Could be wrong, or just more domain-specific, bu my experience is people don’t complain that the video is 15-30 minutes long, is that it’s a video (and that long) when the information could have been more succintly and practically displayed in a text tutorial or a blog format.

Which is kind of interesting, considering it wasn’t that long ago that people asked for tutorials and other information in the shape of videos because they couldn’t be bothered to read shit.

Defederation all by itself isn’t bad.

Immature and irresponsible instance admins who use it as a tool to act out their personal conflicts are.

Decentralisation could very well lead to specialised instances for niche interests or fringe groups. I mean, exactly this has popped up during the first two Twitter migration wave.

And still, you’ve got countless people who want mastodon.social to be exactly the way they want it to be, regardless of what anyone else may want, or what’s possible on such a big instance. Because that’s where they are, and they are not going to move elsewhere.

There are two kinds of people who claim that Mastodon is the best.

One, absolute fanbois and fangurls who, in addition, don’t even know that Pleroma, Misskey or any forks of either exist, much less what they’re like. Their point is always “biggest = most popular = best”, although they themselves, like almost everyone on Mastodon, were railroaded onto Mastodon without being told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon, even in terms of microblogging.

I’m not even kidding when I say the UX on the *keys is closer to Twitter than that on Mastodon. And at the same tiime, the *keys show what Fediverse projects something comes from whereas Mastodon tries hard to make everyone believe that the Fediverse is Mastodon.

Two, Mastodon devs. I’ve actually had a Mastodon developer who knew that I’m on Hubzilla comment into my face that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete Fediverse project. I could have inquired him about Mastodon support for one or two dozen Hubzilla features, ranging from full HTML rendering over nomadic identity and WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV connectivity to a built-in wiki engine. But I didn’t.

What really needs contributors are the streams repository and probably also Forte. They’re very powerful, they’re highly advanced, they’re secure and resilient, they’re basically what the whole Fediverse should be like, and they can blow not only Mastodon out of the water, but also Pleroma, Misskey and all their forks. But they only have half a maintainer at best because their creator has officially retired.

Allow me to elaborate:

These are the youngest offspring of a family of roughly Facebook-like Fediverse server applications created by Mike Macgirvin. They started in 2010 with Mistpark, later Friendika, now known as Friendica. The focus has never been on aping the UI/UX of something commercial and centralised, like Lemmy apes Reddit, but to create a replacement that’s actually better. Toss out stuff that sucks, add features that could be useful like full-blown blogging capability, including blogging-level text formatting, and a built-in file space with its own file manager.

The next in the family was a 2012 Friendica fork originally named Red that introduced the concept of nomadic identity. As of now, and outside developer instances, nomadic identity is a feature exclusive to Mike’s creations. Red became the Red Matrix, and in 2015, it was renamed and redesigned into Hubzilla, a “decentralised social CMS” and the Fediverse’s biggest feature monster.

What followed was a whole bunch of forks, mostly development forks, only one of which was officially declared stable. This led to the creation of the streams repository in October, 2021. It’s a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, but the first fork already lost many of Hubzilla’s extra features and a lot of Hubzilla’s connectivity.

The streams repository contains a Fediverse server application that is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless (“streams” is the name of the repository, not the name of the application), that is not a product, that is not a project, and that is just as intentionally released into the public domain, save for 3rd-party contributions inherited from Hubzilla that are under various free licenses.

While (streams), as it is colloquially called, may not have Hubzilla’s wealth of features, it has to be one of the two most advanced pieces of Fediverse software out there. With its permissions system that is even improved over Hubzilla’s, hardly anything can match it in safety, security and privacy. On top comes resilience through nomadic identity. Also, (streams) is more adapted to a Fediverse that’s driven by ActivityPub and dominated by Mastodon whereas Hubzilla seems stuck in the mid-2010s in some regards.

At this point, it should be mentioned that while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can communicate through ActivityPub, none of them is based on it. AFAIK, Friendica is still based on its own protocol, DFRN, which is used by nothing else. Hubzilla is based on an older version of the Nomad protocol known as Zot6. (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad and also understands Zot6 for the best possible connectivity with Hubzilla.

So one of the latest development goals for the streams repository was the introduction of nomadic identity via ActivityPub, a concept that first appeared in 2023. I’m not sure how far this has been developed. But Mike created a new (streams) fork named Forte in August this year which had all support for non-ActivityPub protocols removed, probably also to cut down the maze of ID for everything which blew up on (streams) when support for FEP-ef61 was pushed to the release branch in July. Also, Forte has a name, it has a brand, it has a license, it has fully functional nodeinfo, and it is a project. Otherwise, Forte is identical to (streams).

Currently, there is only one Forte instance with one user, and that’s Mike’s private channel which mostly only his friends know about. Forte can be considered very experimental at this point, at least until Mike declares it ready for prime-time. After all, Forte has to handle nomadic identity via ActivityPub which, so far, is only proven to work under developer lab conditions at best.

However, there isn’t much going on in terms of development. After the hassle that was getting malfunctioning (streams) back on track this summer, Mike officially retired from Fediverse development at the turn from August to September. He hasn’t quit entirely, but he only works on (streams) and Forte sparsely. At the same time, the (streams) community was and still is too small to have a willing and able developer amongst themselves, and Forte has no community.

According to Mike, Forte could (and should) be “the Fediverse of 2030”. It only needs more people working on it.

The EFF is too big and thus too unflexible to quickly realise that

• there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon
• in fact, Mastodon itself is more than mastodon.social
• what else there is in the Fediverse is federated with Mastodon
• which means that if you join something else than Mastodon, all the same people who follow you on Mastodon can follow you there as well
• many of Mastodon’s limitations don’t exist in the Fediverse outside Mastodon

I mean, it should give you to think that the official Fediverse representation of the EFF is on mastodon.social. Like they’re still total Fediverse newbies. Like they’ve only just gotten past the “not worth joining the Fediverse, there’s literally nobody there” phase.

I think such organisations should all have a total Fediverse whiz amongst their members who knows the Fediverse outside Mastodon inside-out, and who has significant influence because people in the organisation actually listen to them.

The EFF is in a perfect situation right now: They don’t have their own Fediverse instance. So if they wanted to set up something that isn’t Mastodon, like Friendica or Hubzilla which would be much better for organisations like these, they wouldn’t have to discard and shut down a Mastodon instance of their own, only give up an account on mastodon.social.

You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?

Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I’ve never used Twitter.

A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are “powerful”, “complex”, but also “unusual”.

Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn’t all that Hubzilla can do.

If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.

There’s little that you couldn’t possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don’t even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).

Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn’t become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.

Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a “channel”. And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.

For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they’re eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)

Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don’t even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.

The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla’s killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.

Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.

Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.

Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won’t take your channel with it. You’ll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.

But don’t expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It’s nothing like Reddit, it’s nothing like Twitter has ever been, and it’s nothing like most of the rest of the Fediverse. The closest would be (streams), a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork)? of Hubzilla itself, and everything in this chain is/was by the same creator. Followed by Friendica and Forte, still by the same creator, and Forte’s only instance is currently the private instance of said creator. But everything else in the Fediverse is nothing like Hubzilla.

First newbie obstacle: You can’t follow anyone on Mastodon. Or almost anywhere else in the Fediverse. That’s because ActivityPub is optional, and it’s off by default so that your new channel only supports that one nomadic protocol at first. Non-nomadic protocols kind of disturb nomadic identity, mostly because you have to re-connect non-nomadic contacts manually, one by one. And back when Hubzilla was made, it was actually a tempting idea to run a purely nomadic channel.

To add to the difficulty, there is no ActivityPub switch in the settings. ActivityPub is an “app” that needs to be “installed”. Hubzilla is very modular, and so are its channels where not all its features are enabled by default.

And then there’s the permissions system. Something like this exists nowhere in the Fediverse that isn’t made by the Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte creator Mike Macgirvin. Not even Friendica has it to such an extent. It’s extensive, it’s fine-grained, and it’s powerful.

But unlike everything in the Fediverse not created by Mike, it does not default to “everything is allowed to everyone unless muted or blocked”. Its default settings are still geared towards 2012 when it was still named Red (from spanish la red = the network), when the Federation, the precursor of the Fediverse, was still small, and four years before Mastodon was launched. In those days, the idea of a purely Red/Red Matrix/Hubzilla network that offers a maximum of privacy, safety and security was not too far-fetched.

And so, by default, certain things are disallowed unless explicitly allowed to certain contacts by means of contact role. By default, your posts all only go to a privacy group (think Mastodon lists on more coke and even more 'roids) instead of to everyone. Before you can really get going, you’ll have to install multiple apps of which you don’t know what they do and adjust things of which you don’t know that they exist, much less what they’re for. It takes months to become a halfway routined user, and it takes years to be come a power user who realises that setting everything to public is actually stupid, and who knows how to tone down the settings again while not keeping your existing contacts out.

Yeah, the UI/UX is far from top notch. But keep in mind that Hubzilla is a fork of Friendica. Which is from 2010. In 2010, social networks and social media were still mostly geared towards the desktop, and phone apps were gimmicks rather than bare necessities. Both Friendica and Hubzilla were created by only one person. And he’s a protocol designer and not a full-stack Web developer. Mike can make UIs work, but he can’t make them as pretty as what Apple whips up.

Hubzilla is very themeable, but it currently has only got one official theme. Its name “Redbasic” indicates its origin: Red. As in Hubzilla, three years before it was Hubzilla. 2012. It hasn’t changed much since then, except it became more configurable with Hubzilla 9 this year.

There used to be more themes, but even after the community took over from Mike in 2018, Hubzilla never had more than two core developers. And, again, it’s an utter monster. The devs invested most of their time into the vast backend, consisting of the core and the more essential apps. Over time, not only several apps fell to the wayside (including a chess game which was dropped in 2020 because of a big protocol upgrade), but so did all themes except Redbasic. The devs only had time to upgrade one theme to new or changed features, and so the other themes became incompatible and were eventually dropped.

Brand-new third-party themes are in the making, and a few will soon be rolled out. But I wouldn’t count on them being included into every new Hubzilla installation, much less all existing hubs.

Speaking of apps: There’s no official Hubzilla app, neither for iOS nor for Android. There’s one app for Android named Nomad. It’s only available on F-Droid. And it hasn’t been updated in a whopping five years. On more recent devices, it doesn’t even work anymore. And, in fact, it’s a Web app. It integrates Hubzilla’s Web interface instead of having everything on a dedicated, native mobile UI. In other words, there aren’t that many advantages of using Nomad over using a browser.

There’s also a very, very, very bare-bone Android app, I think it was made by Hubzilla’s main dev, that can only post to Hubzilla and nothing else. You can’t even use it to read anything. It isn’t available in any app store.

The best you can do if you want to use Hubzilla on a phone is install it as a Progressive Web App.

Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.

Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a “Facebook killer” in development.

They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.

Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today’s diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.

Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be “like Facebook, but way better”. With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.

By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don’t sink into some data nirvana.

Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.

Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora*'s aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora*, and calls them lists.

Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.

But Friendica’s biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can “federate” via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an 𝕏 account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.

The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you’re on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they’re all over the place.

misskey.io is a Japanese instance under Japanese law. With pretty lax rules, and only under Japanese law. Which means that just about everything in the West blocks misskey.io, and I think misskey.io doesn’t let Westerners join.

Why?

Because lolicon is allowed on misskey.io.

Thing is, lolicon may or may not count as CSAM by Western standards. Western lawmakers haven’t decided about it yet, hence “may or may not”. But “may or may not” may mean “yes, it is”.

And so, to be safe, Western instances block the hell out of misskey.io to keep what may or may not be CSAM from coming in. Remember that Mastodon caches any and all media. One lolicon post being washed up on Mastodon.social may be enough for Gargron to end up behind bars for “having child pr0n on his Web server”.

In Japan, on the other hand, lawmakers have decided. Lolicon is not CSAM, and it’s legal.

Thus, misskey.io, being hosted in Japan under Japanese law and only Japanese law, allows lolicon all over the place.

No. You can’t crosspost to two or more Lemmy communities at once. AFAICS, that’s fully deliberate and intentional by design to keep people from spamming Lemmy with mass-crossposts.

What it fixes is trouble with crossposting to Lemmy, Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) and Guppe groups. You can’t mention these in any order you like. You always have to begin with one Lemmy community. If a Lemmy community is not mentioned first, it will be ignored, no matter what is mentioned first.

Also, apparently, mentioning Guppe groups before a Friendica group, a Hubzilla forum or a (streams) group doesn’t work either.

Sorting Hat for Lemmy?

Always post in this format:

Thread title
(Blank line)
@Lemmy_community @Friendica_group/Hubzilla_forum/(streams)_group @Guppe_group (optionally more Guppe groups)
(Blank line)
Post body

It literally started in 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.

If you’re looking for something that is to Facebook what Bluesky is to pre-Musk Twitter, it doesn’t exist.

Otherwise, “the Facebook ones” are:

• Friendica (intended to be a Facebook alternative from the very beginning, designed to federate with everything that moves)
• Hubzilla (fork of (a fork of?) Friendica by Friendica’s own creator, currently the most powerful piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, basically a federated Swiss army knife that can do Facebook as well)
• the nameless thing in the streams repository (not in this graph, fork of a fork of a fork of a fork… of Hubzilla by Friendica’s and Hubzilla’s creator, less feature-laden than Hubzilla, but more modern and evolving at a rapid pace, the most advanced piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, but instances are hard to find)

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.

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.

That’s a bit more complicated than I thought.

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.

I intend to keep posting them on Hubzilla (official website).**

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.

Ultimately, I haven’t seen your posts/toots.

Here’s my most recent image post from yesterday.

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:

• #alttext, #alttxt
• #imagedescription, #imagedescriptions
• #bildbeschreibung, #bildbeschreibungen, #bibesch

Also, check the posts from @alttexthalloffame.

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.

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.

That’s an understatement. It’s nothing more than another link dump that doesn’t look like anyone wants to actually discuss something. And even as such, it’s almost dead. Like, one post in two months.

Also, it looks more like for “how do I, as a full-stack developer, make my Web app accessible” than for “how do I, as an end user, make my image posts accessible”. But I’m looking for the latter.

And, preferably, I’m looking for someplace where I don’t first have to explain most of the Fediverse to everyone because all they know is Lemmy (if it’s on Lemmy), or because all they know is Mastodon (if it’s on Mastodon or glued onto Mastodon like Guppe).

Would you happen to know why that is?

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.

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.