The key to getting more 𝕏 users to join the Fediverse is to give them a super-faithful Twitter clone in the Fediverse of which they don't even notice that it isn't another silo

There's a whole lot of whining going on on Mastodon that millions of people are leaving 𝕏 for Bluesky. And not for the Fediverse Mastodon. They should all come to the Fediverse Mastodon instead. Or, yes, the Fediverse. For way too many people, it's exactly the same.

Everyone's wondering why all these people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon. Some say that Mastodon's on-boarding is still too clunky. 𝕏-to-Bluesky converts state that getting into Mastodon is too complicated, what with having to choose an instance, something that Mastodon users can't understand. At least not those who were able to join without being railroaded to mastodon.social.

People want another Twitter

Wanna know why people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon?

They. Want. Twitter.

Without Musk. But otherwise Twitter. Not something entirely different. Something that they already know. Something that they don't have to get used to.

Bluesky gives them pretty much exactly that. A clone of early-2010s Twitter. Including the Web UI, including the mobile app. And including allegedly not having to choose an instance. Apparently, the official Bluesky app has an instance selector now, but otherwise, Bluesky hides the fact that it is actually decentralised now so well that next to nobody even in the Fediverse knows.

For that's the other point: Bluesky doesn't seem to force people to choose an instance because it appears to be the same kind of monolithic, centralist, walled-garden silo as 𝕏. And it's exactly that what people want.

So, bad news: Mastodon will never be as popular as Bluesky. It's too complicated. It doesn't look like Twitter, it doesn't feel like Twitter, and the having-to-choose-an-instance cat is out of the bag.

How to get more 𝕏 users into the Fediverse

If we want people to escape from 𝕏 to the Fediverse, we need a new Fediverse project for them to join. This time, it has to be an exact copy of early 2020s Twitter, right before Musk bought it out. Only the branding and branding-related terms ("tweet") must be replaced, everything else must be absolutely identical. It must be closer to Twitter than Bluesky. It actually must not have any features that pre-Musk Twitter didn't have.

For simplicity reasons, let's give it the working title "Chirper".

Of course, being in the Fediverse, Chirper should be decentralised itself, and it must be federated with everything else in the Fediverse.

However: The users must not notice any of this. At least not on the lighthouse instance chirper.social which has to be the project website at the same time, and which needs a capacity of at least 3 billion users.

A new level of mollycoddling and fooling users

The users on chirper.social must be mollycoddled much, much more than even on Mastodon. The fact that Chirper itself is decentralised must be hidden from them. If a post comes from Mastodon, it must appear to be from chirper.social. If a post comes from Hubzilla, it must appear to be from chirper.social. If it can't be made to look like from chirper.social, it must be rejected.

Chirper's Fediverse connection must be hidden from the users on chirper.social by all means, including content censorship. Nothing that hints at Chirper being part of the Fediverse must appear on their timelines. Posts about the Fediverse are allowed, but posts about Chirper being connected to the Fediverse must be automatically rejected server-side. Everything that can possibly be done must be done to hide users moving from one Fediverse instance to another while keeping their name from the users on chirper.social.

If need be, Chirper, its developers and the admins and mods on chirper.social must lie to the general public as well as the users on this instance. It's for the latter's own good. Mass media, tech media and bloggers outside of Chirper must be told that Chirper is a centralised, walled-up silo.

Enlightening users who are ready

Now, if someone is deemed "ready", especially if they really wish Chirper was decentralised itself, they will secretly be offered the opportunity to "go down the rabbit hole". If they do so, they'll be given the chance to move to another Chirper instance, a full move based on nomadic identity which their connections on chirper.social won't notice. From then on, their posts will be monitored and censored just the same as everything else from outside chirper.social. If they choose to move to another instance, their mobile app will unlock decentrality features. Mind you, at this point, they'll still be made believe that Chirper is a walled garden. A decentralised walled garden, but a walled garden.

The next step, again, when they're "ready", will be to "go deeper down the rabbit hole". Not before this point will they learn about Chirper being connected to the Fediverse. They'll learn that some of their connections have never been on Chirper in the first place, that they've always communicated with the Fediverse outside of Chirper, even when they were still on chirper.social. If, at this point, nomadic identity via ActivityPub has spread in the Fediverse, and a significant number of projects has implemented it, and these Chirper users desire to get to know other places in the Fediverse, they will be presented an easy UI to clone their Chirper ID to someplace else.

Of course, this will upset Mastodon users. Why didn't all these people join Mastodon instead? Why don't they even know about Mastodon? Why are they intentionally kept unaware that they're connected to Mastodon?

Guess what: This is exactly how many people in the non-Mastodon Fediverse feel like right now already.

If you approach the Fediverse as a social network, it has places with much better onboarding than Mastodon because Mastodon isn't a social network after all

I've come to the realisation that one big onboarding issue in the Fediverse appears after actually getting on board: It's getting connections. For you Mastodon users, that's people to follow first of all so your timeline is no longer silent and then followers so you yourself are being heard.

And I've come to another realisation: Of all server applications in the Fediverse, it's the ones that count as mind-warpingly difficult to use that have an edge over Mastodon here. Mike Macgirvin's creations. Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and the fledgling Forte.

Why Mastodon actually isn't a social network after all

Mastodon makes it unnecessarily hard to get your first connections by largely aping 𝕏 or rather pre-Musk Twitter. But 𝕏 is not about connections. 𝕏 is not a social network. It actually has never been. 𝕏 is a microblogging platform. 𝕏 is all about content, and it uses "The Algorithm" to serve this content to all its users on a silver platter. It's a murky, unfair, biased algorithm, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Mastodon largely apes 𝕏 all the way to some of its shortcomings from a tight character limit to no concept of conversations, and it apes 𝕏's microblogging platform architecture. But this architecture depends on that very algorithm that Mastodon so staunchly and proudly refuses to implement. On Mastodon, like in most of the Fediverse, if you don't have any contacts, you've pretty much got nothing.

But Mastodon is not about finding contacts. Mastodon is too much of an 𝕏-aping microblogging platform to actually be a social network.

Early Mastodon mostly managed to strive because Mastodon users told other Mastodon users about their Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon. At the climax of the Twitter migration, new Mastodon users had tools that could help them find those whom they had followed on Twitter on Mastodon. But even these tools weren't known by all newbies, and they were too cumbersome to use for those who were used to the Twitter app.

And nowadays, not even these tools exist anymore. People leave Mastodon not because it doesn't look and feel like Twitter, but because it feels dead, because it's so hard to get content on your timeline. Others resort to spending a while indiscriminately following everyone whom they encounter on their federated timeline to at least have the same uninteresting background noise as on 𝕏. But many don't even manage to come up with this idea, or they simply don't know what a "federated timeline" is because 𝕏 has none. And even then, nothing interesting happens on their timeline.

Sure, you can follow hashtags. But newbies and even generally not-so-advanced users don't even know you can do that. You can't do that on 𝕏 either, after all, so the very idea that this should be possible on Mastodon eludes them because no Mastodon UI actively advertises this feature.

Sure, you can use the search to try and find people with your interests. But that requires active searching. That's cumbersome. On top of it, it requires thinking in hashtags because it only works with hashtags. The vast majority of people coming over from 𝕏 to Mastodon have never in their lives used hashtags before. That's also why they fail to find an audience, and that's another reason why they don't follow hashtags. They go on using Mastodon like 𝕏, but this would only work if there was an "Algorithm" forwarding content to users.

If you want content on Mastodon, if you want to be seen on Mastodon, you have to use it like a social network. But Mastodon isn't, technically speaking, a social network. The only reason why people try so hard to use it as a social network is the same reason why people try to use Mastodon as a whole lot of things that Mastodon isn't: because Mastodon is all they know in the Fediverse.

Enter the Facebook alternatives

But fortunately, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has a whole lot more to offer. For example, actual social networking.

What's the world's biggest and most well-known social network? No, not 𝕏. It's Facebook. Say about Facebook what you want, but it has social networking down pat. Unlike 𝕏 which is about content, Facebook is about contacts or, as it calls them, "friends". Whereas 𝕏 is a soapbox, and whereas Mastodon, by aping 𝕏, is a soapbox, too, Facebook has the "social" aspect deeply engrained in its very DNA.

Now, some of you may say that it'd be great if someone made Facebook for the Fediverse.

But there already is Facebook in the Fediverse. There has been Facebook in the Fediverse since long before Twitter was cloned.

First and foremost, it's Friendica, the oldest surviving Fediverse project. Launched in summer of 2010 when even diaspora* was nothing more than a wild dream and an even wilder crowdfunding campaign, it was designed to be a Facebook alternative. Hubzilla is an all-powerful content management system blistering with features that can be expanded even further. But at its core, it's still the same Friendica fork that it was in 2012 when it was still the Red Matrix. The two newest members of the family, officially nameless (streams) and fledgling Forte, are back to mostly social networking, but give it a more advanced spin while still carrying Friendica's DNA within them.

Unlike Mastodon which has always been an attempt at mimicking Twitter, albeit an incomplete one, Friendica and its descendants have never tried to ape Facebook. Neither did they clone the unnecessary cruft that Facebook had already then, nor did they clone Facebook's data harvesting.

Instead, Friendica added sensible new features, and its descendants kept them. These included enough text and post formatting capabilities to rival not only bulletin-board forums, but full-blown blogging engines, including the use of BBcode markup instead of hiding everything behind a mandatory WYSIWYG interface.

At the same time, they all took over certain features because it made sense to take them over. One was the conversation structure which is the same on Facebook as on Tumblr, on Reddit, in the Usenet, on every blog out there with a comments section and in every Web forum. It draws a distinction between the (start) post and its follow-ups which are considered comments.

Another one was discussion groups which were implemented on Friendica not as a wholly separate feature, but as user accounts with special settings. Hubzilla took them over as channels, and (streams) and Forte still have them. They make discussing certain topics a whole lot easier than Mastodon's fumbling around with hashtags, hoping someone follows them, and murky and unmoderated Guppe groups.

New contacts on a silver platter

But what really helps in onboarding is another feature that Friendica took over from Facebook: contact suggestions. Since you start out with no contacts, you also start out with no content and no interactions. But Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte suggest people to you whom you may want to connect to. If you've taken some time to fill out your profile, especially the keywords field (it's actually a separate profile field on all four), they'll suggest users who have the same keywords as you in their profiles.

Oh, and they can suggest groups or, as they're called from Hubzilla on, forums just the same.

On Mastodon, you have to learn to use the search to find people with e.g. certain interests. Or you have to shout into the void and hope someone hears it. Or you have to indiscriminately follow hundreds or thousands of people on the local or federated timeline and hope there's someone interesting among them. It's you who has to take action.

On the other hand, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte serve you potential new contacts on a silver platter. All you have to do is go where they're being suggested and look through the list. If you like one suggestion, you can connect to them with one click. (At least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, you'll still have to configure the connection to your liking, but you don't have to jump through hoops and use search or copy-paste URLs or IDs to connect in the first place.) And just like on Facebook, if you don't like a suggestion, you also have a button to remove that suggestion from the list. But unlike on Facebook, you won't see that suggestion forced back on you after some time.

Granted, you only get accounts or channels suggested which are known to your home server. And your home server does not know everyone everywhere in the Fediverse. Still, it's a good start, your timeline or stream becomes busy, and you may get some exposure yourself if you're followed back. By the way, users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are more likely to follow you back than Mastodon users because they have to follow you back to let you follow them. As I've said: Connections on these four are always mutual, just like Facebook "friends".

Also, on Hubzilla, this feature is kind of limited. Hubzilla only suggests channels using the one protocol that Hubzilla has built into its core, Zot6. This means that Hubzilla only suggests Hubzilla and (streams) channels. It can't suggest connections using e.g. ActivityPub or the diaspora* protocol, even of you have them enabled.

(streams), on the other hand, has ActivityPub built into its core and on by default for new channels. It suggests ActivityPub-using accounts as well, so you do have e.g. Mastodon users among your suggestions. And Forte is based on ActivityPub itself, so that's a given. It doesn't exclude Hubzilla or (streams) channels because these communicate with Forte via ActivityPub themselves.

Getting to the suggestions is easy enough. On Hubzilla, you first have to go to your connections. Unlike Mastodon, they haven't been stashed away in the settings. They've got their own menu item, and if you want to, you can add the icon to the navigation bar as well. And there you have a link to the suggestions. Each suggestion shows you a bunch of profile fields, more than Mastodon has altogether, including the keywords which are even clickable to filter the list. There's also an estimation on how many connections you have in common with that suggested contact, another Facebook feature. In addition, there's a keyword cloud that can be used for filtering. Also, you can remove channels flagged not safe for work, you can limit your suggestions to channels on your home hub, and you can limit it to public forums.

(streams) and forte make it even easier: They have a small connection suggestions box with two suggestions on the stream page which is the default landing page and akin to Mastodon's personal timeline. (It's possible to add them to Hubzilla's stream page as well, but that isn't exactly what a newbie would do.) The same box can also be found on the connections page, taking the place of Hubzilla's simple link to the connections.

The suggestions themselves are different, too. Even though (streams) and Forte only know mutual connections, they list followers and followed separately on suggested ActivityPub connections. Hashtags in the main profile text are converted to and used as keywords. In addition, keywords that you have in common with a suggested connection are shown in bold type.

In all these cases, connection suggestions are actually a sub-feature of the so-called directory. The directory contains and lists all Fediverse actors known to a server instance, so you can feel free to go and browse these as well. Again, they can be limited to only SFW and/or only local channels and/or only forums. Speaking of forums or groups: (streams) and most likely also Forte even recognise Friendica groups, Guppe groups, Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, NodeBB forums, Flipboard magazines, the Social Web Foundation website etc. as discussion groups. Not even Facebook does anything similar.

Finally

A wide-spread attitude among people who are used to Mastodon is that Mastodon is the Fediverse gold standard, and everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon should become more like Mastodon.

But the Fediverse is widely regarded one big social network. And if there's something in the Fediverse that has actual social networking down pat, that isn't Mastodon. Mastodon is still what it has always been: a Twitter-mimicking microblogging platform. And it's every bit as bad at finding new connections as 𝕏 which, by the way, has never been meant to be a social network either.

Sorry to all you Mastodon fans, but: Just like 𝕏, Mastodon is not about people and connections. It is all about content. It has always been all about content.

Still sorry, but: Finding your first connections is vastly easier and more convenient in those places in the Fediverse that are actual social networks, that are Facebook alternatives rather than 𝕏 alternatives. And that's Friendica and its nomadic descendants, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Surprising revelation: Virtual world users don't necessarily want their avatar to be their digital self. In fact, they don't necessarily only want to have one avatar.

During the Metaverse hype of 2022, you could often read statements like, "In the future, everyone will have an avatar."

This practically always meant that everyone would have one avatar. This avatar would be their digital twin, as close to their real-life self as possible. And, as New World Notes point out, [url=]Horizons is entirely based on this idea.

Mark Zuckerberg had Meta Horizons, what most people think "The Metaverse" refers to, designed around this idea. And with hardly any way to deviate from it. He wants Horizons to be 3-D Facebook with everyone having an avatar on Horizons, only one avatar, and that avatar must be the digital representation of their real-life selves. Just like he wants everyone to be themselves on Facebook by having nicknames banned early on. Horizons was and still is planned to become 3-D Facebook.

This, however, is one out of several signs that Zuckerberg doesn't know anything about virtual worlds. As shown in the link above, Zuckerberg knows that there has been something called Second Life, but I'm not sure whether he knows that Second Life still exists. And he definitely doesn't know what Second Life is like. Even though Cory Ondrejka, who is behind Facebook's acquisition of Oculus, used to be a Linden himself. But Zuck doesn't care what people say. He knows everything better. He isn't the Meta CEO and a multi-billionnaire for nothing. And they aren't.

Of course, if you talk about virtual worlds with people who have never used virtual worlds yet, at least not with avatars of their own, this is generally their idea of how virtual worlds are used. Mass media generally follow the same notion and even amplify it by spreading it. In the future, you'll have a digital twin in the Metaverse. That's how it's done. Could it possibly be any different?

In the virtual worlds which exist today, it is different. Very different.

Perfect places to prove people wrong are Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds. Compared with Roblox or Rec Room or VRChat or other platforms, their avatars are fairly realistic which, you may think, should make life-like digital twins even more life-like.

Now, just get yourself an avatar in Second Life or on some OpenSim grid, preferably one connected to the Hypergrid, but most are. Go to some event where a lot of avatars have gathered like a club party with a DJ. Look at the avatars that are there.

And then ask yourself: "Do all these people look like this in real life?"

Because everyone will look like a combination of a super-model and a dolled-up Instagram influencer. At the very least. Especially the female avatars. They all have big boobs, they all have big butts, they all have big, voluptuous lips. Almost all have long, lush manes. In OpenSim probably more than in Second Life, they're dressed in ways that you couldn't imagine digital avatars to be possible to dress in. Or real-life women, for that matter. Some of the ladies will be dancing on six-inch platforms with twelve-inch spike heels, regardless of the underground.

Also, in OpenSim probably more than in Second Life, female avatars in particular may be outright unnatural. Humongous breasts which nonetheless no gravity seems to be tugging on in spite of the obvious lack of a bra. Hips at least twice as wide as the waist. Thighs that they could fit their heads into.

Male avatars aren't quite as extreme. But if you see male avatars with an open shirt or topless, they always have chiseled abs.

If you really think they're all digital twins of their users, think twice. Especially about the female avatars with the outrageously unrealistic body measurements that are completely impossible in real life. Even disregarding these, the "digital twin" logic means you must have stumbled into some unguarded super-model meet-up. Until you discover that avatars look like this everywhere.

Also, look around again. How many avatars are female, how many are male? You'll notice that female avatars are the majority. Again, if you spend some more time looking around and meeting avatars, you'll discover that female avatars are the majority in general.

So, does this mean that many more women use Second Life and OpenSim than men? But why?

No, they don't.

Here's the truth: Just because an avatar is female, doesn't mean the owner is female.

Second Life is so very very much not 3-D Facebook. It never aimed to be 3-D Facebook, not only because it pre-dates Facebook by several years, but also because the name "Second Life" indicates that your avatar can live a life independent from your real life without being "digital you".

Oh, and by the way:

• Second Life avatars have a forename and a surname. But the surname has never been a free-text field. At most, you have a list of surnames to choose one from. So no naming your avatar like yourself unless your family name just happens to be offered in Second Life, and even then only if nobody else has chosen that name before you.
• Second Life lets you have more than one avatar. Linden Lab doesn't really like it when their users create so-called alts for themselves, but it's possible. And it's commonplace.
• Alts are even more commonplace in OpenSim. For starters, you can have multiple avatars with the same name on multiple grids. Besides, there are fewer obstacles in creating alts, even on the same grid. In OpenSim, it's even more common to have alts for various purposes.
• As indicated in the first link, one out of three male users of virtual worlds have female main avatars.
• Also, as indicated in the first link, one out of ten female users of virtual worlds have male main avatars.
• Again, they may always have alts. Just because a guy has a male main, doesn't mean he doesn't have at least one female alt somewhere.
• According to estimations, behind every other female avatar in Second Life and OpenSim, there's a male user.

If you don't believe any of this: I personally know a whole bunch of female OpenSim avatars with guys behind them. In three cases, it's blatantly obvious: Two of them have weekly DJ gigs, the third one DJs on particular occasions, and all three announce by voice. In all three cases, there are guys talking. Only one of them has a male DJ alt, but you have to address to his female main for song requests.

It becomes blatantly obvious that remaking your real-life self in Second Life and OpenSim is not only not the primary goal, but undesired once you start customising your own avatar. Unlike other virtual world platforms, Second Life and OpenSim don't do this in some avatar appearance editor with nothing but switches and sliders, nor do they rely on imported monolithic avatars à la Ready Player Me. There is no way of scanning yourself or even only importing a photograph of your face and using that for your avatar.

Instead, you have to piece your avatar together. And you have to acquire these pieces into your inventory first. Said pieces were all made by users as opposed to being supplied by the same people who develop the worlds.

You need a body. You almost always need a separate head. You need a set of skin textures. You need hair. And that's just the basic building blocks; I'm not talking about clothes and accessories yet.

Now look at what you can get. Everything is geared towards young, beautiful, sexy. Where's the chubbier stuff? Where's the elderly stuff? In fact, where's the normal stuff? You may discover variants of female mesh bodies or add-ons for female mesh bodies with more realistically-sized breasts, usually marketed as something like "petite". But since everyone is used to standard big boobs, many users consider these bodies not realistic, but underage and their users potential paedophiles.

Why is there no more normal stuff? Because there's too little demand for it. It simply isn't worth making. Go figure. And remember that all these bodies, these heads, these skins, this hair and all the clothes and accessories for your avatar come from the community.

In fact, one reason why so many guys have female avatars, often even female main avatars, is because you've got many many more customisation options for female avatars, especially clothes. Both Second Life and OpenSim are full-blown menswear ghettos.

It's partially a vicious circle and partially self-fulfilling. It's commonly said that women basically need a walk-in wardrobe whereas a guy needs one shirt, one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes. But often, the reason why male avatars rarely change their outfits is because they don't have that much to choose from in the first place. Menswear is considered not worth making at such a variety.

So while men are more inclined to outfit their avatars once and then leave them like this for all eternity whereas women are more inclined to "play Barbie" giving their avatars a different outfit each day, there certainly are guys who want to be virtual dressmen. And if they can't "play Ken" with a male avatar the way they want, they resort to "playing Barbie" instead and getting themselves a female avatar.

Of course, there are many other reasons to make an opposite-gender avatar. Women may want to avoid sleazy guys by having a male avatar. Both may want to experiment with how an opposite-gender avatar is made, or they need one to test opposite-gender clothes and outfits before selling them. Just a few examples.

This is actually one of the nice things about virtual worlds: You can be what you want to be. Your avatar doesn't have to be your digital self. You can choose to try and model it after you, but you've also got the choice not to do that. You can even roleplay if you want to. And if you want to play different roles, many worlds let you create multiple avatars with different identities.

It isn't wise for a virtual world to force its users to have only one avatar and make it a digital copy of their real-life selves. Not because the owners of the world "say so". Not because it's their corporate philosophy. Especially not because it's unimaginable to them that virtual world users would not make their avatars their digital twins.

A vital lesson that virtual world companies need to learn from existing virtual worlds instead of disregarding them entirely and re-inventing the wheel from zero again.

When disabled Fediverse users demand participation in accessibility discussions, but there are no discussions in the first place, and they themselves don't even seem to be available to give accessibility feedback

"Nothing about us without us" is the catchphrase used by disabled accessibility activists who are trying to get everyone to get accessibility right. It means that non-disabled people should stop assuming what disabled people need. Instead, they should listen to what disabled people say they need and then give them what they need.

Just like accessibility in the digital realm in general, this is not only targetted at professional Web or UI developers. This is targetted at any and all social media users just as well.

However, this would be a great deal easier if it wasn't still "without them" all the time.

Lack of necessary feedback

Alt-text and image descriptions are one example and one major issue. How are we, the sighted Fediverse users, supposed to know what blind or visually-impaired users really need and where they need it if we never get any feedback? And we never get any feedback, especially not from blind or visually-impaired users.

Granted, only sighted users can call us out for an AI-generated alt-text that's complete rubbish because non-sighted users can't compare the alt-text with the image.

But non-sighted users could tell us whether they're sufficiently informed or not. They could tell us whether they're satisfied with an image description mentioning that something is there, or whether they need to be told what this something looks like. They could tell us which information in an image description is useful to them, which isn't, and what they'd suggest to improve its usefulness.

They could tell us whether certain information that's in the alt-text right now should better go elsewhere, like into the post. They could tell us whether extra information needed to understand a post or an image should be given right in the post that contains the image or through an external link. They could tell us whether they need more explanation on a certain topic displayed in an image, or whether there is too much explanation that they don't need. (Of course, they should take into consideration that some of us do not have a 500-character limit.)

Instead, we, the sighted users who are expected to describe our images, receive no feedback for our image descriptions at all. We're expected to know exactly what blind or visually-impaired users need, and we're expected to know it right off the bat without being told so by blind or visually-impaired users. It should be crystal-clear how this is impossible.

What are we supposed to do instead? Send all our image posts directly to one or two dozen people who we know are blind and ask for feedback? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who considers this very bad style, especially in the long run, not to mention no guarantee for feedback.

So with no feedback, all we can do is guess what blind or visually-impaired users need.

Common alt-text guides are not helpful

Now you might wonder why all this is supposed to be such a big problem. After all, there are so many alt-text guides out there on the Web that tell us how to do it.

Yes, but here in the Fediverse, they're all half-useless.

The vast majority of them is written for static Web sites, either scientific or technological or commercial. Some include blogs, again, either scientific or technological or commercial. The moment they start relying on captions and HTML code, you know you can toss them because they don't translate to almost anything in the Fediverse.

What few alt-text guides are written for social media are written for the huge corporate American silos. 𝕏, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. They do not translate to the Fediverse which has its own rules and cultures, not to mention much higher character limits, if any.

Yes, there are one or two guides on how to write alt-text in the Fediverse. But they're always about Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. They're written for Mastodon's limitations, especially only 500 characters being available in the post itself versus a whopping 1,500 characters being available in the alt-text. And they're written with Mastodon's culture in mind which, in turn, is influenced by Mastodon's limitations.

Elsewhere in the Fediverse than Mastodon, you have much more possibilities. You have thousands of characters to use up in your post. Or you don't have any character limit to worry about at all. You don't have all means at hand that you have on a static HTML Web site. Even the few dozen (streams) users who can use HTML in social media posts don't have the same influence on the layout of their posts as Web designers have on Web sites. Still, you aren't bound to Mastodon's self-imposed limitations.

And yet, those Mastodon alt-text guides tell you you have to squeeze all information into the alt-text as if you don't have any room in the post. Which, unlike most Mastodon users, you do have.

It certainly doesn't help that the Fediverse's entire accessibility culture comes from Mastodon, concentrates on Mastodon and only takes Mastodon into consideration with all its limitations. Apparently, if you describe an image for the blind and the visually-impaired, you must describe everything in the alt-text. After all, according to the keepers of accessibility in the Fediverse, how could you possibly describe anything in a post with a 500-character limit?

In addition, all guides always only cover their specific standard cases. For example, an image description guide for static scientific Web sites only covers images that are typical for static scientific Web sites. Graphs, flowcharts, maybe a portrait picture. Everything else is an edge-case that is not covered by the guide.

There are even pictures that are edge-cases for all guides and not sufficiently or not at all covered by any of them. When I post an image, it's practically always such an edge-case, and I can only guess what might be the right way to describe it.

Discussing Fediverse accessibility is necessary...

Even single feedback for image descriptions, media descriptions, transcripts etc. is not that useful. If one user gives you feedback, you know what this one user needs. But you do not know what the general public with disabilities needs. And what actually matters is just that. Another user might give you wholly different feedback. Two different blind users are likely to give you two different feedbacks on the same image description.

What is needed so direly is open discussion about accessibility in the Fediverse. People gathering together, talking about accessibility, exchanging experiences, exchanging ideas, exchanging knowledge that others don't have. People with various disabilities and special requirements in the Fediverse need to join this discussion because "nothing about them without them", right? After all, it is about them.

And people from outside of Mastodon need to join, too. They are needed to give insights on what can be done on Pleroma and Akkoma, on Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey and Catodon, on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), on Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed and Sublinks and everywhere else. They are needed to combat the rampant Mastodon-centricism and keep reminding the Mastodon users that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. They are needed to explain that the Fediverse outside of Mastodon offers many more possibilities than Mastodon that can be used for accessibility. They are needed for solutions to be found that are not bound to Mastodon's restrictions. And they need to learn about there being accessibility in the Fediverse in the first place because it's currently pretty much a topic that only exists on Mastodon.

There are so many things I'd personally like to be discussed and ideally brought to a consensus of sorts. For example:

• Explaining things in the alt-text versus explaining things in the post versus linking to external sites for explanations.
  The first is the established Mastodon standard, but any information exclusively available in the alt-text is inaccessible to people who can't access alt-text, including due to physical disabilities.
  The second is the most accessible, but it inflates the post, and it breaks with several Mastodon principles (probably over 500 characters, explanation not in the alt-text).
  The third is the easiest way, but it's inconvenient because image and explanation are in different places.
• What if an image needs a very long and very detailed visual description, considering the nature of the image and the expected audience?
  Describe the image only in the post (inflates the post, no image description in the alt-text, breaks with Mastodon principles, impossible on vanilla Mastodon)?
  Describe it externally and link to the description (no image description anywhere near the image, image description separated from the image, breaks with Mastodon principles, requires an external space to upload the description)?
  Only give a description that's short enough for the alt-text regardless (insufficient description)?
  Refrain from posting the image altogether?
• Seeing as all text in an image must always be transcribed verbatim, what if text is unreadable for some reason, but whoever posts the image can source the text and transcribe it regardless?
  Must it be transcribed because that's what the rule says?
  Must it be transcribed so that even sighted people know what's written there?
  Must it not be transcribed?

...but it's nigh-impossible

Alas, this won't happen. Ever. It won't happen because there is no place in the Fediverse where it could sensibly happen.

Now you might wonder what gives me that idea. Can't this just be done on Mastodon?

No, it can't. Yes, most participants would be on Mastodon. And Mastodon users who don't know anything else keep saying that Mastodon is sooo good for discussions.

But seriously, if you've experienced anything in the Fediverse that isn't purist microblogging like Mastodon, you've long since have come to the realisation that when it comes to discussions with a certain number of participants, Mastodon is utter rubbish. It has no concept of conversations whatsoever. It's great as a soapbox. But it's outright horrible at holding a discussion together. How are you supposed to have a meaningful discussion with 30 people if you burn through most of your 500-character limit mentioning the other 29?

Also, Mastodon has another disadvantage: Almost all participants will be on Mastodon themselves. Most of them will not know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon. At least some will not even know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. And that one poor sap from Friendica will constantly try to remind people that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, but he'll be ignored because he doesn't always mention all participants in this thread. Because mentioning everyone is not necessary on Friendica itself, so he isn't used to it, but on Mastodon, it's pretty much essential.

Speaking of Friendica, it'd actually be the ideal place in the Fediverse for such discussions because users from almost all over the place could participate. Interaction between Mastodon users and Friendica forums is proven to work very well. A Friendica forum can be moderated, unlike a Guppe group. And posts and comments reach all members of a Friendica forum without mass-mentioning.

The difficulty here would be to get it going in the first place. Ideally, the forum would be set up and run by an experienced Friendica user. But accessibility is not nearly as much an issue on Friendica as it is on Mastodon, so the difficult part would be to find someone who sees the point in running a forum about it in the first place. A Mastodon user who does see the point, on the other hand, would have to get used to something that is a whole lot different from Mastodon while being a forum admin/mod.

Lastly, there is the Threadiverse, Lemmy first and foremost. But Lemmy has its own issues. For starters, it's federated with the Fediverse outside the Threadiverse only barely and not quite reliably, and the devs don't seem to be interested in non-Threadiverse federation. So everyone interested in the topic would need a Lemmy account, and many refuse to make a second Fediverse account for whichever purpose.

If it's on Lemmy, it will naturally attract Lemmy natives. But the vast majority of these have come from Reddit straight to Lemmy. Just like most Mastodon users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Mastodon, most Lemmy users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Lemmy. I am on Lemmy, and I've actually run into that wall. After all, they barely interact with the Fediverse outside Lemmy. As accessibility isn't an issue on Lemmy either, they know nothing about accessibility on top of knowing nothing about most of the Fediverse.

So instead of having meaningful discussions, you'll spend most of the time educating Lemmy users about the Fediverse outside Lemmy, about Mastodon culture, about accessibility and about why all this should even matter to people who aren't professional Web devs. And yes, you'll have to do it again and again for each newcomer who couldn't be bothered to read up on any of this in older threads.

In fact, I'm not even sure if any of the Threadiverse projects are accessible to blind or visually-impaired users in the first place.

Lastly, I've got some doubts that discussing accessibility in the Fediverse would even possible if there was a perfectly appropriate place for it. I mean, this Fediverse neither gives advice on accessibility within itself beyond linking to always the same useless guides, nor does it give feedback on accessibility measures such as image descriptions.

People, disabled or not, seem to want perfect accessibility. But nobody wants to help others improve their contributions to accessibility in any way. It's easier and more convenient to expect things to happen by themselves.

Could it be that AI can image-describe circles even around me? And that the only ones whom my image descriptions satisfy are Mastodon's alt-text police?

I think I've reached a point at which I only describe my images for the alt-text police anymore. At which I only keep ramping up my efforts, increasing my description quality and declaring all my previous image descriptions obsolete and hopelessly outdated only to have an edge over those who try hard to enforce quality image descriptions all over the Fediverse, and who might stumble upon one of my image posts in their federated timelines by chance.

For blind or visually-impaired people, my image descriptions ought to fall under "better than nothing" at best and even that only if they have the patience to have them read out in their entirety. But even my short descriptions in the alt-text are too long already, often surpassing the 1,000-character mark. And they're often devoid of text transcripts due to lack of space.

My full descriptions that go into the post are probably mostly ignored, also because nobody on Mastodon actually expects an image description anywhere that isn't alt-text. But on top of that, they're even longer. Five-digit character counts, image descriptions longer than dozens of Mastodon toots, are my standard. Necessarily so because I can't see it being possible to sufficiently describe the kind of images I post in significantly fewer characters, so I can't help it.

But it isn't only about the length. It also seems to be about quality. As @Robert Kingett, blind points out in this Mastodon post and this blog post linked in the same Mastodon post, blind or visually-impaired people generally prefer AI-written image descriptions over human-written image descriptions. Human-written image descriptions lack effort, they lack details, they lack just about everything. AI descriptions, in comparison, are highly detailed and informative. And I guess when they talk about human-written image descriptions, they mean all of them.

I can upgrade my description style as often as I want. I can try to make it more and more inclusive by changing the way I describe colours or dimensions as much as I want. I can spend days describing one image, explaining it, researching necessary details for the description and explanation. But from a blind or visually-impaired user's point of view, AI can apparently write circles around that in every way.

AI can apparently describe and even explain my own images about an absolutely extreme niche topic more accurately and in greater detail than I can. In all details that I describe and explain, with no exception, plus even more on top of that.

If I take two days to describe an image in over 60,000 characters, it's still sub-standard in terms of quality, informativity and level of detail. AI only takes a few seconds to generate a few hundred characters which apparently describe and explain the self-same image at a higher quality, more informatively and at a higher level of detail. It may even be able to not only identify where exactly an image was created, even if that place is only a few days old, but also explain that location to someone who doesn't know anything about virtual worlds within no more than 100 characters or so.

Whenever I have to describe an image, I always have to throw someone in front of the bus. I can't perfectly satisfy everyone all the same at the same time. My detailed image descriptions are too long for many people, be it people with a short attention span, be it people with little time. But if I shortened them dramatically, I'd have to cut information to the disadvantage of not only neurodiverse people who need things explained in great detail, but also blind or visually-impaired users who want to explore a new and previously unknown world through only that one image, just like sighted people can let their eyes wander around the image.

Apparently, AI is fully capable of actually perfectly satisfying everyone all the same at the same time because it can convey more information with only a few hundred characters.

Sure, AI makes mistakes. But apparently, AI still makes fewer mistakes than I do.

#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI

How Linden Lab managed to fool almost everyone with a spectacular tech stunt in 2008

In mid-2008, at the peak of the Second Life hype, a remarkable project went live which, until today, is unprecedented: the attempt at connecting 3-D virtual worlds from two different developers and sending avatars from one world to another. Some may remember the story of people teleporting from Second Life to OpenSim and the project being abandoned not much later.

Just recently, Wagner James "Hamlet" Au published a new post on his New World Notes blog and took the opportunity again to show OpenSim in a bad light again. His wording even makes it look like OpenSim has long since vanished when it's actually growing faster than Second Life with more than four times of the latter's landmass.

But there's more to the whole story.

A bit of history

Let's look back in time first. Second Life, one of the most successful 3-D virtual worlds ever, was launched in 2002 and opened to the general public in 2003. Being operated by a for-profit, however, it had to make money. It started with pay-to-play, but eventually switched to a revenue model based on land rentals. Plus an increasing number of taxes.

It didn't take long for the Second Life API to be reverse-engineered and alternative 3rd-party viewers to be developed. But eventually, someone who was disgruntled with Second Life's rampantly capitalist system decided to build something against the other side of the API, a free, open-source virtual-world server application similar to Second Life. It was first released the same month that Linden Lab open-sourced the official viewer, January, 2007. At first, it was named "OpenSecondLife", but it was eventually renamed "OpenSimulator".

In July, half a year later, the first public OpenSim grid went online, OSgrid. It is not only the oldest, but one of the two biggest of probably over 4,000 OpenSim grids, having recently surpassed even Second Life's landmass.

At first, all OpenSim grids were stand-alones. If you wanted to visit a certain place in a certain grid, you needed an avatar on that grid. This changed in 2008 when OpenSim developer Diva Kanto introduced the concept of the Hypergrid which connected OpenSim grids in such a way that avatars could travel between them, looks, inventory and all. Like many things in early OpenSim, it was very buggy. But it worked.

Industry interest

The invention of the Hypergrid, the first interconnection between separate virtual worlds, coincided with the Second Life hype. In those days, Second Life was all over tech media. Some media outlets, even including mainstream mass media, had offices in Second Life to be able to see things from up-close and interview avatars and such. Second Life was that big. And the announcement that an open-source Second Life spin-off had just made it possible to travel from one grid to another caught quite a lot of people's attention.

IBM was particularly interested. The Hypergrid looked like the future of virtual worlds to them, especially with the mindset of those days that virtual worlds are the future. And OpenSim was still very close to Second Life in technology. It had to because it depended on third-party Second Life viewers since it had no development capacities for its own viewer.

And so the idea came up to create a network of virtual worlds that should include not only OpenSim grids, but Second Life as well.

In general, IBM got very interested in OpenSim. They offered the OpenSim devs to collaborate and set a few dozen paid developers aside to improve the OpenSim code, especially the fledgling Hypergrid. They also got into contact with Linden Lab to launch a project named Open Grid, a connection between Second Life and the Hypergrid.

The publicity stunt

On June 30th, 2008, the cooperation between IBM, Linden Lab and the OpenSim developers appeared to come to fruition: A bunch of "gridnauts", both Lindens and IBM developer avatars, "teleported from Second Life to OpenSim". That's the short version of the story.

But first of all, they did not start from the Second Life main grid. A special beta grid was created and even partly decorated for this occasion. For the time being, it was declared impossible to teleport from the Second Life main grid because changes had to be done to the beta grid to make this connection possible. Some of the "gridnauts" kept their avatars as standard Ruths, but a few did some modifications on their looks. Of course, not being on the main grid, they had no access to the assets on the main grid such as clothes.

In addition, this could not be done with the official Second Life viewer. Linden Lab provided a special viewer named the Open Grid Beta Viewer.

The destination of the trip was not, however, an OpenSim grid specifically created for the Open Grid project. It was bone-stock OSgrid. Granted, OSgrid has been running development code since its creation, but there must have been precious little Open-Grid-specific code in it, if any. "IBM's modified code", as cited in the official Second Life wiki article linked above, was probably almost entirely bugfixes plus a few new features that everyone in OpenSim could profit from. This could have included the possibility to register new avatars in a viewer rather than only on the website of a grid.

Torely Linden captured the event on video and edited the footage into a two-minute clip called "Across the Metaverse". Yes, Torely Linden spoke of "the Metaverse" 13 years before Mark Zuckerberg did. But the OSgrid founders did so another year earlier.

When the "gridnauts" arrived on OSgrid, their inventories were empty. Linden Lab explained this was the case because it was technologically impossible to transfer an inventory from Second Life to OpenSim or vice versa.

It was all show

What few people know: It was all show. A Second Life user and former Open Grid beta-tester called it "smoke and mirrors" on the official Second Life forum.

Linden Lab fooled the public, and Linden Lab probably also fooled both the IBM devs, the beta testers and maybe even some official Lindens until they understood what was actually happening. All that the IBM devs had to do was make OpenSim fit for the event and iron out bugs that might have ended up awkward. IBM was probably working entirely on the OpenSim side of things. Linden Lab took care of the Second Life side, the beta grid and especially the beta viewer, alone without IBM having any insight. Thus, the IBM devs probably never really knew what Linden Lab did, and that the alleged teleportation from Second Life to OpenSim was nothing but a lie.

At no point did any avatar ever actually teleport from a Second Life grid to an OpenSim grid.

What the Open Grid Beta Viewer really did was log the Second Life beta grid avatar out and an OSgrid avatar with the same name in. On the way back, the OSgrid avatar was logged out, and the Second Life beta grid avatar was logged in. When logged into OpenSim, "_EXTERNAL" was added to the name tag after the avatar name.

So what people actually saw during the OpenSim segment of the video footage of this trip weren't Second Life avatars stripped of their inventories. They were OSgrid avatars.

At first glance, this was not too obvious. An avatar from the same grid as the one logged in usually doesn't show its home grid in the name tag above its head. So there was no "@osgrid.org:80" above the heads of the "gridnauts".

Also, as the video footage shows, the whole trip was restricted to a piece of hilly, barren land rather than one of the OSgrid Plazas. Only a few signs had been placed. Otherwise, nothing had been done, nothing had been built. It was obviously a sim created for this specific purpose. Access to this sim was probably limited to a specific group which the OSgrid avatars of the "gridnauts" were added to immediately after their creation. No group names are shown, though; it's either because the Open Grid Beta Viewer had group-showing code removed, or Torley Linden had switched group tags off.

By the way, notice how the name of the sim is censored in the video. Also, notice the absence of OSgrid avatars. Or OpenSim avatars in general. There was no welcome committee.

...an obvious show even

If you know a thing or two about OpenSim or even only Second Life, however, a few things make painfully obvious that the whole show was just that, a show.

The best sign is Torely's empty inventory. I've seen empty OpenSim inventories. And believe me when I say they're never completely blank. Even if there are no assets in the inventory, even if a grid does not add a pre-filled library with a few things to new avatars' inventories, there's always the basic directory structure. But Torely's video doesn't even show that.

Instead, it says, "No matching items found in inventory." It only says that and looks that blank when something has been searched for and not found. Either the Open Grid Beta Viewer was hard-coded to search for something that would definitely never be in Torely's inventory. Or it reset the search field while being closed and re-opened, but not the search itself. Either way, some search was used to artifically wipe Torely's inventory view clear.

Either Linden Lab thought it'd be easier for clueless casuals watching the video to understand that the inventory is empty when it's actually completely blank, or Torely had something to hide.

It gets even better. Pay close attention to the avatars in the video. Pause it if necessary. Yes, Torely's avatar looks like a standard Ruth on OSgrid. But Torely's avatar on the beta grid is a standard Ruth, too.

Now look at Hamilton Linden. He is wearing a dark top on the beta grid, prior to departure. This top is actually one of the few clothing items whose texture manages to load during the OSgrid segment in spite of the corrupted cache. It's the same dark top as on the beta grid. Everything an avatar wears when teleporting from one grid to another must be in the inventory and remain there. This means that Hamilton Linden has his dark top readily available in OSgrid. Thus, it has to be in his inventory. But if transferring content from a Second Life grid to an OpenSim grid is not possible, how did it get there?

Better yet: Zero Linden is wearing a skirt. On a Second Life or OpenSim classic avatar, it's just another texture layer, but it has to be there. It's grey on Zero Linden, but completely absent from all the other avatars, so it has to be there. Again, how could it possibly have gotten there?

I'll tell you how: At least Hamilton and Zero, just like Torely, knew from the get-go that the whole shindig was as fake as it could ever get. In order to make their avatars recognisable on both sides, they wanted to redo their beta grid look in OSgrid. So they logged into both grids and redid the few changes on their beta grid avatars in comparison to standard Ruth on their OSgrid avatars. All "gridnauts" who were filled in on the scam had previously created avatars on OSgrid. And at least these two couldn't help but customise their avatars. The uninformed "gridnauts" had their OSgrid avatars created for them and probably also had to keep their beta grid avatars stock Ruths.

Torely was right about the inventory not being carried over, though. What the "gridnauts" had in their inventories on OSgrid was either supplied by OSgrid or remade by hand.

Obvious precautions

It's obvious that Linden Lab had precautions taken to make it more credible. Torely's artificially "blanked" inventory was one part of it.

Another part was the "gridnauts" landing on almost barren land, all alone. There weren't even OSgrid officials present to welcome them and interact with them, at least not in Torely's video edit. The "gridnauts" needed to have this unwelcoming piece of land for themselves for a short while. If OSgrid officials arrived later to greet the "gridnauts", this must intentionally have been left out. Most likely, if they had been there, the Open Grid Beta Viewer would have slapped "_EXTERNAL" on their names as well because it couldn't distinguish between OSgrid avatars owned by admins and OSgrid avatars owned by "gridnauts".

It's even more likely that this sim was not only group access-only, but that the "gridnaut" avatars were the only ones in the group. Even OSgrid officials weren't allowed in. Linden Lab could not risk the presence of non-"gridnaut" avatars. For one, a fully decked-out OSgrid official avatar with "_EXTERNAL" behind the name would have ruined everything. Even worse, OSgrid or other visitors could have made their own video of the whole show. And it would have looked a whole lot different without the trickery demanded by Linden Lab. Don't forget that YouTube already existed in 2008, and much more than today, it was a place where everyone could upload self-made videos.

With all those precautions in place, it's interesting how none were taken to trick OpenSim users into taking this for genuine. They were probably considered too few to be a real danger because nobody outside their own little bubble would even notice them. And with no chance to prove Linden Lab's manipulation with a video of their own, there was little they could do anyway.

For the vast majority of the target audience of Torely's video, the precautions were sufficient. At least Hamilton and Zero re-doing their avatar looks on OSgrid was allowed in order to make them recognisable to people who don't know that an avatar's look is stored in the inventory. Only the few OpenSim users who had already Hypergridded back then knew what that meant. Everyone else, maybe even including some Second Life users, didn't see how this contradicted Torely's tall tale of empty inventories.

But why?

Now you may ask yourself: Why did Linden Lab even take all this effort upon themselves?

I can only speculate. But I guess it's because, in stark contrast to IBM, they never really wanted Second Life and OpenSim to fully connect. They wanted to present it as "technically possible, but too unfeasible to continue working on it".

Linden Lab and Second Life would have had nothing to gain from such a connection if it had ever gone fully functional but a whole lot to lose. "Fully functional" would have required taking your entire inventory with you in both directions.

First of all, this would have required adding support for there being more than one grid to Second Life, just so that it could identify avatars from other grids, assets from other grids et cetera. For OpenSim, any Second Life grid would only have been one more grid. Second Life, AnSky, 3rd Rock Grid, Metropolis, it would have been pretty much all the same, only with different names and maybe with different quirks.

At first glance, this connection would have been a dream coming true for businesspeople. OpenSim would have opened up Second Life's markets to more customers. In theory.

In practice, it wouldn't.

Unfair advantage for OpenSim

OpenSim never had an official inter-grid payment system. In fact, it was only in 2008 that 3rd Rock Grid was launched as the very first grid to implement payment beyond "Monopoly money". And that was an in-world currency that could be bought from real money, but not sold back. And that currency was only available on 3rd Rock Grid. It would have been impossible to introduce the Linden Dollar to OpenSim in general, much less force it upon all grids.

It wouldn't have been worth the effort anyway, seeing as how few users OpenSim had in 2008, especially considering how many users Second Life had. After all, it was Second Life's heyday in full effect.

It also wouldn't have been worth the effort because next to nobody in OpenSim would have bought anything in Second Life anyway. Why should they? Early OpenSim's everyone-for-themselves, all-rights-reserved culture carried over from Second Life was fading away with the arrival of freebies being shared with full permissions. The Queen of Freebies was Linda Kellie, formerly known as Karra Baker in Second Life where she attempted the same thing before Linden Lab kicked her out. She made and released more and more free stuff, and in 2008, she opened up her first freebie sim, Linda Kellie Designs. Everything on that sim was made by her, and everything on that sim could be copied, modified and shared freely.

There simply wasn't much of an incentive to go to Second Life and buy stuff if you could get your stuff for free, full-perm and under a public-domain-like CC0 license in OpenSim. And by 2008's standards, Linda's stuff wasn't even bad. When she still was Karra Baker in Second Life, she was actually considered unfair competition for the commercial creators. And after LK Designs had been launched, an increasing number of OpenSim users started creating stuff and offering it for free and often even full-perm.

And if assets could have been transferred both ways, there would have been a great lot more incentive for Second Life users to go "shopping" in OpenSim. For free. Some may even have taken Linda's CC0 stuff to the Second Life Marketplace and tried to sell it for money until someone else would have come and offered the self-same stuff for free.

Introducing the Linden Dollar and access to the Second Life Marketplace to OpenSim would have led to disaster itself. That's simply because Second Life's permission system isn't nearly as effective in OpenSim as it is in Second Life. After all, anyone can set up their own grid and connect it to the Hypergrid. In this case, even connect it to the Open Grid network and thus to Second Life.

On your own grid, however, you're your own boss, your own Linden. And you have Linden-like powers. In fact, your powers may even exceed those of an average Linden. You have god-mode. Third-party viewers for Second Life that were also compatible with OpenSim provided you with it. And this god-mode not only lets you circumvent permissions, but even manipulate them.

So in theory, an OpenSim user with an own grid and enough money could have gone to Second Life and bought all the hottest stuff in-world. Or they could have bought it on the Marketplace and, if necessary, just picked it up in Second Life. Of course, all this content would have been either no-copy or no-transfer and usually also no-modify. But not for long.

For then they could have rezzed that content in-world, maybe even still in the shape of sales boxes. Then they could have used their god-mode to set all that content to full-perm. And then they could have hung it up in their own store and offered it for free. Even to Second Life users. In fact, they could have gone one step further, made new box art and made themselves the "creators" of this content. And Linden Lab could have tried to DMCA them all they wanted, but to no avail if that grid and its owner were located someplace where U.S. laws don't apply.

In addition, the Open Grid connection would have been bad for Second Life's land rentals, one of Second Life's main sources of revenue. In order to visit friends in Second Life or attend events in Second Life, you would no longer have had to live in Second Life. You could have had not only your avatar in OpenSim, but also your land. More land area and a much higher prim allowance for a fraction of the costs in comparison with Second Life. And in fact, even the friends and the events might have moved to OpenSim, the events particularly because event locations could have been built bigger with more prims on cheaper land.

Creators would have set up at least second homes in OpenSim. There, they would have been able to create and experiment without paying upload fees to Linden Lab. Once their creations would have been done, they simply could have sent them to their Second Life avatars that would have adjusted the permissions and offered them for sale.

All in all, the Open Grid connection was probably recognised to be costly for Linden Lab in various ways. It would have cost a fortune to implement and make stable, also because Second Life would require the majority of changes. Unlike OpenSim, it was not designed to connect to other grids. And after its implementation, Second Life's revenue would have tanked because OpenSim would have provided cheaper or free alternatives to almost everything.

Tying an overambitious corporation down

I'm pretty sure that Linden Lab was well aware of at least some of these potential consequences, if not all of them. Under no circumstances was any of this allowed to happen. But IBM wanted it to happen. They didn't know about these consequences because, truth be told, they didn't know much about Second Life and OpenSim in general. And just telling IBM, "We don't want to do it because it'll ruin our revenues," would have looked bad.

At the same time, IBM not having have a realistic idea about what was possible and what wasn't, especially not what was possible or not for Linden Lab, turned out to be an advantage. And so Linden Lab put up a show that demonstrated that what IBM wanted was allegedly basically possible (to satisfy IBM a little), but not very feasible (to disappoint them just enough that they wouldn't follow the Open Grid idea any further). It must have been convincing enough that IBM changed their plans.

That is, IBM didn't drop out of virtual worlds entirely. They continued to support and even develop OpenSim until 2011, hoping to create a free, open, decentralised metaverse without Second Life, only based on OpenSim. I'm not sure what caused this to end. Maybe it was IBM losing interest. Maybe it was IBM not making any money off of it.

If Linden Lab could actually foresee what terrible consequences an Open Grid connection to OpenSim's Hypergrid would bring with itself, it's strange how they could not foresee the consequences when they published the Copybot source code in 2009.

August 31st: Mike Macgirvin has resigned from maintaining the streams repository and let the community take over

@Fediverse News

Today, on August 31st, 2024, @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ has officially resigned from maintaining the streams repository. He won't shut it down, and he said he will add contributors if anyone wants to contribute, but he won't actively work on it anymore.

No link to the the source because the source is private.

The streams repository is the home of an intentionally nameless, brandless, public-domain Fediverse server application which its community semi-officially refers to as (streams). Its features include, but are not limited to:

• federation via Nomad, Zot6 (Hubzilla) and ActivityPub (optionally, but on by default)
• multiple independent channels/identities on the same account/login
• nomadic identity
• virtually unlimited character count
• full blogging-level text formatting using BBcode, Markdown and/or HTML, including in-line images
• advanced, extensive permission controls for privacy and security second to none in the Fediverse, customisable for each individual contact with 15 permission settings
• optional individual word filters per contact
• optional automatic reader-side content warning generator
• support for flagging images sensitive for Mastodon
• built-in file space with WebDAV connectivity per channel
• built-in, headless CardDAV and CalDAV servers per channel

(streams) is the latest stable release in a family of server applications that started in 2010 with a decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark, now known as Friendica.

The evolution in the family started in 2011 when Mike invented the concept of nomadic identity, the simultaneous existence of the same Fediverse identity with the same content on multiple server instances, to help overcome the issue of server instances shutting down and their users losing everything. It was first implemented in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012 which was turned into Hubzilla in 2015.

The streams repository came into existence in October, 2021, with a whole tree of eight forks between it and Hubzilla since 2018. Just a few weeks ago, Mike forked it into a new project named Forte, almost nothing about which is known yet, and which is probably very experimental, seeing as Mike has been working on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub as of late.

There hasn't been any statement about Forte's future either, but Mike is known to pass stable, daily-driver projects on to the community when he starts something new, such as Friendica in 2012 when he started working on Red and Hubzilla in 2018 when he started working on Osada and Zap. And as small as (streams) may be, seeing as it's sitting in roughly the same niche as Friendica and Hubzilla, it has become a stable daily driver for about a couple dozen users.

(streams) won't go away, but its development will slow down dramatically because new maintainers have yet to be found, and until now, Mike has pretty much done all the work on it. It will probably take longer for the dust to fully settle after (streams) has introduced portable objects as per FEP-ef61 on its way to nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Also, @silverpill, the maintainer of Mitra which currently is the only other Fediverse software to implement FEP-ef61, will have other and more people to talk to.

How the new version of the Firestorm viewer with support for Physically-Based Rendering enrages its users

As to be expected, the Second Life community is completely exploding over PBR, now that the single most popular viewer has rolled out the first version with Physically-Based Rendering. And I don't mean exploding with cheer.

The announcement thread on Reddit shows people with Nvidia GeForce RTX cards who suddenly have slideshow-like FPS for some reason. I must admit this makes me wonder because I get fairly great results out of a Radeon RX590 which is even less high-end. Under Linux. With an open-source driver from the Debian testing repos. In OpenSim, but that shouldn't make so much of a difference unless Second Life surrounds you with 2K PBR content everywhere now.

Another Reddit thread is about how Second Life users take their frustration out on the volunteer Firestorm support in Second Life as in in-world. They catch all the anger that should rather go directly to Linden Lab.

Despite what some users experience with dedicated video hardware that partly isn't even six years old, it's apparent that many of those who complain about the PBR viewers being slow are on toasters that shouldn't have been used for anything 3-D in the first place, especially not virtual worlds full of amateur-made, unoptimised content. Worlds in which optimisation is quality degradation, and ARC is a measurement for good looks.

At least among the Firestorm users, over 10% of them are on mobile hardware that's at least ten years old which usually means on-board graphics. In fact, people are still whining over 32-bit Windows support being axed because their only (or most powerful) computer is so ancient that it still boots 32-bit Windows. And yet, they use it for 3-D virtual worlds because they haven't been able to afford any computer, new or used, in a decade and a half.

So the sharp drop in FPS came not only from a new rendering engine, but also from turning stuff on that was off before and then ripping off the switches. Advanced lighting model, bump maps and normal maps, transparent water, shaders, light sources other than the Sun, the Moon and ambient...

The irony is that Linden Lab and the Firestorm team decided to turn the Advanced Lighting Model including normal maps and specular maps permanently on to make normal maps more convenient and more attractive for content creators. I mean, what they currently do is make their content for potato computers on which all graphical bells and whistles have to be turned off, including normal maps. So how do you make small surface details if you can't rely on normal maps? You build them into the mesh itself, making it vastly more complex in the course and cutting into everyone's FPS.

It's also apparent that nobody could be bothered to read up about PBR. Many seem utterly surprised about the FPS drop. They're used to Firestorm becoming slower and slower to them with every release, but not by such degrees. They seem not to have read that this would happen.

The complaints about how stuff suddenly looks differently come for the same reason: People didn't read up on PBR. They seem to think that PBR is ALM with mirrors instead of an entirely new lighting and rendering model. However, PBR also includes High Dynamic Range, and at least in Second Life, both forward rendering and the old ALM have such a low dynamic range that they render everything in pastel tones, and content creators had to tint everything in garishly cartoonish colours to balance that.

What's happening is largely exactly the same as whenever Linden Lab introduces something new: Conservative users reject it because they reject all changes that actually change stuff and can't be turned off. I guess the outcry when viewers dropped the mesh option and permanently forced everyone to see mesh must have been as big as the outcry when mesh was introduced.

At this point, it really is a pity that there's no real OpenSim forum on which people from all grids can congregate and discuss things. OpenSimWorld has built-in forums, but hardly anyone knows because nobody ever pays attention to the left-hand sidebar.

If there was a central place to discuss OpenSim matters, I guess the outcry against the new Firestorm would come a bit more slowly, but be even more extreme, and even more people would be opposed to it and PBR in general. Including those who say they'll never upgrade to Firestorm 7 while still using Firestorm 6.5.6 or 6.4.21 or so.

There would be four reasons for this. One, while the Second Life community is already so old that it needs newbies who stick around to equal users passing away, the OpenSim community manages to be even older on average, and that means even more conservative. Even more than Second Life users, OpenSim users are likely to want OpenSim back the way it was when they joined. There are still people in OpenSim who vocally oppose mesh. And it isn't too unnormal in OpenSim for users who have been around for long enough to have avatars on a 2010 or even 2007 level whereas you risk being ostracised in Second Life if your mesh body is older than 12 months.

Two, OpenSim is basically Second Life for those who can't afford Second Life. You can get land for dirt cheap, and you can get e.g. a Maitreya LaraX, LeLutka EvoX heads and Doux EvoX skins and hair for absolutely free. The latter isn't legal, but still. So it isn't only the cheapskates and the anti-capitalists who flock into OpenSim, but especially those who genuinely don't have the money to have a decent Second Life experience. And if they don't have money for that, it's highly unlikely that they have money for a decent computer. In other words, many of those who use the Firestorm Viewer on mobile hardware from before 2015 are probably OpenSim users. OpenSim has to have an even higher number of toasters per 1,000 users than Second Life.

Three, and this comes on top: Second Life has a three-versions rule. Only the three most recent versions of any given viewer are allowed to connect. OpenSim doesn't have such a rule. Certain grids or sims might limit which viewers their visitors are allowed to use and mostly do so to keep copybotters out, but in general, such a rule doesn't exist. You can use OpenSim with a Firestorm 5.x if you want to, and if you're living in a bubble on a grid that still runs on OpenSim 0.8.2.1 in which next to nobody has a mesh body, and nobody uses BoM. Absolutely having to upgrade your viewer is not part of OpenSim's culture. Instead, it's perfectly normal to keep using old viewers if you reject certain new features, e.g. EEP.

And four, most OpenSim users aren't even used to seeing Blinn-Phong, i.e. the old normal map and specular map model. Most of the time when content is illegally exported from Second Life and put back together, normal maps and specular maps are omitted. Doing so saves time that can be used to churn out more stuff which probably also explains why some importers don't even add the missing AVsitter back into furniture unless it's sex furniture. And besides, so many OpenSim users are on toasters and have normal maps and specular maps off anyway, and it isn't worth adding what next to nobody can see. It's really mostly only a few of OpenSim's own original creators who add normal maps and specular maps, but their creations aren't available on the big popular freebie sims where everyone picks up their stuff nowadays.

So criticism on PBR in OpenSim would be mixed with a lot of "change is bad" attitude. Expect people demanding OpenSim's development split from Second Life's, and OpenSim finally get its own viewer, just so that OpenSim doesn't have to take over all the "new crap" that Linden Lab whips up. Expect some saying this should have happened long ago, up to the point of some old-timers saying that the introduction of mesh was a mistake already and basically wanting OpenSim to look like Second Life did in 2008 for all eternity because that's what they're used to. And that's what they think their toasters can handle because they've all but forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by thousands of prims.

If you're a frequent partygoer in OpenSim, you're likely to know at least some of these

How Second Life's ageplay scandal that isn't even so much about there being ageplay increases "underage" avatar paranoia in OpenSim

Breaking news yesterday was an article on Medium about ageplay in Second Life. Sexual ageplay. As in sexual encounters between adult-looking avatars controlled by adult users and underage-looking avatars controlled by adult users. And how Linden Lab not only seem to ignore it to such degrees that they're allegedly doing so intentionally, but some Lindens are allegedly involved in it themselves. I won't link to the article, but here's the thread in the Second Life subreddit about this article and its impact.

To make one thing clear: Yes, we're definitely talking about adult users in all cases. For those of you who don't know Second Life: First of all, Second Life has a content rating system for sims. General is PG which means pretty much squeaky-clean. Moderate is 18+ and allows for stuff like public nudity and sexual actions in private unless a sim owner explicitly forbids it. Adult is 18+, too, and allows for everything in public.

Besides, Second Life has age verification. You have to send in a copy of your ID or something similar to prove your real-life age, otherwise your avatar will be restricted to General-rated sims. And General-rated sims, by definition, don't allow for sexual encounters because the scripted furniture necessary for acting out sexual activities is not allowed to be installed on General-rated sims in the first place.

So in this scandal, everything is vague so far. But the impact is the bigger already. In Second Life, not few users have been sceptical about the nature of avatars that look like children. But now this has turned into a veritable witch hunt against anyone and everyone who doesn't look "grown-up" by Second Life standards, also because Second Life Residents feel like they have to take matters into their own hands if the Lindens have actually been proven to do diddly-squat time and again.

The situation in OpenSim

But I don't want to talk about the Second Life side. I want to talk about how this affects OpenSim, for the vast majority of OpenSim users are Second Life users as well and closely follow Second Life news and Second Life blogs.

In OpenSim, apart from most of the underlying technology, things are a lot different from Second Life. OpenSim is as decentralised as can possibly be, and it has been since its very inception in 2007 and the introduction of federation in the shape of the Hypergrid in 2008.

OpenSim doesn't have a central authority in any shape or form. OpenSim doesn't have any centralised rules or rule-making in any shape or form either. The only reason why OpenSim has the exact same three content rating levels as Second Life is because it's used with Second Life viewers, and thus, it has to be compatible with Second Life.

But even these content rating levels become meaningless without a central authority that defines them and enforces them. And the only thing that's central in OpenSim is the development of the vanilla OpenSim server software. In OpenSim, rules only matter if you're in a place where someone else makes the rules. But you don't have to. Anyone can launch their own private or public grid and make their own rules or none at all, and as long as they're on their own grid, they live by their own rules or the lack thereof.

In fact, the only grid I know that has written-down definitions for the content rating levels is the commercial grid DigiWorldz. Even DigiWorldz allows these rules to be used "liberally" on the side of making them stricter. You may have an Adult-rated sim which, at the same time, is G-rated.

On top of that, the content rating levels are half-useless in OpenSim anyway. There is no central avatar registry either. There is no central authority that does more or less mandatory age checks for avatars. In fact, almost no grid has ever had any age verification, and even if there was something like that, it was limited to that one grid and to its own residents. OSgrid couldn't possibly automatically inquire from Metropolis if an avatar that Hypergridded in from Metropolis to OSgrid had a verified adult user. So a mechanism that could keep underage users away from Moderate-rated or Adult-rated sims doesn't exist because it's impossible to implement, much less make it as 100% water-tight as in Second Life.

Thus, the content rating levels aren't much more than "decorative" and could theoretically serve as not much more than a content warning.

So much about the OpenSim background.

No central authority means a safe haven

Now, due to this decentralised, inherently borderline anarchist ecosystem, OpenSim became a new home for people who were banned from Second Life for whichever reasons. After all, even if they also ended up being banned from several OpenSim grids, they could always start their own grid. And if too many grids blocked their grid, they could start a new one with a new identity. And so forth. But many don't even have to go that far because grid-hopping and having more than one identity slows down actions against them.

This doesn't only apply to notorious troublemakers. It applies to paedophiles just as well. Only newbies are completely unaware that there are paedos in OpenSim, but then again, many newbies who haven't been in Second Life before coming to OpenSim can't imagine that there's virtual sex in OpenSim at all. Even if they discover that all technical requirements are fulfilled.

In particular, there have been two particularly infamous cases of paedophiles in OpenSim. One was a guy from Texas who always rejected the rules of sims, the rules of entire grids and even local and national laws and substituted his own. Or rather, he claimed that whatever he did did not break any rules because of some specifics in the wording or something.

For one, he tried to talk nude adult female avatars into ageplay while remaining fully dressed himself at first. In this case, ageplay would have meant an adult user of an adult male avatar acting as an adult man and an adult user of an adult female avatar acting like a little girl. Essentially, to get around anti-ageplay or anti-child-avatar ruling, he aimed for daddyplay with grown-up counterparts, something he would have been able to claim to be perfectly legal on the sim, in the grid and in all real-life jurisdictions involved and thus unsanctionable.

Besides, however, he was repeatedly caught butt-naked next to child avatars on General-rated sims. It couldn't ruin his reputation anymore, no matter how many identities he had. But it could completely destroy that of the sims and their owners for "allowing" this to happen.

The other case was a convicted English paedophile with a different modus operandi. All his avatars were little girls as in children. He had a whole number of identities readily available for them so he could quickly register new avatars.

This was obvious from a number of points: So there were these little girls randomly appearing on sims where there was at least one more avatar. They had different names. They came from various grids. But sometimes girls from different grids had the same name. And they all acted exactly the same.

They landed on the sim. They stayed on the landing-point. It was usually or always a sim which, if it was an event location, didn't have the landing-point right next to the party. They picked out one of the avatars on the sim. And then they got into contact with that avatar via IM. The wording was always exactly identical. That guy had a notecard or a text file or a Word document or something from which he copy-pasted not only avatar names, but also always the same dialogues. I wouldn't wonder if even the intended ageplay would have acted out along pre-defined lines that he would have copy-pasted.

And this guy certainly had enough avatars to keep going for months. He could always make new avatars by registering one on another grid, copy-pasting in the forename and the surname, then having the brand-new avatar meet one of his already existing avatars and the existing avatars sending over a bunch of items to the new avatar's inventory. He eventually vanished altogether, either because OpenSim became uninteresting, or because it became too much of an effort compared with whatever else he discovered, or because he was convicted in real life once more.

OpenSim's war on child avatars

It's due to such happenings that many OpenSim users, sim owners and owners of not-exactly-tiny public grids in particular, have been up in arms against ageplay for a couple of years already. And as there's no central authority in OpenSim that could make rules against ageplay and combat it, there's no central authority to keep individuals' efforts in this direction from going completely out of hand.

One attempt at a countermeasure is the attempt at re-defining the Adult rating. The "Adult" part is to refer to the visual age of the avatars visiting a place, and the Adult rating is to mean that no child avatars are allowed. This sounds like a given, but at the same time, Adult-rated sims are often not PG-rated, but G-rated at the same time, not allowing nudity or even only scanty clothing anywhere. Sometimes, entire grids do that, but it's mostly the owners of sims having such a re-defined Adult rating who defend their one-sided re-definition.

A nasty side-effect of this, however, is that the Adult rating loses its effect as a content warning. More and more OpenSim users simply don't expect anything naughty on Adult-rated sims anymore, and they're highly irritated when they come to an on-going event on an Adult-rated sim such as Stark and see naked avatars. At the same time, nudists can't count on nudity being allowed on Adult-rated sims anymore. And there have actually been cases of avatars being permanently banned from Adult-rated sims that nonetheless don't allow nudity, but that don't announce their ban on nudity anywhere.

Another attempt is the infamous Childgate. It's a script that checks the height of an avatar, and if it's below a certain threshold, the script automatically both kicks and permanently bans the avatar. So far, so good.

Collateral damage: realistic and non-sexy avatars

But the Childgate is pre-configured to kick and ban any and all avatars under 6 feet which is 1.83m. That's taller than most women in real life, and it's even taller than many men in real life. But due to Second Life's unreliable avatar height measuring, namely up to the eyes rather than the top of the head, Second Life users quit paying attention to the height indicated by their shapes which quickly led to ludicrously tall avatars becoming the standard. This, of course, bled into OpenSim which does not have that quirk, but few people know OpenSim doesn't have it. Still, if you have a realistically-sized avatar, chances are good that you'll be kicked and banned from sims with a Childgate on the spot.

I'm not even sure if the Childgate measures an avatar's height the OpenSim way or the Second Life way. And I've read somewhere that some sim owners have configured the Childgate to kick and ban everyone under 7 feet which is 2.14m because they unironically consider avatars of that height underage.

And then there are less voluptuous versions of popular mesh bodies, especially Athena Petite. Athena Petite is basically a variant of the Athena mesh body for more realistic avatars. Athena is much more on the "sexy" side with breasts which, even at small settings, would be very likely to be inflated with silicone in real life, so big are they. Athena Petite has realistically-sized breasts. The original target audience are the same people who adjust their avatar's height to something realistic; if they're women in real life, it's often their real-life height.

However, the average OpenSim user isn't used to that. The average OpenSim user is used to completely distorted female avatars as the standard. 7' or taller. BBBBBL (big butt, big boobs, big lips, referring to a large derriere, a pair of unnaturally-sized breasts and a mouth with unnaturally enormous lips in a perpetual kiss shape not unlike a duckface). A skin tone that'd require you to sleep in a tanning-bed, but still with bright red lipstick. The avatar being nine or ten times as tall as the head is big when seven and a half or, at most, eight times would be realistic. 60% of the body height being the legs, not even necessarily including the feet which are permanently fixed in a position for 6-inch heels. And, of course, arms that are so short that the fingertips don't reach farther down than the crotch.

Athena is being perceived as a "normal" woman because over 90% of all female avatars roaming the Hypergrid since 2015 have been Athenas, often with hardly modified shapes. "Sexy" starts with Legacy which has an absolutely unnatural waist-to-hip ratio, and if that doesn't suffice, there are the various HG bodies which have an even more ridiculously huge butt and hips that are three times as wide as the waist. Well, and if there's something that's less voluptuous than bone-stock, standard, everyday, off-the-shelf Athena, it's automatically perceived as probably underage.

Even before the current situation, there have been known cases of sim owners kicking and banning avatars with Athena Petite bodies in the course of enforcing their "no child avatars" policy because they consider Athena Petite to be 14 years old at most.

But there have also been cases of avatars being kicked and banned for looking underage because they didn't check enough "sexy" marks. Realistic height plus realistic shape which results in a "bubble head". Toned-down lips, even though hardly anyone does that. Too pale skin tone. Freckles, only kids have freckles. No make-up. Hairstyle other than long flowing locks. Wearing too much pink without at the same time looking like a total slut. Wearing too much pastel. Wearing too bright colours. Wearing flat sneakers because female avatars are expected to always only ever wear sandals or high boots, in both cases with at least 6-inch heels. Wearing socks because female avatars are expected to wear black nylon stockings or no hosiery at all. Sometimes only one of these is enough for a female avatar to be flagged a child avatar.

Bleak future

Again, this has been the status quo up until that article on Medium. And it isn't like the article doesn't have any effect on OpenSim. In fact, it has already started. And I expect it to escalate further.

Soon, you'll have to max out the sexiness of your avatar everywhere all the time. Sim owners will raise the threshold of what's considered a grown-up avatar. Not only will they ban even more avatars that aren't sexy enough on sight, but avatar attachment gates will spread. These things can and do remove avatars based on what the avatars wear. And I expect these gates to be fed with more and more content which, according to OpenSim sim owners, is typical for child avatars. It already starts with all known kid mesh bodies and all known kids' clothes. I think Athena Petite will quickly be added to most of them. And I actually expect them to soon include keywords like "sneakers" or "freckles" or the like.