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Fri, 17 May 2024 03:40:01 +0200

tallship

tallship@public.mitra.social

This Should be *a huge conversation in the #Fediverse - really.

@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?

Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.

Well, #A11Y is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.

It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, #Privacy_Mining, monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".

Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.

Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an #instabanhammer, and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.

Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of #smolweb, single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.

Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).

RE: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/9e481d2a-72a6-4f4a-bad8-b72cf6272327

@jupiter_rowland

Jupiter Rowland schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Thu, 16 May 2024 11:04:21 +0200

Discussing Fediverse accessibility isn't possible anywhere. Now I know. Try your best to prove me wrong.

You can't really discuss anything on Mastodon because Mastodon isn't made for discussions and completely unfit for group discussions. Besides, you can't really discuss the greater Fediverse with people who only know Mastodon, and who want Mastodon's culture as it is right now applied all over the Fediverse instead of questioned and discussed.

You can't discuss Fediverse accessibility anywhere else either. That's because you'll end up amongst people who don't know Mastodon beyond having read that name somewhere, who often actually don't even care. And yes, this includes the Fediverse community on lemmy.world. Judging by that name, you should expect people to know something about the Fediverse. Turned out all they know beyond the name is Lemmy and maybe /kbin.

Also, users on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) take accessibility in the Fediverse for just another stupid fad from Mastodon if they learn about its existence.

On Lemmy, they don't even know about its existence. In fact, since both Reddit and Lemmy don't provide the means to make posts accessible, the very concept of end users making their own content accessible is so incredibly alien and unimaginable to Lemmy users that they automatically assume everyone who starts talking about accessibility is a developer.

Mastodon: "Why, of course, everything has to go into the alt-text! How could you even possibly question this? This is how we've always done it, and it's impossible to do any differently anyway. What do you mean, you can post over 500 characters? What do you mean, you aren't on Mastodon? And you've been on something that isn't Mastodon all the time? So it's a Mastodon fork? What do you mean, it isn't a Mastodon fork either?"

Friendica: "We aren't Mastodon, and Mastodon is dumb anyway. Besides, Friendica's alt-text is buggy. Don't bother. Do your own thing."

Hubzilla: "Mastodon does what? Really? And you say it's mandatory there? Meh. Just another fad they try to push upon everyone else. We won't let them push it upon us. Can Hubzilla even do alt-text? One more good reason to keep PubCrawl off."

(streams): "Mastodon and everything else that goes against the ActivityPub standard can go burn in hell."

Lemmy: "You want to do what? Put alt-text in a social media post? Not a social media frontend that you're developing, but... in... a frigging post?! Wait, you're not a dev after all? How could you even do that if you aren't a dev? You can't do that here on Lemmy. So you're saying they do that on Mastodon? Really? WTF? Like, why would they do that? Who needs that? What do you mean, it's mandatory there? Really? It is? You're saying you can be, like, banned for not doing something that's technically impossible on Lemmy? WTH?! This can't possibly be real!"

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #A11y #Accessibility

Fri, 17 May 2024 10:26:25 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@tallship Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.

On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.

For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).

And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.

If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do? Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.

It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.

This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"

On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.

They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.

If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.

At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.

Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.

The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.

However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.

There's a Lemmy community named "Fediverse". "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right? People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about?

Hahahaha... no.

Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.

If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.

If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.

At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.

So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts?

Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.

And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #A11y #Accessibility

Sat, 18 May 2024 04:06:53 +0200

ZeStig

zstg@fedia.social

@jupiter_rowland @tallship @tallship Iceshrimp (or at least the instance I'm on - fedia.social, has a good 11000 character limit per toot. That's more than enough imo. It's Mastodon which has a much smaller limit.