Jupiter Rowland

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Duothematic channel. Primary topic is virtual worlds/OpenSim, secondary topic is the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Follow me from Mastodon or anywhere else in the Fediverse.

Ort:: The Hypergrid

Geschlecht:: Männlich

Homepage:: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/profile/jupiter_rowland

Sat, 04 May 2024 19:39:03 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

It was most likely a reply guy who told you that the Fediverse is not Mastodon; CW: Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, mansplaining mentioned, reply guys mentioned

Artikel ansehen

Fediverse

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Sat, 04 May 2024 20:40:53 +0200

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

It was most likely a reply guy who told you that the Fediverse is not Mastodon; CW: Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, mansplaining mentioned, reply guys mentioned

Artikel ansehen

Sat, 04 May 2024 20:53:57 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BeAware :veriweed: How often have you been scolded or blocked on the spot? Or how often has anyone complained about your behaviour?

Sat, 04 May 2024 20:58:46 +0200

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

@jupiter_rowland I've never been scolded or complained about AFAIK. But, then again, I'm not doing it to everyone. I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've done it in the 10 months I've been here.?‍♂️

I try not to bother myself with blocks though, honestly. If someone blocks me, that's their problem. They're immediately in my past and I don't really think about it.

Sat, 04 May 2024 21:03:01 +0200

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

@jupiter_rowland have you ever had these things happen to you??

Sat, 04 May 2024 21:43:44 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BeAware :veriweed: I can't say I haven't.

Not even half of the times, I get a reply. Some people actually act irritated. And I'm certain that I've been blocked just today, and that probably wasn't the only time.

But what I mostly talk about in these situations is the Fediverse beyond Mastodon and things like image descriptions.

Sat, 04 May 2024 21:46:57 +0200

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

@jupiter_rowland now I'm really curious, what about image descriptions? Does mastodon do it very differently?

Sat, 04 May 2024 23:17:38 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BeAware :veriweed: On the one hand, there's describing images the Mastodon way. It may range from one-liners to descriptions that almost reach 1,500 characters which are seen as absolutely massive and incredibly detailed. But they always go into the alt-text, explanations included. "Image description" and "alt-text" are mutually synonymous on Mastodon. Nobody ever questions that. After all, posts can contain no more than 500 characters.

However, this is mostly geared towards fairly simple real-life photographs which contain lots of elements that don't have to be described because they're uninteresting, and that don't have to be explained because everyone's fairly familiar with them.

And then there's the attitude that any alt-text is better than no alt-text and the idea that AI can describe any and all pictures well enough or even perfectly already now. The latter, of course, comes from people only using AI on simple real-life photographs or social media screenshots.

Those who are on Mastodon not only see these things as given, but they can't imagine them possibly being any different.

On the other hand, I break all these rules.

For one, here on Hubzilla, I don't have a limit for post text, nor do I have a limit for alt-text which has to be grafted into the post text anyway. That is, alt-text is kind of limited because even Hubzilla can only show so much, and it can't scroll through alt-text. Besides, Mastodon, Misskey and all their mutual forks cut off alt-texts from outside at the 1,500-character mark and permanently discard anything that goes beyond. So alt-text remains limited to 1,500 characters.

But posts remain unlimited. If I put an image description into the post text, I can make it as long as I want to or as I have to. And in fact, explanations don't belong into alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text, and any information only available in alt-text is inaccessible and therefore lost to those who can't.

That's important because my image descriptions have to go with a whole lot of explanation.

That, in turn, is because the pictures I post are nothing like what you'd normally find on Mastodon.

They aren't real-life photographs. They're renderings from inside 3-D virtual worlds. Extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds even; I'm not talking about VRchat or Roblox. The whole system is known to probably not more than one in 200,000 Fediverse users, and particular places may be known to not even one in a million Fediverse users. Chances are I'm the only one in over ten million Fediverse users who knows that particular place where an image is from.

This means two things.

One, almost nobody who comes across my image posts knows anything about anything in these pictures. They don't get the pictures at all. And blind or visually-impaired users wouldn't even know what what's in the pictures looks like if I told them what's in the pictures.

Two, on the other hand, people could pretty well be interested in them. After all, I'm talking about something that has been referring to itself as a "metaverse" regularly since early 2007. "The Metaverse" is real, it's living, breathing, much to everyone's surprise. It's got nothing to do with Meta Platforms. And there has to be cool stuff in it if it's worth showing in-world pictures.

So people might become so curious about this discovery that they want to know as much as they can. But they know nothing, so they don't get the images in the first place if these images don't come with extensive explanations and descriptions.

This is the main reason why my image descriptions grow so massively long. I've explained it in this article.

And with "massively long", I mean tens of thousands of characters. My most recent example is a post with only one image, but over 25,000 characters of description and explanation, and although it's the most up-to-date, I'm not even satisfied with it. Two posts with multiple images each and even longer descriptions for the respectively first one, albeit a bit more out-dated, are here and here.

As you may be able to see, what I do is: I write a fairly short, purely visual description to have at least some description in the alt-text so nobody can complain that the alt-text doesn't actually describe the image. Also, the alt-text mentions that the actual, more detailed and explanatory image description is in the post text, including where and how to find it. That's because I'd never post something of that length with a summary/content warning, so for users on ActivityPub-based microblogging projects, the full image description is hidden.

Not only has nobody ever done anything like this on Mastodon, but it's completely unimaginable because it isn't even possible on the vast majority of instances. My longest picture post is way longer than 150 Mastodon toots.

This gives me experiences with image descriptions that nobody else has ever made, especially not on Mastodon. Those many Mastodon users who "know" it's set in stone that the Mastodon way is the only way sometimes deserve to read about someone else's completely different point of view.

In fact, this becomes a necessity whenever Mastodon users want to establish image-describing standards that a) only apply to Mastodon with its limitations and b) only apply to the kind of image content that's usually posted on Mastodon, but that'd be completely and utterly incompatible with my images and my way of describing them to the point of rendering my image descriptions invalid.

But there may also be other cases in which I differ from the general Mastodon way of thinking.

Memes, for example. Memes in posts should always be described accordingly and explained if necessary. From this, I deduce that template-based memes require explanations of the templates used. At the same time, I know that the majority of Fediverse users prefers having all information in the same place as the image itself over having to get extra information from another website which, for mobile users, means from a different app.

In summary, this means that template-based memes require explanations that go even beyond KnowYourMeme because KnowYourMeme relies on linking to other pages on the same site, e.g. to explain things like 4chan, SomethingAwful, Wojak, snowclones or advice animals. But since the Fediverse prefers to have it all in one place, all these extra explanations have to be woven into the meme description and explanation specific to this particular meme. Nobody on Mastodon has ever thought of this.

Another example is the recurring talk about describing the automatically-selected image in a Mastodon link preview. It's important to know here that it's next to impossible to tell which image from which link will be picked as the preview image, if any. Also, while Hubzilla has a preview feature for posts in the making, it does not have link previews.

Not only does this mean that the link preview image on Mastodon will have to be identified and described after sending the post, but Hubzilla users will have to go to a Mastodon instance and wait until their images have federated there before they can edit the post and describe the image. This, of course, is a greater effort and takes longer than for Mastodon users who can see the link preview in their own timelines immediately or shortly after posting. In the meantime, the post will spend even more time spreading around Mastodon with no image description, and many many more people will see it without an image description, and they might react accordingly, not expecting an image description to be added rather soon.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:07:42 +0200 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 May 2024 08:11:33 +0200

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

@jupiter_rowland that took me awhile to read so I had to put it off for awhile. I read through it and it is definitely interesting, but honestly a lot of it just goes over my head past a certain point. But I do see your frustrations on things like post limits and alt text character limits and such. (However, you can customize those on every instance pretty easily.)It's really unfortunate because at this point, I'm not sure those types of things will be changed. That train might have left the station and Mastodon probably won't look back at it.

It sucks, but let's be honest, it's not like Eugen is gonna be listening to any criticism regarding proprietary features like that. Don't think he ever has.?‍♂️

Sun, 05 May 2024 09:19:21 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BeAware :veriweed:

but honestly a lot of it just goes over my head past a certain point.

That's what I mean when I say I write about an extremely obscure niche topic, and I always have a lot to explain for people to get my images.

Unfortunately, the whole topic is probably so special-interest that I have to shove too much down people's throats to give them even only the basics. They might not understand the images either way.

But I do see your frustrations on things like post limits and alt text character limits and such.

It isn't so much the technology. It doesn't make much of a difference whether Mastodon cuts my 40,000-character image description off at the 1,500-character mark, or whether Hubzilla lets me read only the first 3,500 characters because there's only so much vertical space in my browser window.

The full description goes into the post text either way because it contains explanations that are necessary for people to understand the image, and people e.g. with a severe tremor who can't move a mouse steadily or with a head pointer that they poke around on a keyboard with can't read it when it's in the alt-text because they can't access alt-text.

And when it's in the post text, Mastodon won't cut it off at the 500-character mark and throw the excess 39,500 characters away. If anything, it rejects posts with over 100,000 characters altogether AFAIK.

I know that Pleroma and Akkoma reject posts over 50,000 characters, and I suspect Misskey and the Forkeys to reject even shorter posts. But nobody in my primary audience is on either of these.

The problem is rather the culture. It's a culture that's cultivated on Mastodon and on Mastodon only, that disregards the rest of the Fediverse and how it's different because nobody knows, but that is being forced upon that self-same rest of the Fediverse regardless. If your home instance is connected to Mastodon, you play by Mastodon's unofficial rules or else.

Sad, but true: The rules of one Mastodon instance don't apply to all connected Mastodon instances all the same. They apply to the local timeline, but not to the federated timeline. Other instances may have contradicting rules, and no instance admin is going to enforce rules that apply to other instances, but not their own one.

At the same time, however, Mastodon's overarching unwritten cultural rules do apply to the federated timeline because they apply to all Mastodon instances. And they're forced upon everything that isn't Mastodon all the same.

That's partly because Mastodon users don't even notice when something doesn't come from Mastodon, partly because some of those who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon still believe that everything that isn't Mastodon is either an alternative UI for Mastodon with a couple extra features (Akkoma or Iceshrimp or Friendica is for the Web what Mona or Tusky is for the phone) or bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on otherwise, and it's partly because whoever is the biggest is the boss, and because Mastodon users tend to think Mastodon was there first.

Mastodon's culture includes not only a sufficient description for each image you post, but you're expected to put the full description into the alt-text and only into the alt-text. This comes from adequately describing images in the post text being technically impossible on vanilla Mastodon with only 500 characters minus the actual post text, minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus even content warning.

So for one, Mastodon users expect an image description in the alt-text. That's why I describe each image twice, once with a few hundred characters in the alt-text, once with thousands upon thousands of characters in the post text.

Besides, I expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated when they discover that I've put a detailed image description into the post text rather than into the alt-text where they expect it. Yes, there's an image description in the alt-text. But why is there a longer one in the post text? Why isn't the long one in the alt-text where it belongs by Mastodon's standards? Why do I refuse to do things like they're done on Mastodon?

Okay, so my full image description is too long for alt-text. But why don't I make it shorter then? Nobody on Mastodon writes image descriptions that are several thousand characters long. Why don't I write image descriptions like Mastodon users?

Also: While Mastodon is fully capable of importing and displaying posts that are tens of thousands of characters long, many many Mastodon users are very opposed to posts longer than 500 characters. They're technically possible, but they're culturally disliked and frowned upon. This mostly applies to those who use the official Mastodon app that can't fold long posts in and expand them if you want to read them, but it isn't limited to those users.

It's another cultural thing: Mastodon cannot post over 500 characters, so Mastodon users aren't used to over 500 characters, so nobody anywhere in the Fediverse must post over 500 characters. Mastodon users actually keep tooting that they want filters which remove everything over 500 characters from their timelines.

And not exactly rarely, they take matters into their own hands. If they spot a post with over 500 characters in their personal timeline, they block the poster upon first strike, but not necessarily without complaining to the user first. Some go as far as doing that when they see a post with over 500 characters in the federated timeline.

In fact, I expect entire Mastodon instances to have blocked non-Mastodon users instance-wide because some local user felt disturbed about their over-500-characters posts and asked the moderation to step in. There may even be instances, not even exactly small ones, that go as far as blocking the entire offending instance.

For these reasons, for me, posting images while having connections all over Mastodon is like treading on raw eggs. I spend 13 hours describing an image in 40,000 characters just to give a casual bystander audience a chance to understand them. I post that thing. A few people may find it helpful. To many, it makes no difference in practice because they don't read my image description. And then there's the unknown number of Mastodon users who take countermeasures or have countermeasures taken by admins/mods because my gargantuan image post disturbs them and/or goes against Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #500Characters #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 11:05:24 +0200

not exactly, no

a masto instance like wetdry world (well technically they use chuckya and not base masto) is directly affiliated with non-masto instances like lethal lava land which uses sharkey, a misskey fork

akkoma and misskey (forks) are also generally popular with queer communities on fedi because they also have the capacity for stuff like emoji reacts, misskey flavoured markdown, and quote posts, with the first two not really being that common anywhere else (though i have heard friendica might have emoji reacts)

in my specific case my first fedi instance was an akkoma instance (though i'm probably an exception rather than the norm there)