@Szescstopni

What is too long/too short?

There can't be any fixed definition for that. Not here in the Fediverse.

The "Over 200 characters is too long" rule does not work in and can't be applied to the Fediverse. No, sorry, it can't. I've explained it in my (very early WIP) wiki about image descriptions and alt-text in the Fediverse: How are alt-text and image descriptions in the Fediverse different from other places? (tl;dr: On the Web, over 200 characters in alt-text are evil, but you've got captions, and you've got ample of other possibilities to describe an image than the alt-text. On Mastodon, you've only got the alt-text for image descriptions, and people cheer for 1,000-character alt-texts.)

Depending on a) the kind of image you post, b) the obscurity of its contents, c) your audience (including whoever might stumble upon your image post; if you post in public, that's basically the whole Fediverse and everyone with Web access), d) their knowledge about what your image shows and e) their to-be-expected curiosity about what your image shows, you may have to describe your image in way more than 200 characters.

This was the last time I've posted an image here on Hubzilla. It's a rendering from within a super-obscure 3-D virtual world. Next to nobody has ever seen it, but due to this being a 3-D virtual world (= proof that "the Metaverse is surprisingly not dead"), curiosity may be high. And my impression of especially Mastodon is that people prefer being given any and all information they may need right away to having to ask. Like, ask what something specific looks like.

And so the image description in the alt-text is a bit over 1,400 characters long. And it's still very lacking. It doesn't even mention certain elements in the image. And it doesn't transcribe even only one bit of text. It's actually an extremely shortened version of the long image description in the post text itself. Over 60,000 characters of visual description and necessary explanations and text transcripts. That's over 10,000 words. That's probably over three hours of a screen reader rambling. That's two full days of me examining the place up-close, looking up additional information and writing the description. But I deemed it necessary.

If it was an absolute requirement for me to a) cut the alt-text down to a maximum of 200 characters and b) cut the long description altogether, lots and lots and lots of information would be lost, including all text transcripts.

I must learn more about the rules of the capitalization police.

If you use a hashtag like #⁠superbowl, how is NVDA or any other screen reader software supposed to know whether that means "Super Bowl" or "superb owl"?

Thus, any new word in a multiple-word hashtag must be capitalised so that screen readers know that this is where a new word starts.

There are two ways of doing this.

One is camel case. Camel case is the lazy variant: The first word is not capitalised, all other words are. #⁠oneTwoThree

The other one is Pascal case, named after the programming language Pascal. Pascal case is the prettier variant: All words are capitalised. #⁠OneTwoThree

Oops, I shouldn't have posted those images in replies as public. Anyway, 833 out of 836 images with alttext ain't so bad.

Replying to a public post with a DM isn't supported everywhere in the Fediverse anyway. This only works on purist microblogging server applications on which a thread is just a bunch of posts tied together with mentions.

It does not, however, work on more elaborate Fediverse server applications like Hubzilla (where I'm commenting from right now), (streams) and Forte. On these, a thread is an enclosed object with exactly one post, the start post, and otherwise comments. They have a highly complex permissions system in which all permissions in a conversation are defined by the post. If the post is public, all comments are public, full stop. So if you had replied to this otherwise 100% public, 100% Mastodon thread with a DM, then Hubzilla would have monkey-wrenched your DM into a public comment with a red padlock symbol for a permission conflict.

CC: @Stefan Bohacek

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #CamelCase #PascalCase #Permissions

@Karen E. Lund Would you lose points for very long alt-texts/image descriptions?

I tend to describe my original images in extremely high details. Recently (for any definition of "recently" because I haven't posted a single image in over a year due to the huge effort of describing them), my alt-texts tend to reach 1,500 characters or one or a few below that. At least ca. 900 characters are actual image descriptions, sometimes up to ca. 1,400.

And that's what I consider a "short" description. Because the rest of the alt-text explains where to find the "long" description. It's in the post itself. It includes verbatim transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not. And it includes all explanations which I deem necessary for everyone to understand my images.

This long description exceeds any known arbitrarily defined character limit anywhere in the Fediverse by magnitudes. I can post such long image descriptions because the only character limit I have here on Hubzilla is the maximum size of the database field for the post text.

Yes, you've read that right. I describe each one of my original images twice.

And I must write my image descriptions that long. I don't post real-life photos, nor do I post social media screen shots. I post renderings from extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Maybe one in 200,000 Fediverse users has even only heard of the technology that drives them.

Thus, I cannot assume anything in my images to be familiar to anyone out there. I can't assume that anyone out there knows what anything in my images looks like, also because my images tend to contain things which simply do not exist in real life in any shape or form.

At the same time, my impression is that especially Mastodon users expect all information which they don't have to be served on a silver platter immediately with the image description. If you mention something in your image, and somebody doesn't know what it looks like, you're obliged to describe it right away. Expecting anyone to ask you anything about your image after the fact feels like being considered ableist. I mean, you could just as well expect people to ask you to describe the whole image in the first place, right?

Same goes for explanations. Given the choice between looking stuff up themselves, being given links where they can look stuff up and being explained everything right there, right then, Mastodon users appear to greatly prefer the latter and only consider the latter really accessible.

And I have to explain a lot. When I tell you where I've taken an image, this alone takes me more characters than some of you use for a whole day's worth of alt-texts. The whole topic is so obscure that I have to explain explanations of explanations.

My personal record (warning: technically outdated image descriptions): 1,500 characters of alt-text, 1,400+ of which are image description; 60,000+ characters of long description for one image. That's about 10,000 words. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the image descriptions. It takes a screen reader about three hours to read the long description out loud. But someone somewhere out there might be interested in all this information and displeased if they had to ask me about it to get it.

As for bilinguality, I should add to my WIP wiki on image descriptions and alt-texts that an alt-text must never include more than one image because screen readers cannot switch between languages mid-alt-text.

What I do, and I'm not even sure if that's such a good idea, is transcribe text in images that is not in English verbatim, literally letter by letter, and then translate it into English as closely as possible. I'm torn between a verbatim transcript which a screen reader cannot read out correctly and only giving a translation which would not be a verbatim transcript.

In fact, I've once had a situation in which I had to transcribe a sign in English, (broken) German and French. So I gave

• a 100% verbatim transcript of the English text
• a 100% verbatim transcript of the German text, all mistakes included
• an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible
• a 100% verbatim transcript of the French text
• an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible

Nowadays, I'd simply avoid posting images with non-English text anywhere in it like the plague.

CC: @Kim Possible :kimoji_fire: @Jayne

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

Are you referring to my mentions being @Erik :heart_agender: and @Roknrol rather than what you're used to, namely @⁠bright_helpings and @⁠roknrol? Using the long name rather than the short name and keeping the @ outside the link rather than making it part of the link? Likewise, the # being outside the hashtag link rather than being part of it?

This is because I'm not on Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been. So this is not a toot.

No, really. This is what I post from: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland, https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/profile/jupiter_rowland. I ask you: Does this look like Mastodon? Have you ever seen Mastodon look like this?

Where I am, this style of mentions and hashtags is hard-coded. And it has been since long before Mastodon was even an idea.

I'm on something named Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon at all.

It is its very own project, fully independent from Mastodon (https://hubzilla.org, https://framagit.org/hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla).

Hubzilla has not intruded into "the Mastodon Fediverse" either. The Fediverse is older than Mastodon. And Hubzilla was there before Mastodon.

Hubzilla was launched by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in March, 2015, eight months before Mastodon, by renaming and redesigning his own Red Matrix from 2012, almost four years before Mastodon. And the Red Matrix was a fork of a fork of his own Friendica, which was launched on July 2nd, 2010, 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon. (https://en.wikipedia.org/Friendica, https://friendi.ca, https://github.com/friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica)

Friendica was there before Mastodon, too.

Here's the official Friendica/Hubzilla timeline on Hubzilla's official website to show you that I'm not making anything up: https://hubzilla.org/page/info/timeline. Scroll all the way down and notice all the features that you may right now know for a fact that the Fediverse doesn't have, but that Friendica has introduced to the Fediverse 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.

Again, Mastodon has never been its own network. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. When Mastodon was launched in January, 2016, it immediately federated with

• GNU social, the successor to @Evan Prodromou's StatusNet from 2008 (the actual start of the Fediverse, eight years older than Mastodon)
• @Mike Macgirvin ?️'s Friendica, now maintained by @Tobias and @Michael
• @Mike Macgirvin ?️'s Hubzilla

Friendica has been formatting mentions and hashtags the way I just did for 15 years now. When Mastodon was launched, Friendica has been formatting them that way for five and a half years already, and Hubzilla has done so for ten months. It is hard-coded there. It is not a user option.

That's because not everything in the Fediverse is a Twitter clone or Twitter alternative. [b]Friendica was designed as a Facebook alternative with full-blown long-form blogging capability. And Hubzilla adds even more stuff to this. This is why Friendica and Hubzilla don't mimic Twitter.

Another shocking fact: As you can clearly see here, Friendica and Hubzilla don't have Mastodon's 500-character limit. Friendica's character limit is 200,000. Hubzilla's character limit is 16,777,215, the maximum length of the database field. And it's deeply engrained in their culture, which is many years older than Mastodon's culture, to not worry about the length of a post exceeding 500 characters.

One more shocking fact: Friendica has had quote-posts since its very beginning. So has Hubzilla. Both have always been able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot, and they will forever remain able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot. And Mastodon will never be able to do anything against it. (By the way: In 15 years of Friendica, nobody has ever used quote-posts for dogpiling or harassment purposes. Neither Friendica nor Hubzilla is Twitter.)

You find this disturbing? You think none of this should exist in the Fediverse, even though all this has been in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon?

Then go ahead and block all instances of Friendica and Hubzilla as well as all instances of Mike's later creations, (streams) (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams) from 2021 and Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) from 2024.

• https://friendica.fediverse.observer/list
• https://fedidb.com/software/friendica
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=friendica
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=friendica
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=friendica
• https://hubzilla.fediverse.observer/list
• https://fedidb.com/software/hubzilla
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://rumbly.net/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=forte
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=forte
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=forte

Or you could go ask @Seirdy / DM me the word "bread" and @Garden Fence Blocklist as well as @Mad Villain of @The Bad Space to add every last instance on any of these lists to their blocklists for being "rampantly and unabashedly ableist and xenophobic by design" due to not being and acting and working like Mastodon and just as rampantly and unabashedly refusing to fully adopt and adapt to the Mastodon-centric "Fediverse culture" as defined by fresh Twitter refugees on Mastodon in mid-2022 as well as refusing to abandon their own culture which is disturbingly incompatible with Mastodon's. Essentially try and have four entire Fediverse server applications Fediblocked once and for all because they're so disturbing from a "Fediverse equals Mastodon" point of view.

Or you could go to Mastodon's GitHub repository (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon), submit a feature request for defederating Mastodon from everything that isn't Mastodon by design and then go lobbying for support for your feature request.

As for why I have so many hashtags below my comments, here is what they mean. Many of them are meant to trigger filters, including such that automatically hide posts behind content warning buttons, a feature that Mastodon has had since October, 2022, that Friendica has had since July, 2010, and that Hubzilla has had since March, 2015.

• #Long, #LongPost = This post is over 500 characters long. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
• #CWLong, #CWLongPost = CW: long post (over 500 characters long). Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
• #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta = This post talks about the Fediverse. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
• #CWFediMeta, #CWFediverseMeta = CW: Fediverse meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
• #NotOnlyMastodon, #FediverseIsNotMastodon, #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse: This post talks about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. Create a filter for either or multiple or all of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. Otherwise, click or tap any of these hashtags to read more about it in your Fediverse app.
• #Friendica: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Friendica. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Hubzilla: This post talks about the Swiss army knif of the Fediverse named Hubzilla. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Hubzilla. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Streams, #(streams): This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse commonly referred to as (streams). Create a filter for either or both of them if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap either of them to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Forte: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Forte. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Forte. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #AltText = This post talks about alt-text and/or contains an image with alt-text. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
• #AltTextMeta = This post talks about alt-text. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
• #CWAltTextMeta = CW: alt-text meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
• #ImageDescription = This post talks about image descriptions and/or contains an image with an image description. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
• #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta = This post talks about image descriptions. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
• #CWImageDescriptionMeta = CW: image description meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
• #Hashtag, #Hashtags, #HashtagMeta = This post talks about hashtags. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
• #CWHashtagMeta = CW: hashtag meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
• #CharacterLimit, #CharacterLimits = This post is talking about character limits. It is primarily meant for post discovery. But if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about character limits, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
• #QuotePost, #QuoteTweet, #QuoteToot, #QuoteBoost = This post talks about quote-posts and/or contains a quote-post. If this disturbs you, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
• #QuotePosts, #QuoteTweets, #QuoteToots, #QuoteBoosts, #QuotedShares = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
• #QuotePostDebate, #QuoteTootDebate = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
• #FediblockMeta = This post is talking about fediblocks. It is primarily meant for post discovery.

Lastly: Having all hashtags in one line at the very end of a post that only contains hashtags is the preferred way in the Fediverse. For one, hashtags in their own line at the end of the post irritate screen reader users much less than hashtags in the middle of the text. It's actually hashtags in the middle of the text that are ableist. Besides, Mastodon is explicitly designed to have a separate hashtag line at the end of the post.