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2026-02-01 13:05:12

Walrus@toot.wales

@benroyce

I think this is exactly the right approach to #AltText for this sort of material, even though it does exclude the people #AltText is for. I imagine some screen readers could cope with the images, but don't know. I can extract text from them, but I'm quite nerdy...

2026-02-01 14:06:16

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩 That's actually a problem if you're on vanilla Mastodon with only 500 characters per toot and only 1,500 characters of alt-text per image. Your only chance would be to spread the transcripts across a massive thread.

If you regularly have to post images with well over 1,500 characters of text in them, you could move elsewhere in the Fediverse that offers more characters, but that's still federated with Mastodon. Examples:

Misskey has a hard-coded limit of 3,000 characters.
Sharkey has a configurable limit that defaults to 3,000 characters.
Pleroma and Akkoma have configurable limits that default to 5,000 characters.
Friendica and Hubzilla (I'm commenting from the latter right now) are limited to over 16.7 million characters by their databases.
(streams) (where I post my images nowadays) and Forte are limited to over 24 million characters.

On all of these, you could put text transcripts into the post text body and maybe mention in the alt-text that the texts in the images are transcribed in the post itself.

The downside of this, however, is that your posts will exceed 500 characters. And this means you'll lose a whole lot of reach. There are lots and lots of Mastodon users who block everyone who ever posts over 500 characters at once at first strike because they want Mastodon/the Fediverse to be and remain a 100% pure microblogging "service" with no more than 500 characters.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Sharkey #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters

2026-02-01 16:38:04

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Walrus@toot.wales

@jupiter_rowland

Useful comparison, thanks!

I just put stuff that's too big on my blog, and link to it, but not everyone has that luxury.

2026-02-01 16:49:26

Pino Carafa

rozeboosje@masto.ai

@jupiter_rowland for that reason I created 2 accounts. This one has the standard 500 character limit, my @rozeboosje@fedi.at one allows me to post the occasional longer toot with up to 5,000 characters, and then I boost those posts through this account.

Why would one block accounts that sometimes post longer toots, though? A "tl;dr" approach to my toots certainly wouldn't upset me.

2026-02-01 19:11:19

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Pino Carafa

Why would one block accounts that sometimes post longer toots, though?

Because people are invited to Mastodon with no word that it's connected to something that isn't Mastodon. That'd make things too complicated.

So they join Mastodon and the Fediverse, thinking that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Nothing but a decentralised microblogging platform with no more than 500 characters.

For quite a while, all they see is vanilla Mastodon toots with no more than 500 characters. "Quite a while" may be anything from two months to four years to even more. So they get used to the Fediverse being only Mastodon and not having more than 500 characters.

But then, the more people they follow and the more people follow them back, the more people do they follow who don't live in a Mastodon-only bubble. This means two things:

These other people will boost content that exceeds 500 characters to their timelines.
Their own toots end up outside Mastodon where people see them who don't have 500-character limits. And they reply to their toots with no regards for Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules. In other words, with over 500 characters.

In other words: They suddenly get "toots" (that aren't toots because they aren't from Mastodon) onto their timelines that are way too long. As in over 500 characters.

And they completely. Flip. Their. Shit.

Of course, they don't know that this particular "toot" is from Friendica. A place in the Fediverse that's over five and a half years older than Mastodon, with its own culture that's vastly different from Mastodon's, and with 33,000+ times more characters than Mastodon.

And they don't care. They only want their only-Mastodon, only-500-characters Fediverse back that they got used to, that they learned to love.

Besides, they don't know about third-party apps. That, and/or they couldn't possibly wrap their minds around using Mastodon with an app that isn't named "Mastodon". Thus, they daily-drive the official Mastodon app.

However, the official Mastodon app is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse where nothing exceeds 500 characters. It can't fold long posts in. You get a 10,000-character message onto your timeline, and the official Mastodon app will show you the full 10,000-character "essay", full stop.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta