon deviates from what people are used to where I post. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s user community, who they are in general, where they came from, how most of them are tech-illiterates on phones, and half of them think Mastodon is the Fediverse. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s culture and give a few links to demonstrate it.
Since all this would be tl;dr, I’d have to explain it by and by and in such ways that my explanations are remembered by the other users.
Then and only then I can ask for advice. That is, probably not even then because all advice I could expect would be 100% based on information that I myself have provided, and I’d be none the wiser.
In my eyes, Piped and such are the ideal solution, not peertube. Not, because peertube is bad, but because with using Piped, you can have your videos and you can have them on a FOSS surface, but leave the nasty tasks like paying for enough storage to host all those videos to the data guzzlers who get denied their return. Some real Robin hood shit right there.
Unless you're also throwing money at YouTube premium (etc), isn't this by definition unsustainable to do? So it's not really a viable long-term strategy either.
Like don't get me wrong, I don't want all the tracking and stuff either, but somebody has to pay those server bills. If it's not happening through straight cash then it's going to be through increasingly aggressive monetization and cost-cutting strategies.
I’m often in conflict about ads. On one hand they are an absolute blight on society, being harmful at best and a nuisance at worst. On the other hand, what the fuck is going to pay for all this shit? We should just nationalize YouTube.
Yes, nationalizing YouTube would work, or more so an Internal team, founded by all nations. Btw Germany has some sort of “Youtube”, paid by people and not government founded. It’s very limited as you can’t upload and only watch. The content is also only what is decided by the owners. Theoretically we’d just need to expand that, to allow uploads and get money by more than just the German citizens. I always had that dream, as it would provide a fully ads free platform. Not sure why that isn’t already a thing, as video platforms are an integral part of our society by now.
nationalize? A global platform? That spells trouble. Big time. I'm assuming you mean "making it owned by the U.S. government"... I as a German take offence to that!
I just mean we need a publicly version of YT. I am aware the logistics of this are ridiculous, the global nature of yt as you point out is a major hurdle. No country I’m aware of has even managed to nationalize their infrastructure so… ya.
I'm not sure what the ideal solution would look like, but I imagine that we're going to be seeing a lot more of this across the board for all "free" platforms.
Ads suck. They're a privacy/security risk in many cases. A lot of them are straight-up fraudulent, and there's little that the ad servers will do to correct these issues. But also, a vast majority of users will never pay for these services. And video platforms are prohibitively expensive for any other company to maintain.
PeerTube is great, in theory, but for the use-case that most people have in mind when they consider a video platform, it's not exactly filling in the voids that YouTube would leave if they were to close down or otherwise restrict access to their platform.
For me, there's a lot of creators that I watch who would not be able to continue producing the content that I enjoy if not for YouTube and their ad revenue systems. They could move to paid platforms, but would likely end up losing tons of money in the process, and would possibly have to discontinue content creation altogether as it would no longer be sustainable.
I pay for YT Premium so that I can have an ad-free experience while still supporting the channels I watch, which already makes me an outlier. But there is no way that I'd be able to afford to support even a quarter of the creators whose content I love if they were all to move to other platforms. This is a tough situation for everybody involved, and there's no clear better solution than "let the ad mongers continue mongering ads".
Piped will work as long as youtube allows them too and not a second longer. Reliance on an actor that hates you, isn’t the “ideal solution”. Newpipe breaks every time google decides they want to change how youtube works and invidio, freetube, piped, etc. all do too when that happens. That’s far from ideal.
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