How a small bunch of German-speaking non-Mastodon Fediverse users is fighting back against the spreading sectarian belief that the Fediverse is or at least should be only Mastodon

Mastodon can't be growing that slowly. After all, it's turning into a "Fediverse equals Mastodon" echo chamber more and more. This can only mean that there are many more newbies coming on board who have learned prior to joining that the Fediverse is "the Mastodon network" than there are Mastodon users who learn, or rather are taught, that this is not the case.

Because this is not the case. There is no Mastodon network. Oh, and what I've just linked to is in the Fediverse itself. It's on a Hubzilla channel, @pcw⁠@hub.hubzilla.hu (manually gave this "mention" a more traditional look). Hubzilla is part of the Fediverse, and it has been federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around.

Now, there are two more phenomena going on in the Fediverse concerning this.

On the one hand, there is a resistance movement forming against the spreading "Fediverse equals Mastodon" notion. Interestingly, it consists entirely of native German speakers. Most of them are primarily on Friendica which likely suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users who insist in the Fediverse being Mastodon and only Mastodon and nothing else.

If you spot some post or comment that explains that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon, you can almost count on the user being on Friendica. And usually a native German speaker. Unless it's one of the few "usual suspects" on Pleroma, Akkoma, Calckey or Hubzilla.

Interestingly, however, you hardly ever see someone whose mother tongue is not German telling Mastodon users that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Mastodon users doing so are even rarer occurrences.

On the other hand, it's crazy how Mastodon users resist being told about the Fediverse not being Mastodon. It isn't only journalists who have outright stated in news articles that the Fediverse is "the Mastodon network" or not even mentioned the Fediverse and presented Mastodon as a decentralised walled garden, and who fight tooth and nail to defend themselves being right and everyone else being wrong when being confronted by non-Mastodon users.

It's even more completely normal users. They use "Mastodon" and "Fediverse" mutually synonymously and fully exchangeably, or they openly claim that Mastodon is the Fediverse, and most replies are from more Mastodon users who like and thereby confirm what they've posted. And the more Mastodon users post like the Fediverse was only Mastodon or directly claim just this, the more Mastodon users believe it.

Mass media and tech media never even mentioning the existence of the Fediverse and only ever talking about Mastodon contribute their part, also because journalists don't like to admit that they're wrong even when they're clearly wrong. It doesn't help that those very few journos who write about Mastodon while being Mastodon have only ever dipped one toe into Mastodon and still largely use it like Twitter otherwise.

Also, maybe it's because we're growing more sensitive, but for one, it seems like those who have joined during the second Twitter migration wave, the one in late 2022, and who still think the Fediverse is only Mastodon are coming out of the woodwork now. And besides, just about all newbies joining the Fediverse nowadays "know" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

At best, it's hard for them to wrap their minds around this not being the case. At worst, they resist this notion. Yes, they resist the fact that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

First, they seem to go into full denial. They try to convince themselves that what that other user has just written is not true because it'd be very uncomfortable to them to have to share the Fediverse with something that is not their beloved, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy woolly mammoth. That's when they don't say anything.

Then, when they come to the realisation that there is no denying it, especially when more and more users chime in, they try to fight back. They claim it doesn't matter. They claim nobody needs to know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and one of their key points is that this information makes matters even more difficult for newbies than they already are.

If all this fails, they press their hands onto their ears like little children and chant out loud, "Lalala, I don't want to hear it!" They generously deal out mutes and blocks. They believe that by silencing everyone who tries to educate them about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, it goes away again.

For they believe that the Fediverse actually was only Mastodon until recently. They believe that the non-Mastodon Fediverse stuff has emerged just recently because they hadn't heard of any of it before, just like they believe that Mastodon was launched shortly before they've joined because they hadn't heard of it before. That's why they want to hear or read even less about Friendica and Hubzilla having been there before Mastodon.

At least parts of Mastodon are turning more and more into a religious cult, a sect. Facts don't matter anymore. Belief and faith not only replace facts, but they turn into "alternative facts" in a sense. Amongst this is that the Fediverse started with Mastodon, Gargron is the God of the Fediverse who created it, and everything that isn't Mastodon is an add-on to Mastodon. According to them, the Mastodon users are the rulers, and the non-Mastodon users are the peasants.

The fundamentalists in this sect are those who haven't even heard of Pixelfed, who haven't heard of Flipboard, WordPress, Medium etc. having implemented ActivityPub and joined the Fediverse either. For them, there is nothing in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. Any claim otherwise is heresy. Anything that doesn't behave exactly like vanilla Mastodon is regarded a rogue Mastodon instance that needs to be corrected.

Now you may say, "Let them be, they're harmless." But they aren't. It isn't like they ignore the non-Mastodon parts of the Fediverse. They fight them to make the Fediverse only Mastodon or as close to being only Mastodon as possible. They've defined their own "Fediquette" which is geared towards only vanilla Mastodon, and they try hard to force it upon everyone outside and make them give up their own culture and all features they have that Mastodon doesn't have. Or they actually try to chase non-Mastodon users out of the Fediverse.

You may say I'm kidding. I wish I was. But I'm not.

Ask @crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts, he is on Calckey. A Mastodon user told him to either keep all his posts at 500 characters or fewer or get the fsck out of the Fediverse. That's only the tip of the iceberg for him.

Ask @jakob ?? ✅, he is on Friendica. After telling a Mastodon user that he is not on Mastodon, but on something that is connected to Mastodon, said Mastodon user blocked him for being an evil hacker who used an evil hacker tool to illegally hack himself into the Mastodon Fediverse.

Ask @Hamiller Friendica and @Matthias, both on Friendica, about obnoxious and ignorant Mastodon users.

All this only happens because aspiring Mastodon users apparently have to be mollycoddled to no end. And this mollycoddling absolutely must include not telling them about the existence of a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. They're already inundated to no end by the concept of decentrality and instances, not to mention the prospect of having to pick a Mastodon instance in spite of actually being railroaded to mastodon.social. So apparently, telling them that there's even more stuff connected to all those many Mastodon instances, stuff which isn't even Mastodon, would overload them completely.

What's even worse is that many Mastodon users are in a competition-against-Bluesky mode now. They want Mastodon to beat Bluesky in user numbers at all costs. And this must include making Mastodon even more newbie-friendly, i.e. mollycoddling them even more than already now. This would inevitably involve telling them even less about the true nature of the Fediverse than already now.

The Fediverse is already growing more and more hostile towards non-Mastodon server applications and non-Mastodon users day by day. Cranking up the mollycoddling and the shielding of new users from the mere existence of a Fediverse outside of Mastodon will accelerate this disturbing process more and more.

The key to getting more ? users to join the Fediverse is to give them a super-faithful Twitter clone in the Fediverse of which they don't even notice that it isn't another silo

There's a whole lot of whining going on on Mastodon that millions of people are leaving ? for Bluesky. And not for the Fediverse Mastodon. They should all come to the Fediverse Mastodon instead. Or, yes, the Fediverse. For way too many people, it's exactly the same.

Everyone's wondering why all these people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon. Some say that Mastodon's on-boarding is still too clunky. ?-to-Bluesky converts state that getting into Mastodon is too complicated, what with having to choose an instance, something that Mastodon users can't understand. At least not those who were able to join without being railroaded to mastodon.social.

People want another Twitter

Wanna know why people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon?

They. Want. Twitter.

Without Musk. But otherwise Twitter. Not something entirely different. Something that they already know. Something that they don't have to get used to.

Bluesky gives them pretty much exactly that. A clone of early-2010s Twitter. Including the Web UI, including the mobile app. And including allegedly not having to choose an instance. Apparently, the official Bluesky app has an instance selector now, but otherwise, Bluesky hides the fact that it is actually decentralised now so well that next to nobody even in the Fediverse knows.

For that's the other point: Bluesky doesn't seem to force people to choose an instance because it appears to be the same kind of monolithic, centralist, walled-garden silo as ?. And it's exactly that what people want.

So, bad news: Mastodon will never be as popular as Bluesky. It's too complicated. It doesn't look like Twitter, it doesn't feel like Twitter, and the having-to-choose-an-instance cat is out of the bag.

How to get more ? users into the Fediverse

If we want people to escape from ? to the Fediverse, we need a new Fediverse project for them to join. This time, it has to be an exact copy of early 2020s Twitter, right before Musk bought it out. Only the branding and branding-related terms ("tweet") must be replaced, everything else must be absolutely identical. It must be closer to Twitter than Bluesky. It actually must not have any features that pre-Musk Twitter didn't have.

For simplicity reasons, let's give it the working title "Chirper".

Of course, being in the Fediverse, Chirper should be decentralised itself, and it must be federated with everything else in the Fediverse.

However: The users must not notice any of this. At least not on the lighthouse instance chirper.social which has to be the project website at the same time, and which needs a capacity of at least 3 billion users.

A new level of mollycoddling and fooling users

The users on chirper.social must be mollycoddled much, much more than even on Mastodon. The fact that Chirper itself is decentralised must be hidden from them. If a post comes from Mastodon, it must appear to be from chirper.social. If a post comes from Hubzilla, it must appear to be from chirper.social. If it can't be made to look like from chirper.social, it must be rejected.

Chirper's Fediverse connection must be hidden from the users on chirper.social by all means, including content censorship. Nothing that hints at Chirper being part of the Fediverse must appear on their timelines. Posts about the Fediverse are allowed, but posts about Chirper being connected to the Fediverse must be automatically rejected server-side. Everything that can possibly be done must be done to hide users moving from one Fediverse instance to another while keeping their name from the users on chirper.social.

If need be, Chirper, its developers and the admins and mods on chirper.social must lie to the general public as well as the users on this instance. It's for the latter's own good. Mass media, tech media and bloggers outside of Chirper must be told that Chirper is a centralised, walled-up silo.

Enlightening users who are ready

Now, if someone is deemed "ready", especially if they really wish Chirper was decentralised itself, they will secretly be offered the opportunity to "go down the rabbit hole". If they do so, they'll be given the chance to move to another Chirper instance, a full move based on nomadic identity which their connections on chirper.social won't notice. From then on, their posts will be monitored and censored just the same as everything else from outside chirper.social. If they choose to move to another instance, their mobile app will unlock decentrality features. Mind you, at this point, they'll still be made believe that Chirper is a walled garden. A decentralised walled garden, but a walled garden.

The next step, again, when they're "ready", will be to "go deeper down the rabbit hole". Not before this point will they learn about Chirper being connected to the Fediverse. They'll learn that some of their connections have never been on Chirper in the first place, that they've always communicated with the Fediverse outside of Chirper, even when they were still on chirper.social. If, at this point, nomadic identity via ActivityPub has spread in the Fediverse, and a significant number of projects has implemented it, and these Chirper users desire to get to know other places in the Fediverse, they will be presented an easy UI to clone their Chirper ID to someplace else.

Of course, this will upset Mastodon users. Why didn't all these people join Mastodon instead? Why don't they even know about Mastodon? Why are they intentionally kept unaware that they're connected to Mastodon?

Guess what: This is exactly how many people in the non-Mastodon Fediverse feel like right now already.

If you approach the Fediverse as a social network, it has places with much better onboarding than Mastodon because Mastodon isn't a social network after all

I've come to the realisation that one big onboarding issue in the Fediverse appears after actually getting on board: It's getting connections. For you Mastodon users, that's people to follow first of all so your timeline is no longer silent and then followers so you yourself are being heard.

And I've come to another realisation: Of all server applications in the Fediverse, it's the ones that count as mind-warpingly difficult to use that have an edge over Mastodon here. Mike Macgirvin's creations. Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and the fledgling Forte.

Why Mastodon actually isn't a social network after all

Mastodon makes it unnecessarily hard to get your first connections by largely aping ? or rather pre-Musk Twitter. But ? is not about connections. ? is not a social network. It actually has never been. ? is a microblogging platform. ? is all about content, and it uses "The Algorithm" to serve this content to all its users on a silver platter. It's a murky, unfair, biased algorithm, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Mastodon largely apes ? all the way to some of its shortcomings from a tight character limit to no concept of conversations, and it apes ?'s microblogging platform architecture. But this architecture depends on that very algorithm that Mastodon so staunchly and proudly refuses to implement. On Mastodon, like in most of the Fediverse, if you don't have any contacts, you've pretty much got nothing.

But Mastodon is not about finding contacts. Mastodon is too much of an ?-aping microblogging platform to actually be a social network.

Early Mastodon mostly managed to strive because Mastodon users told other Mastodon users about their Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon. At the climax of the Twitter migration, new Mastodon users had tools that could help them find those whom they had followed on Twitter on Mastodon. But even these tools weren't known by all newbies, and they were too cumbersome to use for those who were used to the Twitter app.

And nowadays, not even these tools exist anymore. People leave Mastodon not because it doesn't look and feel like Twitter, but because it feels dead, because it's so hard to get content on your timeline. Others resort to spending a while indiscriminately following everyone whom they encounter on their federated timeline to at least have the same uninteresting background noise as on ?. But many don't even manage to come up with this idea, or they simply don't know what a "federated timeline" is because ? has none. And even then, nothing interesting happens on their timeline.

Sure, you can follow hashtags. But newbies and even generally not-so-advanced users don't even know you can do that. You can't do that on ? either, after all, so the very idea that this should be possible on Mastodon eludes them because no Mastodon UI actively advertises this feature.

Sure, you can use the search to try and find people with your interests. But that requires active searching. That's cumbersome. On top of it, it requires thinking in hashtags because it only works with hashtags. The vast majority of people coming over from ? to Mastodon have never in their lives used hashtags before. That's also why they fail to find an audience, and that's another reason why they don't follow hashtags. They go on using Mastodon like ?, but this would only work if there was an "Algorithm" forwarding content to users.

If you want content on Mastodon, if you want to be seen on Mastodon, you have to use it like a social network. But Mastodon isn't, technically speaking, a social network. The only reason why people try so hard to use it as a social network is the same reason why people try to use Mastodon as a whole lot of things that Mastodon isn't: because Mastodon is all they know in the Fediverse.

Enter the Facebook alternatives

But fortunately, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has a whole lot more to offer. For example, actual social networking.

What's the world's biggest and most well-known social network? No, not ?. It's Facebook. Say about Facebook what you want, but it has social networking down pat. Unlike ? which is about content, Facebook is about contacts or, as it calls them, "friends". Whereas ? is a soapbox, and whereas Mastodon, by aping ?, is a soapbox, too, Facebook has the "social" aspect deeply engrained in its very DNA.

Now, some of you may say that it'd be great if someone made Facebook for the Fediverse.

But there already is Facebook in the Fediverse. There has been Facebook in the Fediverse since long before Twitter was cloned.

First and foremost, it's Friendica, the oldest surviving Fediverse project. Launched in summer of 2010 when even diaspora* was nothing more than a wild dream and an even wilder crowdfunding campaign, it was designed to be a Facebook alternative. Hubzilla is an all-powerful content management system blistering with features that can be expanded even further. But at its core, it's still the same Friendica fork that it was in 2012 when it was still the Red Matrix. The two newest members of the family, officially nameless (streams) and fledgling Forte, are back to mostly social networking, but give it a more advanced spin while still carrying Friendica's DNA within them.

Unlike Mastodon which has always been an attempt at mimicking Twitter, albeit an incomplete one, Friendica and its descendants have never tried to ape Facebook. Neither did they clone the unnecessary cruft that Facebook had already then, nor did they clone Facebook's data harvesting.

Instead, Friendica added sensible new features, and its descendants kept them. These included enough text and post formatting capabilities to rival not only bulletin-board forums, but full-blown blogging engines, including the use of BBcode markup instead of hiding everything behind a mandatory WYSIWYG interface.

At the same time, they all took over certain features because it made sense to take them over. One was the conversation structure which is the same on Facebook as on Tumblr, on Reddit, in the Usenet, on every blog out there with a comments section and in every Web forum. It draws a distinction between the (start) post and its follow-ups which are considered comments.

Another one was discussion groups which were implemented on Friendica not as a wholly separate feature, but as user accounts with special settings. Hubzilla took them over as channels, and (streams) and Forte still have them. They make discussing certain topics a whole lot easier than Mastodon's fumbling around with hashtags, hoping someone follows them, and murky and unmoderated Guppe groups.

New contacts on a silver platter

But what really helps in onboarding is another feature that Friendica took over from Facebook: contact suggestions. Since you start out with no contacts, you also start out with no content and no interactions. But Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte suggest people to you whom you may want to connect to. If you've taken some time to fill out your profile, especially the keywords field (it's actually a separate profile field on all four), they'll suggest users who have the same keywords as you in their profiles.

Oh, and they can suggest groups or, as they're called from Hubzilla on, forums just the same.

On Mastodon, you have to learn to use the search to find people with e.g. certain interests. Or you have to shout into the void and hope someone hears it. Or you have to indiscriminately follow hundreds or thousands of people on the local or federated timeline and hope there's someone interesting among them. It's you who has to take action.

On the other hand, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte serve you potential new contacts on a silver platter. All you have to do is go where they're being suggested and look through the list. If you like one suggestion, you can connect to them with one click. (At least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, you'll still have to configure the connection to your liking, but you don't have to jump through hoops and use search or copy-paste URLs or IDs to connect in the first place.) And just like on Facebook, if you don't like a suggestion, you also have a button to remove that suggestion from the list. But unlike on Facebook, you won't see that suggestion forced back on you after some time.

Granted, you only get accounts or channels suggested which are known to your home server. And your home server does not know everyone everywhere in the Fediverse. Still, it's a good start, your timeline or stream becomes busy, and you may get some exposure yourself if you're followed back. By the way, users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are more likely to follow you back than Mastodon users because they have to follow you back to let you follow them. As I've said: Connections on these four are always mutual, just like Facebook "friends".

Also, on Hubzilla, this feature is kind of limited. Hubzilla only suggests channels using the one protocol that Hubzilla has built into its core, Zot6. This means that Hubzilla only suggests Hubzilla and (streams) channels. It can't suggest connections using e.g. ActivityPub or the diaspora* protocol, even of you have them enabled.

(streams), on the other hand, has ActivityPub built into its core and on by default for new channels. It suggests ActivityPub-using accounts as well, so you do have e.g. Mastodon users among your suggestions. And Forte is based on ActivityPub itself, so that's a given. It doesn't exclude Hubzilla or (streams) channels because these communicate with Forte via ActivityPub themselves.

Getting to the suggestions is easy enough. On Hubzilla, you first have to go to your connections. Unlike Mastodon, they haven't been stashed away in the settings. They've got their own menu item, and if you want to, you can add the icon to the navigation bar as well. And there you have a link to the suggestions. Each suggestion shows you a bunch of profile fields, more than Mastodon has altogether, including the keywords which are even clickable to filter the list. There's also an estimation on how many connections you have in common with that suggested contact, another Facebook feature. In addition, there's a keyword cloud that can be used for filtering. Also, you can remove channels flagged not safe for work, you can limit your suggestions to channels on your home hub, and you can limit it to public forums.

(streams) and forte make it even easier: They have a small connection suggestions box with two suggestions on the stream page which is the default landing page and akin to Mastodon's personal timeline. (It's possible to add them to Hubzilla's stream page as well, but that isn't exactly what a newbie would do.) The same box can also be found on the connections page, taking the place of Hubzilla's simple link to the connections.

The suggestions themselves are different, too. Even though (streams) and Forte only know mutual connections, they list followers and followed separately on suggested ActivityPub connections. Hashtags in the main profile text are converted to and used as keywords. In addition, keywords that you have in common with a suggested connection are shown in bold type.

In all these cases, connection suggestions are actually a sub-feature of the so-called directory. The directory contains and lists all Fediverse actors known to a server instance, so you can feel free to go and browse these as well. Again, they can be limited to only SFW and/or only local channels and/or only forums. Speaking of forums or groups: (streams) and most likely also Forte even recognise Friendica groups, Guppe groups, Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, NodeBB forums, Flipboard magazines, the Social Web Foundation website etc. as discussion groups. Not even Facebook does anything similar.

Finally

A wide-spread attitude among people who are used to Mastodon is that Mastodon is the Fediverse gold standard, and everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon should become more like Mastodon.

But the Fediverse is widely regarded one big social network. And if there's something in the Fediverse that has actual social networking down pat, that isn't Mastodon. Mastodon is still what it has always been: a Twitter-mimicking microblogging platform. And it's every bit as bad at finding new connections as ? which, by the way, has never been meant to be a social network either.

Sorry to all you Mastodon fans, but: Just like ?, Mastodon is not about people and connections. It is all about content. It has always been all about content.

Still sorry, but: Finding your first connections is vastly easier and more convenient in those places in the Fediverse that are actual social networks, that are Facebook alternatives rather than ? alternatives. And that's Friendica and its nomadic descendants, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

When disabled Fediverse users demand participation in accessibility discussions, but there are no discussions in the first place, and they themselves don't even seem to be available to give accessibility feedback

"Nothing about us without us" is the catchphrase used by disabled accessibility activists who are trying to get everyone to get accessibility right. It means that non-disabled people should stop assuming what disabled people need. Instead, they should listen to what disabled people say they need and then give them what they need.

Just like accessibility in the digital realm in general, this is not only targetted at professional Web or UI developers. This is targetted at any and all social media users just as well.

However, this would be a great deal easier if it wasn't still "without them" all the time.

Lack of necessary feedback

Alt-text and image descriptions are one example and one major issue. How are we, the sighted Fediverse users, supposed to know what blind or visually-impaired users really need and where they need it if we never get any feedback? And we never get any feedback, especially not from blind or visually-impaired users.

Granted, only sighted users can call us out for an AI-generated alt-text that's complete rubbish because non-sighted users can't compare the alt-text with the image.

But non-sighted users could tell us whether they're sufficiently informed or not. They could tell us whether they're satisfied with an image description mentioning that something is there, or whether they need to be told what this something looks like. They could tell us which information in an image description is useful to them, which isn't, and what they'd suggest to improve its usefulness.

They could tell us whether certain information that's in the alt-text right now should better go elsewhere, like into the post. They could tell us whether extra information needed to understand a post or an image should be given right in the post that contains the image or through an external link. They could tell us whether they need more explanation on a certain topic displayed in an image, or whether there is too much explanation that they don't need. (Of course, they should take into consideration that some of us do not have a 500-character limit.)

Instead, we, the sighted users who are expected to describe our images, receive no feedback for our image descriptions at all. We're expected to know exactly what blind or visually-impaired users need, and we're expected to know it right off the bat without being told so by blind or visually-impaired users. It should be crystal-clear how this is impossible.

What are we supposed to do instead? Send all our image posts directly to one or two dozen people who we know are blind and ask for feedback? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who considers this very bad style, especially in the long run, not to mention no guarantee for feedback.

So with no feedback, all we can do is guess what blind or visually-impaired users need.

Common alt-text guides are not helpful

Now you might wonder why all this is supposed to be such a big problem. After all, there are so many alt-text guides out there on the Web that tell us how to do it.

Yes, but here in the Fediverse, they're all half-useless.

The vast majority of them is written for static Web sites, either scientific or technological or commercial. Some include blogs, again, either scientific or technological or commercial. The moment they start relying on captions and HTML code, you know you can toss them because they don't translate to almost anything in the Fediverse.

What few alt-text guides are written for social media are written for the huge corporate American silos. ?, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. They do not translate to the Fediverse which has its own rules and cultures, not to mention much higher character limits, if any.

Yes, there are one or two guides on how to write alt-text in the Fediverse. But they're always about Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. They're written for Mastodon's limitations, especially only 500 characters being available in the post itself versus a whopping 1,500 characters being available in the alt-text. And they're written with Mastodon's culture in mind which, in turn, is influenced by Mastodon's limitations.

Elsewhere in the Fediverse than Mastodon, you have much more possibilities. You have thousands of characters to use up in your post. Or you don't have any character limit to worry about at all. You don't have all means at hand that you have on a static HTML Web site. Even the few dozen (streams) users who can use HTML in social media posts don't have the same influence on the layout of their posts as Web designers have on Web sites. Still, you aren't bound to Mastodon's self-imposed limitations.

And yet, those Mastodon alt-text guides tell you you have to squeeze all information into the alt-text as if you don't have any room in the post. Which, unlike most Mastodon users, you do have.

It certainly doesn't help that the Fediverse's entire accessibility culture comes from Mastodon, concentrates on Mastodon and only takes Mastodon into consideration with all its limitations. Apparently, if you describe an image for the blind and the visually-impaired, you must describe everything in the alt-text. After all, according to the keepers of accessibility in the Fediverse, how could you possibly describe anything in a post with a 500-character limit?

In addition, all guides always only cover their specific standard cases. For example, an image description guide for static scientific Web sites only covers images that are typical for static scientific Web sites. Graphs, flowcharts, maybe a portrait picture. Everything else is an edge-case that is not covered by the guide.

There are even pictures that are edge-cases for all guides and not sufficiently or not at all covered by any of them. When I post an image, it's practically always such an edge-case, and I can only guess what might be the right way to describe it.

Discussing Fediverse accessibility is necessary...

Even single feedback for image descriptions, media descriptions, transcripts etc. is not that useful. If one user gives you feedback, you know what this one user needs. But you do not know what the general public with disabilities needs. And what actually matters is just that. Another user might give you wholly different feedback. Two different blind users are likely to give you two different feedbacks on the same image description.

What is needed so direly is open discussion about accessibility in the Fediverse. People gathering together, talking about accessibility, exchanging experiences, exchanging ideas, exchanging knowledge that others don't have. People with various disabilities and special requirements in the Fediverse need to join this discussion because "nothing about them without them", right? After all, it is about them.

And people from outside of Mastodon need to join, too. They are needed to give insights on what can be done on Pleroma and Akkoma, on Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey and Catodon, on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), on Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed and Sublinks and everywhere else. They are needed to combat the rampant Mastodon-centricism and keep reminding the Mastodon users that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. They are needed to explain that the Fediverse outside of Mastodon offers many more possibilities than Mastodon that can be used for accessibility. They are needed for solutions to be found that are not bound to Mastodon's restrictions. And they need to learn about there being accessibility in the Fediverse in the first place because it's currently pretty much a topic that only exists on Mastodon.

There are so many things I'd personally like to be discussed and ideally brought to a consensus of sorts. For example:

• Explaining things in the alt-text versus explaining things in the post versus linking to external sites for explanations.
  The first is the established Mastodon standard, but any information exclusively available in the alt-text is inaccessible to people who can't access alt-text, including due to physical disabilities.
  The second is the most accessible, but it inflates the post, and it breaks with several Mastodon principles (probably over 500 characters, explanation not in the alt-text).
  The third is the easiest way, but it's inconvenient because image and explanation are in different places.
• What if an image needs a very long and very detailed visual description, considering the nature of the image and the expected audience?
  Describe the image only in the post (inflates the post, no image description in the alt-text, breaks with Mastodon principles, impossible on vanilla Mastodon)?
  Describe it externally and link to the description (no image description anywhere near the image, image description separated from the image, breaks with Mastodon principles, requires an external space to upload the description)?
  Only give a description that's short enough for the alt-text regardless (insufficient description)?
  Refrain from posting the image altogether?
• Seeing as all text in an image must always be transcribed verbatim, what if text is unreadable for some reason, but whoever posts the image can source the text and transcribe it regardless?
  Must it be transcribed because that's what the rule says?
  Must it be transcribed so that even sighted people know what's written there?
  Must it not be transcribed?

...but it's nigh-impossible

Alas, this won't happen. Ever. It won't happen because there is no place in the Fediverse where it could sensibly happen.

Now you might wonder what gives me that idea. Can't this just be done on Mastodon?

No, it can't. Yes, most participants would be on Mastodon. And Mastodon users who don't know anything else keep saying that Mastodon is sooo good for discussions.

But seriously, if you've experienced anything in the Fediverse that isn't purist microblogging like Mastodon, you've long since have come to the realisation that when it comes to discussions with a certain number of participants, Mastodon is utter rubbish. It has no concept of conversations whatsoever. It's great as a soapbox. But it's outright horrible at holding a discussion together. How are you supposed to have a meaningful discussion with 30 people if you burn through most of your 500-character limit mentioning the other 29?

Also, Mastodon has another disadvantage: Almost all participants will be on Mastodon themselves. Most of them will not know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon. At least some will not even know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. And that one poor sap from Friendica will constantly try to remind people that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, but he'll be ignored because he doesn't always mention all participants in this thread. Because mentioning everyone is not necessary on Friendica itself, so he isn't used to it, but on Mastodon, it's pretty much essential.

Speaking of Friendica, it'd actually be the ideal place in the Fediverse for such discussions because users from almost all over the place could participate. Interaction between Mastodon users and Friendica forums is proven to work very well. A Friendica forum can be moderated, unlike a Guppe group. And posts and comments reach all members of a Friendica forum without mass-mentioning.

The difficulty here would be to get it going in the first place. Ideally, the forum would be set up and run by an experienced Friendica user. But accessibility is not nearly as much an issue on Friendica as it is on Mastodon, so the difficult part would be to find someone who sees the point in running a forum about it in the first place. A Mastodon user who does see the point, on the other hand, would have to get used to something that is a whole lot different from Mastodon while being a forum admin/mod.

Lastly, there is the Threadiverse, Lemmy first and foremost. But Lemmy has its own issues. For starters, it's federated with the Fediverse outside the Threadiverse only barely and not quite reliably, and the devs don't seem to be interested in non-Threadiverse federation. So everyone interested in the topic would need a Lemmy account, and many refuse to make a second Fediverse account for whichever purpose.

If it's on Lemmy, it will naturally attract Lemmy natives. But the vast majority of these have come from Reddit straight to Lemmy. Just like most Mastodon users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Mastodon, most Lemmy users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Lemmy. I am on Lemmy, and I've actually run into that wall. After all, they barely interact with the Fediverse outside Lemmy. As accessibility isn't an issue on Lemmy either, they know nothing about accessibility on top of knowing nothing about most of the Fediverse.

So instead of having meaningful discussions, you'll spend most of the time educating Lemmy users about the Fediverse outside Lemmy, about Mastodon culture, about accessibility and about why all this should even matter to people who aren't professional Web devs. And yes, you'll have to do it again and again for each newcomer who couldn't be bothered to read up on any of this in older threads.

In fact, I'm not even sure if any of the Threadiverse projects are accessible to blind or visually-impaired users in the first place.

Lastly, I've got some doubts that discussing accessibility in the Fediverse would even possible if there was a perfectly appropriate place for it. I mean, this Fediverse neither gives advice on accessibility within itself beyond linking to always the same useless guides, nor does it give feedback on accessibility measures such as image descriptions.

People, disabled or not, seem to want perfect accessibility. But nobody wants to help others improve their contributions to accessibility in any way. It's easier and more convenient to expect things to happen by themselves.

Could it be that AI can image-describe circles even around me? And that the only ones whom my image descriptions satisfy are Mastodon's alt-text police?

I think I've reached a point at which I only describe my images for the alt-text police anymore. At which I only keep ramping up my efforts, increasing my description quality and declaring all my previous image descriptions obsolete and hopelessly outdated only to have an edge over those who try hard to enforce quality image descriptions all over the Fediverse, and who might stumble upon one of my image posts in their federated timelines by chance.

For blind or visually-impaired people, my image descriptions ought to fall under "better than nothing" at best and even that only if they have the patience to have them read out in their entirety. But even my short descriptions in the alt-text are too long already, often surpassing the 1,000-character mark. And they're often devoid of text transcripts due to lack of space.

My full descriptions that go into the post are probably mostly ignored, also because nobody on Mastodon actually expects an image description anywhere that isn't alt-text. But on top of that, they're even longer. Five-digit character counts, image descriptions longer than dozens of Mastodon toots, are my standard. Necessarily so because I can't see it being possible to sufficiently describe the kind of images I post in significantly fewer characters, so I can't help it.

But it isn't only about the length. It also seems to be about quality. As @Robert Kingett, blind points out in this Mastodon post and this blog post linked in the same Mastodon post, blind or visually-impaired people generally prefer AI-written image descriptions over human-written image descriptions. Human-written image descriptions lack effort, they lack details, they lack just about everything. AI descriptions, in comparison, are highly detailed and informative. And I guess when they talk about human-written image descriptions, they mean all of them.

I can upgrade my description style as often as I want. I can try to make it more and more inclusive by changing the way I describe colours or dimensions as much as I want. I can spend days describing one image, explaining it, researching necessary details for the description and explanation. But from a blind or visually-impaired user's point of view, AI can apparently write circles around that in every way.

AI can apparently describe and even explain my own images about an absolutely extreme niche topic more accurately and in greater detail than I can. In all details that I describe and explain, with no exception, plus even more on top of that.

If I take two days to describe an image in over 60,000 characters, it's still sub-standard in terms of quality, informativity and level of detail. AI only takes a few seconds to generate a few hundred characters which apparently describe and explain the self-same image at a higher quality, more informatively and at a higher level of detail. It may even be able to not only identify where exactly an image was created, even if that place is only a few days old, but also explain that location to someone who doesn't know anything about virtual worlds within no more than 100 characters or so.

Whenever I have to describe an image, I always have to throw someone in front of the bus. I can't perfectly satisfy everyone all the same at the same time. My detailed image descriptions are too long for many people, be it people with a short attention span, be it people with little time. But if I shortened them dramatically, I'd have to cut information to the disadvantage of not only neurodiverse people who need things explained in great detail, but also blind or visually-impaired users who want to explore a new and previously unknown world through only that one image, just like sighted people can let their eyes wander around the image.

Apparently, AI is fully capable of actually perfectly satisfying everyone all the same at the same time because it can convey more information with only a few hundred characters.

Sure, AI makes mistakes. But apparently, AI still makes fewer mistakes than I do.

#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI

August 31st: Mike Macgirvin has resigned from maintaining the streams repository and let the community take over

@Fediverse News

Today, on August 31st, 2024, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ has officially resigned from maintaining the streams repository. He won't shut it down, and he said he will add contributors if anyone wants to contribute, but he won't actively work on it anymore.

No link to the the source because the source is private.

The streams repository is the home of an intentionally nameless, brandless, public-domain Fediverse server application which its community semi-officially refers to as (streams). Its features include, but are not limited to:

• federation via Nomad, Zot6 (Hubzilla) and ActivityPub (optionally, but on by default)
• multiple independent channels/identities on the same account/login
• nomadic identity
• virtually unlimited character count
• full blogging-level text formatting using BBcode, Markdown and/or HTML, including in-line images
• advanced, extensive permission controls for privacy and security second to none in the Fediverse, customisable for each individual contact with 15 permission settings
• optional individual word filters per contact
• optional automatic reader-side content warning generator
• support for flagging images sensitive for Mastodon
• built-in file space with WebDAV connectivity per channel
• built-in, headless CardDAV and CalDAV servers per channel

(streams) is the latest stable release in a family of server applications that started in 2010 with a decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark, now known as Friendica.

The evolution in the family started in 2011 when Mike invented the concept of nomadic identity, the simultaneous existence of the same Fediverse identity with the same content on multiple server instances, to help overcome the issue of server instances shutting down and their users losing everything. It was first implemented in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012 which was turned into Hubzilla in 2015.

The streams repository came into existence in October, 2021, with a whole tree of eight forks between it and Hubzilla since 2018. Just a few weeks ago, Mike forked it into a new project named Forte, almost nothing about which is known yet, and which is probably very experimental, seeing as Mike has been working on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub as of late.

There hasn't been any statement about Forte's future either, but Mike is known to pass stable, daily-driver projects on to the community when he starts something new, such as Friendica in 2012 when he started working on Red and Hubzilla in 2018 when he started working on Osada and Zap. And as small as (streams) may be, seeing as it's sitting in roughly the same niche as Friendica and Hubzilla, it has become a stable daily driver for about a couple dozen users.

(streams) won't go away, but its development will slow down dramatically because new maintainers have yet to be found, and until now, Mike has pretty much done all the work on it. It will probably take longer for the dust to fully settle after (streams) has introduced portable objects as per FEP-ef61 on its way to nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Also, @silverpill, the maintainer of Mitra which currently is the only other Fediverse software to implement FEP-ef61, will have other and more people to talk to.