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.

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Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already.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.

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.

Also, not everything has Mastodon-style reports built in. Not sure about modern-day Friendica, but AFAIK, Hubzilla and (streams) don’t.

So if you’re on Mastodon, you report a Hubzilla user on their home hub, and nothing happens, that doesn’t mean that moderation is neglected to such degrees that Fediblocking the whole hub is justified. It doesn’t mean either that Hubzilla’s culture is so much different from Mastodon’s although it is.

It simply means that Hubzilla doesn’t understand Mastodon reports.

Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.

There’s no discussion taking place.

Mastodon is horribly bad for discussions because the more people discuss something, the more mentions have to eat away on the 500-character limit.

Instead, there seems to be total consent for how things are done on Mastodon right now. Even though this way of doing things a) doesn’t work in niche situations unknown to Mastodon users and b) make no sense if you take away Mastodon’s limitations, e.g. everywhere else in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. Nope, no questioning the Mastodon way. How could you even.

A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.

As I’ve already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it’s pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn’t Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.

One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can’t post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, “alt-text” and “image description” are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It’s like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.

If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that’d actually make.

Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren’t even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can’t be discussed in glorified tweets.

Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.

Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.

Ideally, I’d discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone’s needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.

I don’t just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.

I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.

I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.

And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.

I wasn’t talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.

I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.

Thing is, on Mastodon, it’s pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone’s just got “the Mastodon way” stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.

And everywhere that isn’t Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it’s another stupid Mastodon fad.

That’s what I have mostly got on my mind.