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

Whenever I describe a picture from a virtual world, the description grows far beyond everyone's wildest imaginations in size; here's why

I rarely post pictures from virtual worlds anymore. I'd really like to show them to Fediverse users, including those who know nothing about them. But I rarely do that anymore. Not in posts, not even in Hubzilla articles.

That's because pictures posted in the Fediverse need image descriptions. Useful and sufficiently informative image descriptions. And to my understanding, even Hubzilla articles are part of the Fediverse because they're part of Hubzilla. So the exact same rules apply to them that apply to posts. Including image descriptions being an absolute requirement.

And a useful and sufficiently informative image description for a picture from a virtual world has to be absolutely massive. In fact, it can't be done within Mastodon's limits. Not even the 1,500 characters offered for alt-text are enough. Not nearly.

Over the last 12 or 13 months, I've developed my image-describing style, and it's still evolving. However, this also means my image descriptions get more and more detailed with more and more explanations, and so they tend to grow longer and longer.

My first attempt at writing a detailed, informative description for a picture from a virtual world was in November, 2022. It started at over 11,000 characters already and grew beyond 13,000 characters a bit later when I re-worked it and added a missing text transcript. Most recently, I've broken the 40,000-character barrier, also because I've raised my standards to describing pictures within pictures within a picture. I've taken over 13 hours to describe one single picture twice already.

I rarely get any feedback for my image descriptions. But I sometimes have to justify their length, especially to sighted Fediverse users who don't care for virtual worlds.

Sure, most people who come across my pictures don't care for virtual worlds at all. But most people who come across my pictures are fully sighted and don't require any image descriptions. It's still good manners to provide them.

And there may pretty well be people who are very excited about and interested in virtual worlds, especially if it's clear that these are actually existing, living, breathing virtual worlds and not some cryptobro's imagination. And they may want to know everything about these worlds. But they know nothing. They look at the pictures, but they can't figure out from looking at the pictures what these pictures show. Nothing that's in these pictures is really familiar to them.

So when describing a picture from a virtual world, one must never assume that anything in the picture is familiar to the on-looker. In most cases, it is not.

Also, one might say that only sighted people are interested in virtual worlds because virtual worlds are a very visual medium and next to impossible to navigate without eyesight. Still, blind or visually-impaired people may be just as fascinated by virtual worlds as sighted people. And they may be at least just as curious which means they may require even more description and explanation. They want to know what everything looks like, but since they can't see it for themselves, they have to be told.

All this is why pictures from virtual worlds require substantially more detailed and thus much, much longer descriptions than real-life photographs.

The medium

The wordiness of descriptions for images from virtual worlds starts with the medium. It's generally said that image descriptions must not start with "Picture of" or "Image of". Some even say that mentioning the medium, i.e. "Photograph of", is too much.

Unless it is not a digital photograph. And no, it isn't always a digital photograph.

It can just as well be a digitised analogue photograph, film grain and all. It can be a painting. It can be a sketch. It can be a graph. It can be a screenshot of a social media post. It can be a scanned newspaper page.

Or it can be a digital rendering.

Technically speaking, virtual world images are digital renderings. But just writing "digital rendering" isn't enough.

If I only wrote "digital rendering", people would think of spectacular, state-of-the-art, high-resolution digital art with ray-tracing and everything. Like stills from Cyberpunk 2077 for which the graphics settings were temporarily cranked up to levels at which the game becomes unplayable, just to show off. Or like promotional pictures from a Pixar film. Or like the stuff we did in PoV-Ray back in the day. When the single-core CPU ran on full blast for half an hour, but the outcome was a gorgeous screen-sized 3-D picture.

But images from the virtual worlds I frequent are nothing like this. Ray-tracing isn't even an option. It's unavailable. It's technologically impossible. So there is no fancy ray-tracing with fully reflective surfaces and whatnot. But there are shaders with stuff like ambient occlusion.

So where other people may or may not write "photograph", I have to write something like "digital 3-D rendering created using shaders, but without ray-tracing".

The location

If you think that was wordy, think again. Mentioning the location is much worse. And mentioning the location is mandatory in this case.

I mean, it's considered good style to always write where a picture was taken unless, maybe, it was at someone's home, or the location of something is classified.

In real life, that's easy. And except for digital art, digitally generated graphs and pictures of text, almost all pictures in the Fediverse were taken in real-life.

In real life, you can often get away with name-dropping. Most people know at least roughly what "Times Square" refers to. Or "Piccadilly Circus". Or "Monument Valley". Or "Stonehenge". There is no need to break down where these places are. It can be considered common knowledge.

In fact, you get away even more easily with name-dropping landmarks without telling where they are. White House. Empire State Building. Tower Bridge. Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Fuji. Eiffel Tower. Taj Mahal. Sydney Opera House which, admittedly, name-drops its rough location, just like the Hollywood Marquee. All these are names that should ring a bell.

But you can't do that in virtual worlds. In no virtual world can you do that. Not even in Roblox which has twice as many users as Germany has citizens. Much less in worlds running on OpenSim, all of which combined are estimated to have fewer than 50,000 unique monthly users. Whatever "unique" means, considering that many users have more than one avatar in more than one of these worlds.

Such tiny user numbers mean that there are even more people who don't use these worlds, who therefore are completely unfamiliar with these worlds. Who, in fact, don't even know these worlds exist. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single paid Metaverse expert of any kind who has ever even heard of OpenSimulator. They know Horizons, they know The Sandbox, they know Decentraland, they know Rec Room, they know VRchat, they know Roblox and so forth, they may even be aware that Second Life is still around, but they've never in their lives heard of OpenSim. It's that obscure.

So imagine I just name-dropped...

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library.

What'd that tell you?

It'd tell you nothing. You wouldn't know what that is. I couldn't blame you. Right off the bat, I know only two other Fediverse users who definitely know that building because I was there with them. Maybe a few more have been there before. Definitely much fewer than 50. Likely fewer than 20. Out of millions.

Okay, let's add where it is.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde.

Does that help?

No, it doesn't. If you don't know the Sendalonde Community Library, you don't know what and where Sendalonde is either. That place is only known for its spectacular library building.

And you've probably never heard of a real-life place with that name. Of course you haven't. That place isn't in real life.

So I'd have to add some more information.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid.

What's the Discovery Grid? And what's a grid in this context, and why is it called a grid?

Well, then I have to get even wordier.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

Nobody, absolutely nobody writes that much about a real-life location. Ever.

And still, while you know that I'm talking about a place in a virtual world and what that virtual world is based on, while this question is answered, it raises a new question: What is OpenSimulator?

I wouldn't blame you for asking that. Again, even Metaverse experts don't know OpenSimulator. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, in the Open Metaverse Alliance and at the Open Metaverse Foundation has ever heard of OpenSim. The owners and operators of most existing virtual worlds have never heard of OpenSim except those of Second Life, Overte and maybe a few others. Most Second Life users, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim. Most users of most other virtual worlds, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim.

And billions of people out there believe that Zuckerberg has invented "The Metaverse", and that his virtual worlds are actually branded "Metaverse® ("Metaverse" is a registered trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.)" Hardly anyone knows that the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash which, by the way, has inspired Philip Rosedale to create Second Life. And nobody knows that the term "metaverse" has been part of the regular OpenSim users' vocabulary since before 2010. Because nobody knows OpenSim.

And that's why I can't just name-drop "OpenSimulator" either. I have to explain even that.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life.

That alone would be more than your typical cat picture alt-text.

But it'd create misconceptions, namely of OpenSim being another walled-garden, headset-only VR platform that has jumped upon the "Metaverse" bandwagon. Because that's what people know about virtual worlds, if anything. So that's what they automatically assume. And that's wrong.

I'd have to keep that from happening by telling people that OpenSim is as decentralised and federated as the Fediverse, only that it even predates Laconi.ca, not to mention Mastodon. Okay, and it only federates with itself and some of its own forks because OpenSim doesn't run on a standardised protocol, and nobody else has ever created anything compatible.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

This is more than most alt-texts on Mastodon. Only this.

But it still leaves one question unanswered: "Discovery Grid? What's that? Why is it called a grid? What's a grid in this context?"

So I'd have to add yet another paragraph.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.

I'm well past 1,000 characters now. Other people paint entire pictures with words with that many characters. I need them only to explain where a picture was taken. But this should answer all immediate questions and make clear what kind of place the picture shows.

The main downside, apart from the length which for some Mastodon users is too long for a full image description already, is that this will be outdated, should the decision be made to move Sendalonde to another grid again.

And I haven't even started actually describing the image. Blind or visually-impaired users still don't know what it actually shows.

The actual content of the image

If this was a place in real life, I might get away with name-dropping the Sendalonde Community Library and briefly mention that there are some trees around it, and there's a body of water in the background. It'd be absolutely sufficient.

But such a virtual place is something that next to nobody is familiar with. Non-sighted people even less because they're even more unlikely to visit virtual worlds. That's a highly visual medium and usually not really inclusive for non-sighted users.

So if I only name-dropped the Sendalonde Community Library, mentioned where it is located and explained what OpenSim is, I wouldn't be done. There would be blind or visually-impaired people inquiring, "Okay, but what does it look like?" Ditto people with poor internet for whom the image doesn't load.

Sure they would. Because they honestly wouldn't know what it looks like. Because even the sighted users with poor internet have never seen it before. But they would want to know.

So I'd have to tell them. Not doing so would be openly ableist.

And no, one sentence isn't enough. This is a very large, highly complex, highly detailed building and not just a box with a doorway and a sign on it. Besides, remember that we're talking about a virtual world. Architecture in virtual worlds is not bound to the same limits and laws and standards and codes as in real life. Just about everything is possible. So absolutely nothing can ever be considered "a given" and therefore unnecessary to be mentioned.

Now, don't believe that blind or visually-impaired people will limit their "What does it look like?" to the centre-piece of the picture. If you mention something being there, they want to know what it looks like. Always. Regardless of whether or not they used to be sighted, they still don't know what whatever you've mentioned looks like specifically in a virtual world. And, again, it's likely that they don't know what it looks like at all.

Thus, if I mention it, I have to describe it. Always. All of it.

There are exactly two exceptions. One, if something is fully outside the borders of the image. Two, if something is fully covered up by something else. And I'm not even entirely sure about the latter case.

Sometimes, a visual description isn't even enough. Sometimes, I can mention that something is somewhere in the picture. I can describe what that something looks like in all details. But people still don't know what it is.

I can mention that there's an OpenSimWorld beacon standing somewhere. I can describe its looks with over a 1,000 words and so much accuracy that an artist could make a fairly accurate drawing of it just from my description.

But people, the artist included, still would not know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is in the first place, nor what it's there for.

So I have to explain what an OpenSimWorld beacon is and what it does.

Before I can do that, I first have to explain what OpenSimWorld is. And that won't be possible with a short one-liner. OpenSimWorld is a very multi-purpose website. Explaining it will require a four-digit number of characters.

Only after I'm done explaining OpenSimWorld, I can start explaining the beacon. And the beacon is quite multi-functional itself. On top of that, I'll have to explain the concept of teleporting around in OpenSim, especially from grid to grid through the Hypergrid.

This is why I generally avoid having OSW beacons in my pictures.

Teleporters themselves aren't quite as bad, but they, too, require lots and lots of words. They have to be described. If there's a picture on them, maybe one that shows a preview of the chosen destination, that picture has to be described. All of a sudden, I have an entire second image to write a description for. And then I have to explain what that teleporter is, what it does, how it works, how it's operated. They don't know teleporters because there are no teleporters in real life.

At least I might not have to explain to them which destinations the teleporter can send an avatar to. The people who need all these descriptions and explanations won't have any use for this particular information because they don't even know the destinations in the first place. And describing and explaining each of these destinations, especially if they're over a hundred, might actually be beyond the scope of an image description, especially since these destinations usually aren't shown in the image itself.

Avatars

Just like in-world objects, avatars and everything more or less similar require detailed, extensive descriptions and explanations. People need to understand how avatars work in this kind of world, and of course, blind or visually-impaired people want to know what these avatars look like. Each and every last one of them. Again, how are they supposed to know otherwise?

I'm not quite sure whether or not it's smart to always give the names of all avatars in the image. It's easy to find them out, but when writing a description especially for a party picture with dozens of avatars in it, associating the depictions of avatars in the image with identities has to be done right away before even only one of these avatars leaves the location.

One thing that needs to be explained right afterwards is how avatars are built. In the cases of Second Life and OpenSim, this means explaining that they usually aren't "monobloc" avatars that can't be modified in-world. Instead, they are modular, put together from lots of elements, usually starting with a mesh body that "replaces" the default system body normally rendered by the viewer, continuing with a skin texture, an eye texture and a shape with over 80 different parameters and ending with clothes and accessories. Of course, this requires an explanation on what "mesh" is, why it's special and when and why it was introduced.

OpenSim also supports script-controlled NPCs which require their own explanation, including that NPCs don't exist in Second Life, and how they work in OpenSim. Animesh exists both in Second Life and OpenSim and requires its own explanation again.

After these explanations, the actual visual description can begin. And it can and has to be every bit as extensive and detailed as for everything else in the picture.

The sex of an avatar does not have to be avoided in the description, at least not in Second Life and OpenSim. There, you basically only have two choices: masculine men and feminine women. Deviating from that is extremely difficult, so next to nobody does that. What few people actually declare their avatars trans describe them as such in the profile. The only other exception are "women with a little extra". All other avatars can safely be assumed to be cis, and their visual sex can be used to describe them.

In virtual worlds, especially Second Life and OpenSim, there is no reason not to mention the skin tone either. A skin is just that: a skin. It can be replaced with just about any other skin on any avatar without changing anything else. It doesn't even have to be natural. It can be snow white, or it can be green, or it can be the grey of bare metal. In fact, in order to satisfy those who are really curious about virtual worlds, it's even necessary to mention if a skin is photo-realistic and has highlights and shades baked on.

Following that comes a description of what the avatar wears, including the hairstyle. This, too, should go into detail and mention things that are so common in real life that nobody would waste a thought about them, such as whether there are creases or crinkles on a piece of clothing at all, and if so, if they're actually part of the 3-D model or only painted on.

Needless to say that non-standard avatars, e.g. dragons, require the same amount of detail when describing them.

Now, only describing what an avatar looks like isn't enough. It's also necessary to describe what the avatar does which means a detailed description of its posture and mimics. Just about all human avatars in Second Life and OpenSim have support for mimics, even though they usually wear a neutral, non-descript expression. But even that needs to be mentioned.

Text transcripts

They say that if there's text somewhere in a picture, it has to be transcribed verbatim in the image description. However, there is no definite rule for text that is too small to be readable, partially obscured by something in front of it or only partially within the borders of the image.

Text not only appears in screenshots of social media posts, photographs of news articles and the like. It may appear in all kinds of photographs, and it may just as well appear in digital renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. It can be on posters, it can be on billboards, it can be on big and small signs, it can be on store marquees, it can be printed on people's clothes, it can be anywhere.

Again, the basic rule is: If there's text, it has to be transcribed.

Now you might say that transcribing illegible text is completely out of question. It can't be read anyway, so it can't be transcribed either. Case closed.

Not so fast. It's true that this text can't be read in the picture. But that one picture is not necessarily the only source for the text in question. If the picture is a real-life photograph, the last resort would be to go back to where the picture was taken, look around more closely and transcribe the bits of text from there.

Granted, that's difficult if whatever a text was on is no longer there, e.g. if it was printed on a T-shirt. And yes, that's extra effort, too much of an effort if you're at home posting pictures which you've taken during your overseas vacation. Flying back there just to transcribe text is completely out of question.

This is a non-issue for pictures from virtual worlds. In most cases, you can always go back to where you've taken a picture, take closer looks at signs and posters and so on, look behind trees or columns or whatever is standing in front of a sign and partly covering it and easily transcribe everything. Or you take the picture and write the description without even leaving first. You can stay there until you're done describing and transcribing everything.

At least Second Life and OpenSim also allow you to move your camera and therefore your vision independently from your avatar. That really makes it possible to take very close looks at just about everything, regardless of whether or not you can get close enough with your avatar.

There are only four cases in which in-world text does not have to be fully transcribed. One, it's incomplete in-world; in this case, transcribe what is there. Two, it's illegible in-world, for example due to a too low texture resolution or texture quality; that's bad luck. Three, it is fully obscured, either because it is fully covered by something else, or because it's on a surface completely facing away from the camera. And four, it isn't even within the borders of the image.

In all other cases, there is no reason not to transcribe text. The text being illegible in the picture isn't. In fact, that's rather a reason to transcribe it: Even sighted people need help figuring out what's written there. And people who are super-curious about virtual worlds and want to know everything about them will not stop at text.

But why?

Yeah, that's all tough, I know. And I can understand if you as the audience are trying to weasel yourself out of having to read such a massive image description. You're trying to get me to not write that much. You're trying to find a situation in which writing so much is not justified, not necessary. Or better yet, enough situations that they become the majority, that a full description ends up only necessary in extremely niche edge cases that you hope to never come across. You want to see that picture, but you want to see it without thousands or tens of thousands of worlds of description.

Let me tell you something: There is no such situation. There is no context in which such a huge image description wouldn't be necessary.

The picture could be part of a post of someone who has visited that place and wants to tell everyone about it. Even if the post itself has only got 200 characters.

The picture could be part of an announcement of an event that's planned to take place there.

The picture could be part of a post from that very event. Or about the event after it has happened.

The picture could be part of an interview with the owners.

The picture could be part of a post about famous locations in OpenSim.

The picture could be part of a post about the Discovery Grid.

The picture could be part of a post about OpenSim in general.

The picture could be part of a post or thread about 6 obscure virtual worlds that you've probably never heard of, and number 4 is really awesome.

The picture could be part of a post about virtual architecture.

The picture could be part of a post about the concept of virtual libraries or bookstores.

The picture could be part of a recommendation of cool OpenSim places to visit.

It doesn't matter. All these cases require the full image description with all its details. And so do all those which I haven't mentioned. There will always be someone coming across the post with the picture who needs the description.

See, I've learned something about the Fediverse. You can try to limit your target audience. But you can't limit your actual audience.

It'd be much easier for me if I could only post to people who know OpenSim and actually lock everyone else out. But I can't.

On the World-Wide Web, it's easy. If you write something niche, pretty much only people interested in that niche will see your content because only they will even look for content like yours. Content has to be actively dug out, but in doing so, you can pick what kind of content to dig out.

In the Fediverse, anyone will come across stuff that they know nothing about, whether they're interested in it or not. Even elaborate filtering of the personal timeline isn't fail-safe. And then there are local and federated timelines on which all kinds of stuff appear.

No matter how hard you try to only post to a specific audience, it is very likely that someone who knows nothing about your topic will see your post on the federated timeline on mastodon.social. It's rude to keep clueless casuals from following you, even though all they do is follow absolutely everyone because they need that background noise of uninteresting stuff on their personal timeline that they have on X due to The Algorithm. And it's impossible to keep people from boosting your posts to clueless casuals, whether these people are your own connections and familiar with your topic, or they've discovered your most recent post on their federated timeline.

You can't keep clueless casuals who need an extensive image description to understand your picture from coming across it. Neither can you keep blind or visually-impaired users who need an image description to even experience the picture in the first place from coming across it.

Neither, by the way, can you keep those who demand everyone always give a sufficient description for any image from coming across yours. And I'm pretty sure that some of them not only demand that from those whom they follow, but from those whose picture posts they come across on the local or federated timelines as well.

Sure, you can ignore them. You can block them. You can flip them the imaginary or actual bird. And then you can refuse to give a description altogether. Or you can put a short description into the alt-text which actually doesn't help at all. Sure, you can do that. But then you have to cope with having a Fediverse-wide reputation as an ableist swine.

The only alternative is to do it right and give those who need a sufficiently informative image description what they need. In the case of virtual worlds, as I've described, "sufficiently informative" starts at several thousand words.

And this is why pictures from virtual worlds always need extremely long image descriptions.

---

Set of hashtags to see if they're federated across the Fediverse:

#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #Accessibility #Inclusion #Inclusivity #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

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.

What happened in the Fediverse and to the Fediverse since Musk bought out Twitter

One year of Eternal November: The good, the bad and the ugly

The Eternal November has been on-going for a year now. I guess it's obvious that "Eternal November" is a term coined not by the newbies from back then but by those who had been here before the first migration wave already, those in particular who aren't even on Mastodon.

It's indeed a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Fediverse suddenly became important. At least Mastodon was no longer a toy for absolute die-hard geeks like XMPP or Matrix. For more and more non-geeks, even for some non-geek-tech media outlets, social media stopped being only U.S. corporations. It felt like people began to understand that a PC or a laptop doesn't necessarily have to run Windows if it isn't a Mac, that you can run Linux on it as well and free yourself from Microsoft's spying eyes, greedy claws and controlling clasp.

It's also true that the newcomers started changing the culture in the Fediverse. Some of it was taken over from Twitter by people who couldn't or didn't want to get used to something new. Some like increased accessibility was brand-new because even Mastodon already let people do things that were difficult on Twitter. A lot of this came from how welcoming Mastodon felt to marginalised groups like BIPoC, the LGBTQIA+ community or people with all kinds of disabilities. Culturally, it was no longer otaku and furries who were dominant in the Fediverse, both groups that have been chased away from Twitter before, plus Linux geeks.

The other side of the coin

On the other hand, the technological culture changed for the worse. Before the first wave of migration that started in February 2022 when Musk declared his interest in buying out Twitter, the dominant platform in the Fediverse was probably desktop Linux. If you used any Fediverse project, you probably went all-in in getting away from GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Alternative search engines all the way to Searx. Linux instead of Windows. At least de-Googled Android on your phone, if not even a wholly different free and open-source operating system that doesn't come from Apple or Google at all. The average Fediverse user was very tech-literate.

All this changed increasingly with each wave of migration. Over the course of 2022, more and more people began to trickle onto Mastodon who previously hadn't used anything free and open-source before, especially not knowingly and intentionally. They didn't know what FLOSS is, they didn't know what kind of FLOSS existed, and they didn't care. For many of them, Mastodon is still the only piece of FLOSS they have ever used. Plus maybe their mobile Mastodon app, most likely if they're still on the official app.

Shortly before the end of October, when Musk actually took over Twitter, the floodgates opened. Twitter users came in millions. And they started recommending Mastodon to other Twitter users who up until this point had believed that Elon Musk had the total monopoly on micro-blogging.

Amongst these, it was the marginalised groups whom I had mentioned above who were the only ones looking for something that wasn't Twitter. They wanted a safe haven from right-wing harassment. Their own likes who had already migrated told them that Mastodon was exactly that, not only because it was very left-leaning, but also because it lacked the two major harassment tools on Twitter: full-text search and quote-tweets. Also, these people often were invited to instances created, run and mostly or entirely populated by their own kind instead of the big all-purpose instances.

Different from Twitter equals bad

Everyone else, however, followed the promise of Mastodon being "literally Twitter without Musk". And that's exactly what they expected. Another centralised, monolithic silo operated by a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley corporation. Made by hundreds or thousands of paid software developers in cubicles. One that hands them everything on a silver platter right away without them having to do anything with an algorithm that makes their personal timeline bustle with posts from people they had never heard of before they even follow anyone. And of course with a 100% copy of Twitter's look-and-feel.

This promise almost always came along with a link to mastodon.social, implying that mastodon.social was "the Mastodon website", just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. So people piled on mastodon.social as if there was nothing else because there was actually nothing else for them. They weren't told that Mastodon is decentralised. And they themselves recommended Mastodon to other Twitter users when they didn't even know half of what Mastodon is. Including the mastodon.social URL.

In this regard, the closure of mastodon.social's registration due to the instance being completely overrun had positive effects. For starters, Twitter refugees had to learn what instances are and that Mastodon is decentralised before even registering an account because they had to go find another instance. The oh-so-convenient mollycoddling and railroading of newbies was over, at least until mastodon.social increased its capacities, at which point it began anew.

Many aspiring Twitter migrants gave up immediately. Mastodon was too complicated. They had to fire up their brains and learn about techy stuff before they could start tweeting away. They had never needed that before in the digital world. So they went back to Twitter and told everyone that Mastodon is impossibly hard to use. They're probably still on 𝕏, waiting for the Musk-less 100% clone to come or for Bluesky to open its registrations.

Of those who made it through, regardless of on mastodon.social or having been forced to look elsewhere, many didn't stay for long. Only after settling in did they discover that Mastodon was nothing like Twitter. It looked different. It felt different. And it was dead. They pronounced it dead because absolutely nothing was happening on their personal timeline. There was no secret-sauce algorithm filling it with stuff that it thought they might be interested in. There wasn't even an algorithm recommending them users to follow.

They could have found activity on the local timeline or the federated timeline. But chances were they hadn't even used Twitter's public timeline before. Even if they had, they couldn't find Mastodon's equivalent because Mastodon's default Web interface was not a straight-away clone of Twitter's. Everything was in different places, everything was named differently, and everything had different icons, so they couldn't find anything. Not to mention that is was of course beyond their understanding what a "federated" timeline could possibly be if they were on mastodon.social because they didn't know that the Fediverse is decentralised.

After checking two or three times if some algorithm had finally kicked in and served them what they didn't explicitly ask for, they went back to Twitter without even having tooted only once. Others threw in the towel because they simply didn't manage to even use something that didn't handle exactly like Twitter.

If it isn't Twitter, we'll make it Twitter

Many others chose to stay. They'd rather put up with Mastodon's weirdness due to being different from Twitter than with a raging Nazi making all the wrong decisions and threatening Twitter's very existence by blindly firing all the wrong departments. Still, many of them didn't want something completely new, something different. They wanted the closest thing to Twitter that they could get. And Mastodon was the closest thing to Twitter that they had heard of, also because Twitter and Mastodon were the only micro-blogging platforms they had ever heard of.

While other Twitter refugees started establishing a decidedly "un-Twitter" culture, they continued to act exactly like on Twitter. It was hard enough for them to understand and accept that it's "toot" instead of "tweet". Still until today, many haven't gotten it into their heads that it isn't even "retoot" instead of "retweet", it's "boost".

They kept and often still keep on tooting as if they were tweeting. They still stay below 280 characters. They don't use hashtags because they'll never get used to there not being an algorithm forwarding their toots, and that hashtags are critically important in making your posts visible. They don't use content warnings for anything, and they don't describe their images and media. They had never done either on Twitter, so why do it here?

Their "hack" around the lack of an algorithm shoving all kinds of uninteresting stuff into their faces via their personal timeline was by opening the federated timeline and following everyone they saw. What these people posted didn't matter as long as they posted something. That's why there were so many Mastodon users with blank profiles and hardly any to no toots of their own, but they followed a completely incoherent and random bunch of hundreds of users. All just so that Mastodon felt another bit more like Twitter.

At least early on, they also demanded Mastodon itself become more like Twitter so that their likes don't have to adapt to something new. Nagging Eugen Rochko for full-text search and quote-tweets was fairly harmless in comparison to demanding the default Web UI and the official mobile app be re-styled into Twitter look-alikes. They only stopped when they realised that nothing of this would come to fruition.

A few who were experienced in Web development decided to take the lack of full-text search into their own hands before they actually knew about the nature and the culture of the Fediverse. They built their own Fediverse search engines. Proprietary, closed-source, centralised and with no way to opt out, much less opt in. And then they stood and watched in disbelief how instance after instance blocked their search engine, spearheaded by BIPoC and the LGBTQIA+ community who had moved over to Mastodon because it didn't have full-text search in the first place.

The Fediverse outside Mastodon neither knew nor cared. Many barely had any Mastodon connections. What they had instead was full-text search readily available, so even if they knew, they didn't understand all the ruckus. For them, the only bad thing about these search engines was that they were closed-source and especially centralised, contradicting the core principle of the Fediverse. Oh, and all these search engines were built against only Mastodon and nothing else because their creators didn't know at that point that the Fediverse was more than Mastodon. So people outside of Mastodon weren't even affected by any of this, especially not those who had no connections on Mastodon in the first place. Some saw it as good, some more probably saw it as discriminating.

The Fediverse does not equal Mastodon?!

Which brings me to the next point: the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. It had already existed for years. In fact, Pleroma, Friendica and Hubzilla are all actually older than Mastodon. Pleroma is older by a few weeks. Hubzilla is older by almost a year, almost four years if the Red Matrix counts. Friendica is older by almost six years and actually even predates Diaspora* by two months. But hardly anyone knew any of this.

Most newbies who had joined since February 2022 spent a whole lot of time believing that "Mastodon" and "Fediverse" mean the same, that they're mutually synonymous because the Fediverse is only Mastodon anyway. Of those who had joined since the start of the Eternal November, pretty much all did.

And they did so for months, usually at least three to five months. Some were slowly convinced otherwise when they kept reading about Pixelfed and PeerTube which were being talked about and advertised a lot. And it became increasingly clear to them that these two projects were part of the Fediverse, too. So there wasn't only a Twitter, but also an Instagram and a YouTube, and the Instagram and the YouTube were both connected to the Twitter. Little did they know that the Fediverse had more than half a dozen Twitters at that point, neither of which was significant closer to actual Twitter than Mastodon.

Others learned it the hard way. Maybe one of the Mastodon users they were following boosted a post from outside Mastodon. Maybe they themselves had followed a non-Mastodon user in their federated timeline following spree. Either way, a very non-Mastodon post appeared on their personal timeline. They were highly irritated because that post looked so weird. Mentions looked freaky because they used the full name instead of the short name. Even more likely, the post was simply way over 500 characters long. Something which these people had deemed absolutely impossible in the Fediverse because tooting over 500 characters is impossible on vanilla Mastodon. And they complained to the author about that alleged "toot" without having the foggiest idea how it could even be possible to "toot" something like this.

Or they were talking like it's the most normal thing in the world that Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the same, and that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Who would ever doubt that? Well, those following their talks who aren't on Mastodon themselves would. Maybe they were developers, and they had just built another Fediverse tool that'd be useful for the whole Fediverse, but they had hard-built it against only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon because they didn't know anything else.

Whatever the cause, these people suddenly found themselves being lectured by a non-Mastodon Fediverse user about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. It's true they had never known. But it's also true they had never wanted to know. They had never even expected anything like this. And chances were it was too much tech-talk for them. Not to mention that it felt like dozens of non-Mastodon projects suddenly intruding on their cosy little Mastodon. Not seldomly, they didn't want any of these to exist. They wanted them to go away again. Never mind that at least three of them had been around when Mastodon was launched.

I've been in this situation a couple of times myself, enough so that I believed that hundreds of people started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because they considered me a "Fediverse guru" from whom they could catch posts that'd explain the Fediverse outside of Mastodon to them.

What certainly helped was my most popular post by far, "Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist" from around March with 288 likes that I know of. It's about nagging Eugen Rochko to introduce certain features on Mastodon while the self-same features have been readily available on other Fediverse projects for ages. And indeed, I guess this post was an eye-opener for many Mastodon users. Not only because it was me whom they learned from that other Fediverse projects already had stuff like text formatting, full-text search and quotes, but especially because it was me whom they learned from that other projects than Mastodon exist in the Fediverse in the first place. I had quite a wave of new followers on the weeks after this post, and those of them who had been around since November actually followed me to learn about the Fediverse outside Mastodon because it felt like everyone else only knew and talked about Mastodon.

But I often had to tell people in person that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. And sometimes it was hard to tell them because it was hard for them to even grasp.

No, I'm not on Mastodon.

I'm on Hubzilla.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is its very own project.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla is fully independent from Mastodon.

Yes, Hubzilla is fully connected to Mastodon nonetheless. As you can see because I'm writing to you directly from Hubzilla right now.

In fact, Hubzilla is even four years older than Mastodon, technically speaking. When Mastodon was launched, Hubzilla had been around for four years in some way.

Yes, really.

Yes, this is normal. This is what the Fediverse is. A network of all kinds of different projects with different capabilities for different purposes. And not only Mastodon.

See, there's Pleroma which is another Twitter and older than Mastodon, too. And there's Akkoma, another Twitter. And there's Misskey, another Twitter from Japan. And there's CalcKey (Firefish today, but it was CalcKey back then), another Twitter. And there's PeerTube, a YouTube "clone". And there's Pixelfed, an Instagram "clone". And there's Friendica which is more like Facebook. And there's Funkwhale which is more like SoundCloud and the like. And so forth.

What I wrote completely obliterated their new worldview.

Worse yet, some people still can't accept the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. And it was even worse back then. I've heard a story from a Friendica user who was blocked by a Mastodon user for communicating with Mastodon users while not being on Mastodon. For that user, the Fediverse was a Mastodon-only walled garden, and any access to it from something that wasn't Mastodon was some kind of evil black-hat hacking.

Still today, there are Mastodon users who want the Fediverse to be only Mastodon, who might actually be in support of fediblocking everything that isn't Mastodon, even though that'd be a game of Whack-a-Mole. Others can tolerate the presence of other projects than Mastodon in the Fediverse as long as everyone using these projects behaves exactly the same as on Mastodon so that their posts cannot be distinguished from Mastodon posts. No more than 500 characters, no text formatting, no quotes, and they'd better turn those freaky looking mentions off. And "this is hard-coded and has been since before Mastodon was made" is not necessarily accepted as an answer.

Something that I found particularly jarring was members of marginalised groups writing about Mastodon and the Fediverse being a safe haven because full-text search and quote-tweets are absent from the Fediverse. Because they're absent from Mastodon. Some of them had probably never heard of anything else than Mastodon. And it was obvious that none of them had ever heard of what non-Mastodon Fediverse projects are capable of.

For almost all projects that can do something in the direction of micro-blogging had full-text search which did not exclude Mastodon toots. So there were indeed places in the Fediverse where Mastodon toots were full-text searchable as long as they were known to the respective instances. Also, most of these projects could do quotes. And Friendica, Hubzilla and the budding nameless, brandless non-project commonly referred to as (streams) could even do what would amount to "quote-tweets". And yes, with Mastodon toots. They call it "sharing", they do it by referencing the original post rather than copying it, but still.

It happened that I tried to tell these people that what they don't want on Mastodon was readily available elsewhere. That I could full-text search, quote and "quote-tweet" Mastodon posts on Hubzilla. I guess it went beyond their imagination because I never really got a reaction. It didn't help that Mastodon couldn't display quotes properly yet, and it still can't display shared posts properly, so even demonstrating these capabilities didn't have the desired effect.

In hindsight, this was actually good because these groups of users would otherwise have loudly demanded all non-Mastodon instances be fediblocked.

What has happened since then: Bluesky and the third wave

Around December, the second wave came to an end although there were still people moving from Twitter to Mastodon. This was when mastodon.social had increased its capacity. So new registrations focused more and more on mastodon.social again.

It was one thing that it often took people at least three to five months to learn that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. But now that mastodon.social was open again, more and more people came who spent months believing that the Fediverse is only mastodon.social, especially after Mastodon itself built a milder form of mollycoddling and railroading into the official mobile app.

Still, those who have joined in the second wave and its aftermath have mostly settled in. They have learned what it means that Mastodon is decentralised. They have come to terms with the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. In fact, some have moved elsewhere entirely like Firefish or Friendica in the meantime, often taking their connections with them regardless.

This summer, Twitter closed its API to all who wouldn't pay a substantial license fee. They followed Reddit's example which had caused the Threadiverse to explode and adopt that name in the first place. Many of those who were still on Twitter were willing to put up with rampant open fascism and hatred being commonplace, but not with the official mobile app or the official Web interface. And all alternatives were killed off in one fell swoop. A third wave of migration began.

However, this wave was different. For one, the likeliness of these people wanting something entirely new was much smaller. Had they wanted something substantially different from Twitter like Mastodon or any other Fediverse project, they would long since have moved there. But they hadn't.

Besides, Bluesky was already there. And Bluesky is widely being seen as "actually Twitter without Musk" due to having been founded by the same guy as Twitter. However, Bluesky was and still is invite-only. Many would have moved there if they could, but they couldn't. And Threads wasn't and still isn't seen as an alternative because its users are regarded as a subset of the notoriously obnoxious and attention-whoring Instagram crowd.

So while people were waiting for a Bluesky invite, they had to choose between enduring Twitter's hate-mongering and enduring Mastodon's being different and complicated. When the former was no longer accessible through third-party clients, the latter became the lesser of two evils.

This brought us new Mastodon users who only use Mastodon as a stopover, like a refugee camp, until they can finally get to their desired destination, namely Bluesky. For this reason, they aren't interested in Mastodon itself at all. They don't really care what it is and how it works. They see its decentralisation as a nuisance they temporarily have to put up with. And they keep acting like they're on 𝕏 and refusing to adopt any of Mastodon's or the greater Fediverse's mannerisms. They actually hope that they can continue behaving like on 𝕏 once they're on Bluesky. It's Twitter without Musk and without Nazis after all, right?

The irony is that there will never be a Bluesky with open registrations that's so nicely and conveniently centralised like 𝕏. As long as Bluesky has only got its one "mothership instance", it will remain invite-only because the capacity of that instance is limited. Registrations will be opened when there are more instances, and then they will be opened only for these other instances. This will be to keep people from piling upon the "mothership instance" like on all decentralised projects that were ever created from Jabber to Matrix to Diaspora* to Mastodon to Lemmy to Misskey to OpenSimulator, in fact, even including e-mail.

So when you can register an account on Bluesky without an invite, it will no longer be Twitter without Musk. It will become the same degree of complicated that keeps people away from the Fediverse because they have to choose an instance first without being railroaded to one. And until that happens, I bet that Bluesky will have grown its own culture and its own mannerisms and reject at least some of those from 𝕏. So even if you should manage go to Bluesky, you will have to learn, and you will have to adapt.

Fortunately, not everyone who came over to Mastodon during the third wave is like this. Some may simply have been slow. Some may have refused to move from 𝕏 to Mastodon because "but muh followers, but muh fame"; some of these might have been convinced by tales from others who said that they actually get more feedback from fewer followers. Some may have believed mainstream media that had pronounced Mastodon and the whole of the Fediverse dead in early 2023, just to learn that they're alive and well when Mastodon became the talk of the town again due to 𝕏's increasing enshittification.

And truth be told, I guess 𝕏 was so utterly enshittified at this point that not exactly few of these people moved to Mastodon because they decided they wanted something as un-𝕏 as possible instead. And I wouldn't be surprised if this eagerness had actually driven some of them to try out other Fediverse projects as soon as they had heard about them.

And when "clear and concise" and "informative" are more than just mutually exclusive in alt-text

Alt-text isn't an invention of social media, even less an invention of the Mastodon community. Text that describes images especially to blind or visually-impaired users while "embedded" in the pictures themselves has been around for quite a while. Until recently, however, it was mostly a question of good Web design.

When Mastodon exploded, so did the use of alt-text on social platforms. Granted, on Twitter, hardly anyone uses alt-text. But starting on Mastodon, it became good manners to ad alt-text to all pictures and media you post anywhere in the Fediverse, no matter where you are. If you don't, you're likely to be criticised, and many users openly point out that they refuse to boost or reshare anything that contains even only one picture without alt-text.

But alt-text itself has changed along with this trend.

Web design bibles recommend alt-text to be clear and concise; one sentence is enough. The Fediverse has rendered this obsolete. The Fediverse loves and seems to pretty much demand alt-text to be informative and detailed. If it's visible somewhere in the picture, it has to be described. And if it isn't clear what exactly it is that's shown, neither from the message body nor from the alt-text nor from common knowledge, it has to be explained.

In fact, the scope of alt-text in the Fediverse has been expanded from describing to blind or visually-impaired users what sighted users can see to also describing what even eagle-eyed users couldn't possibly see, whatever that may be.

I've seen pictures on Mastodon with alt-text that's longer than a toot could possibly be. Mind you, Mastodon has a hard limit of 1,500 characters for alt-text. But what I've never seen is users being criticised for their alt-texts being too long.

Examples from the Fediverse

Here are a few examples.



This is a nature shot. Nothing much can be seen here. Still, it's four and a half lines of alt-text.



Three gardening pictures that really go into detail. One of them, however, breaks the golden rule that any and all text in pictures must be transcribed verbatim.



This is what happens when you try to write a detailed and informative alt-text for a picture taken in Manhattan. Seven and a half lines of alt-text. And it could still be improved by providing more transcriptions.

So yes, it happens.

My situation

I myself am none of those who boycott things just because they can't be bothered. If the Fediverse demands alt-text, it shall have alt-text. If the Fediverse demands detailed alt-text, well, then so be it, no matter how, as long as it's technologically possible. And it is. You wouldn't believe how it is.

Now, I'm not on Mastodon and a mobile app. I'm here on Hubzilla through a run-of-the-mill desktop Web browser and on a desktop PC with a hardware keyboard in front of me. So "hard to type on a touch screen" isn't valid for me either, and I'm free from Mastodon's limitations.

On the one hand, over here on Hubzilla, alt-text is part of the message body, and the length of alt-text is not separate from the length of a post. On the other hand, post length is next to unlimited here. I could write posts with tens of thousands of characters. I can cram more characters into one post than most Mastodon users toot in one month.

There isn't any alt-text limit either because Hubzilla doesn't have a dedicated alt-text system like Mastodon; instead, alt-text is manually grafted into the BBcode that inserts pictures into posts. So I could also write alt-texts with tens of thousands of characters, easily enough to transcribe scanned newspaper articles or screenshots of blog posts in their entirety. Mastodon will truncate them at 1,500 characters, but I can still write them.

None of this is limited to articles like these. What I can do in articles, I can do all the same in posts, only that Mastodon users won't be able to see it properly then. That's why I've chosen to make this an article, seeing as the vast majority of Fediverse users are Mastodon users for whom many of the features of this article as a post wouldn't work. This being an article makes them read it in a Web browser outside their timelines, a place where image embedding and text formatting works properly.

Still, I have a problem. And that problem comes from what kind of content I post here. If you're lucky, it's a meme which is easy to describe.

If not, I post pictures from inside virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. And that's something that not even two dozen Fediverse users are familiar with. Out of an eight-digit number altogether. Everyone who isn't familiar with it, potentially over 13,000,000 people, requires explanations on all the things they don't know. And it's highly likely that they don't know anything in these pictures.

I've written a very lengthy post about this a few months ago. I didn't get much feedback back then. What feedback I got was that I should keep my alt-texts short. But what I see around the Fediverse suggests otherwise.

Allow me to share with you a post that confirms that I'm not the only one who thinks like this.



"This is especially true for technical topic photos.  By accurately describing what's in the picture, you give context to non-technical viewers, or newbies, as to exactly what they're looking at, and even describe how it works or why it matters." And this, dear @Stormgren, is absolutely essential for the pictures I post. But it's likely to be a whole lot.

Now you might say that detailed descriptions and explanations for pictures should go into the post itself. This is only true if the post is about the picture.

But this isn't Pixelfed. I rarely write about pictures. I use pictures to illustrate what I'm writing about. Including in-world pictures with sometimes lots and lots of details which even the millions of sighted Fediverse users wouldn't recognise, not to mention blind or visually-impaired users. Now, this isn't art photography. I don't arrange the stuff in the pictures that way. I can't help it if they end up with so much in them to see.

Example picture from me

Okay, now let me give you an example. The picture itself doesn't have an alt-text, for I'm going to discuss possible alt-texts below. In the process of doing so, I'm going to describe this picture in all its details. So don't worry, you probably won't miss out on anything.



Again, this isn't Pixelfed. The context in which I'd post the picture would not be, "Look at this picture!" It'd be a post about the Metropolis grid in OpenSim shutting down soon after a whopping 14 years of operation. The picture would only illustrate it, showing my old Metropolis avatar waving good-bye before vanishing along with the grid. In this context, it'd simply be completely out of place to write a 200-character post about the Metro shutdown, add the picture and then add an image description that's thousands upon thousands of characters long.

In the thread I've linked further above, I got a few alt-text suggestions which a) imply that the picture is part of an Instagram-style post about the picture, thus justifying a full description outside the picture, and b) it's clear to the on-looker what's going on. Neither applies to this picture.

Eventually, I suggested this:

My Metropolis avatar, waving a last farewell from the Metropolis welcome building

It was considered okay.

But it's faulty.

Again, it implies that there's a description somewhere else in the post which implies that it's a post about this picture instead of a post merely illustrated by this picture.

So the alt-text roughly mentions what's going on in the picture. But it doesn't say a word about what's actually in the picture.

And what's in this picture is a lot.

If I were to deliver a full description at a level of detail similar to what I've re-shared above, this could be it:

My avatar in the Metropolis Metaversum, waving a last farewell from the Metropolis welcome building before Metropolis shuts down for good. The avatar is a light-skinned, dark-haired male adult wearing metal-framed glasses, a dark grey blazer jacket with darker grey shoulders and collar, a black button-down shirt buttoned up all the way to the collar, a pair of dark black denim jeans and a pair of black full-brogue shoes. He is standing on the outside platform of level 3, the top level of the building and waving his right hand while having his left hand on his hip. The floor of the platform is a rusty steel girder that's so coarse that it'd be fairly hard to walk on in real life. In front of him is the double railing made of likewise rusty steel that surrounds the platform. Below the platform, the rust-coated structure that carries level 3 can be seen. Level 3 itself, entirely behind the avatar with the exception of the outside platform, is encased in a glass cupola with a cylindrical lower part and a spherical upper part, both with semi-transparent green reinforcements between what would otherwise appear as single glass panes. The spherical upper part rests on a support ring made of sheet metal panels with rusty outer edges. This ring, in turn, is carried by four triple sets of boxy, rusty steel columns with semi-elliptical cutouts on the far side of the cupola that roughly give the impression of being riveted. One triple set of columns can be seen right outside the cupola to the right of the avatar, another two can be seen in the background to the left and to the right of the avatar. Within each triple set except the one in the front to the right, there are two passageways into the cupola. Each passageway is surrounded by a greenish metal frame; each pair of these frames carries the marquee "METROPOLIS GRID" made of light grey concrete with blinking white lightbulbs on it. A circular structure made of rusty steel pipes is mounted on the inside of the support ring and carries a number of neon lights with rusty sheet metal covers above them. A semi-circular structure made of likewise rusty sheet metal protrudes outward from the support ring above the two columns to the left in the background Also, to the left of the avatar and on the front part of the platform, there is a dark grey four-seat bench made of rounded square steel tubes with fine steel girders in them as legs, seats and backrests. Around the inside of the cupola, there is a narrow strip with a plant-like green and greyish brown texture going all around except for the passageways. The floor inside the cupola gives the impression of cracked grey concrete. On the left-hand edge of the picture and behind the front set of support columns, there are two greyish-brown rocks with green moss on top; the one behind the columns is almost twice as tall as the one to the left. Also inside the cupola, behind the four-seat bench, there is the circular info desk with a sign mounted on top and an NPC modelled after the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1928 silent movie Metropolis standing on the inside of the desk. The sign is made from rusty sheet metal, a surrounding frame made of zinc-coated steel tubes which still show some rust and two bamboo poles as supports which are stuck through the bottom horizontal pipe. It can only be seen from behind in this picture. A small red and light brown bird is perched on top of the sign. What gives the impression of promotional material for both the film and the grid is placed on the counter top, as are a red and white strawberry cocktail and a light grey laptop computer that appears to be running Windows XP. The red object above the counter top to the left of the NPC is a heart slowly rotating clockwise which provides access to the avatar-partnering feature. An artificial pond with various plants in it extends from behind the info desk past the front of the larger rock to the next passageway. To the left of the info desk, there's the walk-in teleporter that leads down to level 2. It mimicks the look of an old CRT screen of enormous size, built into a weathered metal casing with a low dark grey ramp in front of it. The screen on the teleporter shows a part of level 2 with its green floor, dark grey walls and several more teleporters in front of these walls. The yellow writing "Grid Teleport Center" is hovering above the teleporter. A zinc-coated but slightly rusty metal pipe on top of the teleporter that slowly rotates counter-clockwise carries a special Metropolis sign. The inner part is red with the logo of the film Metropolis and the capital letter M on it, both in white. It is surrounded by a brass ring that separates it from a black area which has more writing in white on it: "DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF FREE VIRTUAL WORLDS" above centre, "METROPOLIS METAVERSUM" below centre and one five-prong star on each side separating the two writings. The outside is another brass ring. The column between the passageways in the background to the left carries a black sign with group joiners for the Metropolis Newsnet group. A box which contains the Metropolis Translator is offered on a small round red table below the group joiners. Above the black sign, the lower edge of another sign that lists the Metropolis core team is visible; the rest of the sign is covered by the sign above the info desk. There is a round concrete structure in the middle of the floor which serves as seating and as a planter for an ash tree with yellowish and reddish autumn leaves that has grown up to the support ring plus four small green bushes around it. Four tables with four chairs each, all made of iron painted black plus light brown wooden planks and foldable, are placed irregularly in front of the circular structure with the ash tree. All the way to the right, a blond woman in a black minidress is sitting at one of the tables with another identical strawberry cocktail in front of her. Right behind the ash tree, there is a black sign with yellow writing on it which announces the closure of Metropolis. Two screens are on its sides, hanging on stainless steel chains, both with five blue buttons below them for navigation. The screen to the left offers basic information about Metropolis in German, the one to the right does the same in English. Both screens show black bars at the top. The black bars have the octogonal, red and white Metropolis logo to the left with "METROPOLIS" written next to it. In addition, the screen to the right has a combined flag to the right, the top left half of which is the U.S. flag, but with only 25 stars, and the bottom right half is the British flag. The rest of both screens is white with a variation on the octagonal Metropolis logo, now in black and semi-transparent, surrounded by the arched black writing "MEA*VITA*CREATIVUM" which is Latin for "my creative life" and with a black "METROPOLIS METAVERSUM" writing below it. Another circular segment of steel girder is mounted above the screens, and ivy is hanging down from it. Between the screen to the right and the one of the passageways further to the right stands a metal truss which carries three support request signs and online indicators for support staff; the top one is in German, the middle one is in French, the bottom one is in English. Additional vegetation includes ferns in rotund, rusty vases both inside and outside the cupola, including one to the left and two to the right of the teleporter, and potted bamboo outside to the left of the teleporter. The light is subdued because the sun was permanently set to sunset on the welcome sim in the last days of Metropolis.

7,636 characters. More than could fit into 15 toots or five Mastodon alt-texts. Yes, that's monstrous. Yes, I've written that myself. No, ChatGPT couldn't do that. It would have to investigate in-world.

But it still isn't sufficient. No, really, it isn't.

For one: What's this Metropolis Metaversum? If I were to explain that to you, what's OpenSimulator?

See, the difference between at least halfway well-known real-life locations and locations in virtual worlds is that the former can be assumed to be known. If not, a few words are sufficient, namely until you reach the name of the nation where something is. Or maybe, maybe the continent. But even in Second Life, you can't assume that anyone knows what and where it is, even less in OpenSim about which even hardly any Second Life users seem to know anything.

Normally, the picture would be used as an illustration in a post about the closure of Metropolis, so I wouldn't have to explain that in the alt-text. In fact, that's what I've uploaded the picture for. In the context of this article, however, this isn't mentioned anywhere, so it requires explanation which I have to add. In fact, some more explanation may be necessary in addition.

And besides, there's still untranscribed text in the picture. Especially the content of the black sign behind the ash tree would be interesting. Granted, I don't know if it's mandatory to transcribe writing that's a) so tiny that I can't even read it in my picture at its original resolution of 2100x1400 and b) partly obscured by a tree trunk and the structure of the building. I must admit that I would gladly have provided a full transcript of the whole sign including all parts covered by other objects. I actually went in-world to where this building is preserved almost in its final state to write the transcriptions in both versions. But this sign has been removed, uncovering the outside shot of this very building which the sign conceals in this picture.

So let's add what's missing and mark it red.

My avatar in the Metropolis Metaversum, waving a last farewell from the Metropolis welcome building before Metropolis shuts down for good. The Metropolis Metaversum, Metropolis or Metro in short, was a virtual 3-D world, also referred to as a grid in this context, based on OpenSimulator which is a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of Second Life. It was one of the earliest OpenSim grids and the first one run by Germans, and it was shut down by its owners on July 5th, 2022 after 14 years of operation. The avatar is a light-skinned, dark-haired male adult wearing metal-framed glasses, a dark grey blazer jacket with darker grey shoulders and collar, a black button-down shirt buttoned up all the way to the collar, a pair of dark black denim jeans and a pair of black full-brogue shoes. He is standing on the outside platform of level 3, the top level of the building and waving his right hand while having his left hand on his hip. The floor of the platform is standing on the outside platform of level 3, the top level of the building. Level 3 was the top level of four and the place where both new avatars appeared for the first time and travellers landed when teleporting in. The floor is a rusty steel girder that's so coarse that it'd be fairly hard to walk on in real life; here it is only a semi-transparent texture on a solid surface. In front of him is the double railing made of likewise rusty steel that surrounds the platform. Below the platform, the rust-coated structure that carries level 3 can be seen. Level 3 itself, entirely behind the avatar with the exception of the outside platform, is encased in a glass cupola with a cylindrical lower part and a spherical upper part, both with semi-transparent green reinforcements between what would otherwise appear as single glass panes. The spherical upper part rests on a support ring made of sheet metal panels with rusty outer edges. This ring, in turn, is carried by four triple sets of boxy, rusty steel columns with semi-elliptical cutouts on the far side of the cupola that roughly give the impression of being riveted. One triple set of columns can be seen right outside the cupola to the right of the avatar, another two can be seen in the background to the left and to the right of the avatar. Within each triple set except the one in the front to the right, there are two passageways into the cupola. Each passageway is surrounded by a greenish metal frame; each pair of these frames carries the marquee "METROPOLIS GRID" made of light grey concrete with blinking white lightbulbs on it. A circular structure made of rusty steel pipes is mounted on the inside of the support ring and carries a number of neon lights with rusty sheet metal covers above them. A semi-circular structure made of likewise rusty sheet metal protrudes outward from the support ring above the two columns to the left in the background Also, to the left of the avatar and on the front part of the platform, there is a dark grey four-seat bench made of rounded square steel tubes with fine steel girders in them as legs, seats and backrests. Around the inside of the cupola, there is a narrow strip with a plant-like green and greyish brown texture going all around except for the passageways. The floor inside the cupola gives the impression of cracked grey concrete. On the left-hand edge of the picture and behind the front set of support columns, there are two greyish-brown rocks with green moss on top; the one behind the columns is almost twice as tall as the one to the left. Also inside the cupola, behind the four-seat bench, there is the circular info desk with a sign mounted on top and an NPC modelled after the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1928 silent movie Metropolis standing on the inside of the desk. Unlike Second Life, OpenSim allows for actual, scriptable NPCs that don't need a running viewer to appear in-world. This NPC, named Bertha, has even basic chatbot functionality implemented. The sign is made from rusty sheet metal, a surrounding frame made of zinc-coated steel tubes which still show some rust and two bamboo poles as supports which are stuck through the bottom horizontal pipe. It can only be seen from behind in this picture. A small red and light brown bird is perched on top of the sign. What gives the impression of promotional material for both the film and the grid is placed on the counter top, the visible face showing Maria's head and the writing "Metropolis Metaversum", as are a red and white strawberry cocktail and a light grey laptop computer that appears to be running Windows XP. The red object above the counter top to the left of the NPC is a heart slowly rotating clockwise which provides access to the avatar-partnering feature. An artificial pond with various plants in it extends from behind the info desk past the front of the larger rock to the next passageway. To the left of the info desk, there's the walk-in teleporter that leads down to level 2. It mimicks the look of an old CRT screen of enormous size, built into a weathered metal casing with a low dark grey ramp in front of it. The screen on the teleporter shows a part of level 2 with its green floor, dark grey walls and several more teleporters in front of these walls. The yellow writing "Grid Teleport Center" is hovering above the teleporter. On the ramp to the teleporter, there is a black sign that reads, "Wenn Durchgehen nicht klappt, Klicken Sie das Bild zum Teleportieren. When Walk-Through does not work, Click the Image to teleport." A zinc-coated but slightly rusty metal pipe on top of the teleporter that slowly rotates counter-clockwise carries a special Metropolis sign. The inner part is red with the logo of the film Metropolis and the capital letter M on it, both in white. It is surrounded by a brass ring that separates it from a black area which has more writing in white on it: "DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF FREE VIRTUAL WORLDS" above centre, "METROPOLIS METAVERSUM" below centre and one five-prong star on each side separating the two writings. The outside is another brass ring. The column between the passageways in the background to the left carries a black sign with group joiners for the Metropolis Newsnet group. The sign has the octagonal red Metropolis logo with a white M in the middle and a white edge around it in the top left corner. To the right of the logo, it is labelled in white, "Metropolis Newsnet Gruppe" which translates to "Metropolis Newsnet Group". The writing below reads, "Aktuelle Informationen um Metropolis" and "Ankündigungen, Infos, Events, Fragen und Antworten im Chat" which translates to "Announcements, infos, events, questions and answers in the chat". The small neon green writing at the bottom edge reads, "Klick hier und folge dem Link im allgemeinen Chat, um der Gruppe beizutreten. Im Gruppenfenster JOIN klicken.(Click here to join the Metropolis Newsnet group." The German part of this translates to, "Click here and follow the link in the general chat to join the group. In the group window, click JOIN." Right below the black sign are three clickable white panels with black writings on them, "deutsch", "français" and "english". A black box with a red top and on each side a large red M and the small red writing "Translator" which contains the Metropolis Translator is offered on a small round red table below the group joiners. The translator is one out of many which automatically translates whatever the user posts in the public chat into another language. Above the black sign, the lower edge of another sign that lists the Metropolis core team is visible; the rest of the sign is covered by the sign above the info desk. There is a round concrete structure in the middle of the floor which serves as seating and as a planter for an ash tree with yellowish and reddish autumn leaves that has grown up to the support ring plus four small green bushes around it. Four tables with four chairs each, all made of iron painted black plus light brown wooden planks and foldable, are placed irregularly in front of the circular structure with the ash tree. All the way to the right, a blond woman in a black minidress is sitting at one of the tables with another identical strawberry cocktail in front of her. She is a static, unscripted model of Bertha Senior, the former Metropolis greeter. Right behind the ash tree, there is a black sign with yellow writing on it which announces the closure of Metropolis. Unfortunately, the writing is indecipherable in the picture, and the sign is not preserved with the rest of this place, so a transcript of the writing on it has become impossible after Metropolis shut down. Two screens are on its sides, hanging on stainless steel chains, both with five blue buttons below them for navigation. Both screens allow avatars to navigate through nine pages. They are both on the last page. The screen to the left offers basic information about Metropolis in German, the one to the right does the same in English. Both screens show black bars at the top. The black bars have the octogonal, red and white Metropolis logo to the left with "METROPOLIS" written next to it. In addition, the screen to the right has a combined flag to the right, the top left half of which is the U.S. flag, but with only 25 stars, and the bottom right half is the British flag. The rest of both screens is white with a variation on the octagonal Metropolis logo, now in black and semi-transparent, surrounded by the arched black writing "MEA*VITA*CREATIVUM" which is Latin for "my creative life" and with a black "METROPOLIS METAVERSUM" writing below it. Another circular segment of steel girder is mounted above the screens, and ivy is hanging down from it. Between the screen to the right and the one of the passageways further to the right stands a metal truss which carries three support request signs and online indicators for support staff. All three have a dark blue "SUPPORT?" label at the top. The top one is in German with "Du hast Fragen oder brauchst Hilfe?" ("You have questions or need help?") written on it in black and "HIER KLICKEN" ("Click here") written below in green and the German flag at the bottom. The middle one is in French with "Vous avez des questions? Vous avez besoin d'aide?" ("You have questions? You are in need of help?") written below in black, "Cliquez ici" ("Click here") written further below in black and the French flag at the bottom. The bottom one is in English with the combined American and British flag in the middle, "Do you have any questions or do you need help?" written below in black and "CLICK HERE" written at the bottom. Additional vegetation includes ferns in rotund, rusty vases both inside and outside the cupola, including one to the left and two to the right of the teleporter, and potted bamboo outside to the left of the teleporter. The light is subdued because the sun was permanently set to sunset on the welcome sim in the last days of Metropolis.

Now I'm at 10,985 characters. Almost the size of 22 toots and more than seven times as long as a Mastodon alt-text could possibly be. For an alt-text. And there's still something missing which I can't add because all sources for it are gone. And the description of what's on the screen of the walk-in teleporter could include some more details, especially since it's hard to recognise even for sighted people with huge computer screens in front of them unless they go and visit the preserved copy of this building in-world and then zoom in on the screen. But except for that, I'd say it's complete enough to satisfy even those who are the most critical about alt-text.

By the way, should I ever use it as an actual alt-text for a picture, I won't add the colour tags. They're purely demonstrational to show the differences between the two versions.

Unfortunately, while this ought to be helpful for blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users, it comes with one big disadvantage. Screen readers can't navigate alt-text like they can navigate normal, on-screen text. All they can do is rattle it down in one go. You can't stop it, you can't go back to anywhere in it. You have to sit through the five minutes or more which a screen reader may take to read this out loud. And even sighted users may struggle reading this if whatever they use to access the Fediverse has an automatic time-out for showing alt-text, and the alt-text of this picture vanishes long before they're done reading it.

Also, I must admit that writing such long alt-texts is inconvenient for myself as well. It took me several hours to write all this, including transcribing text that's only one pixel high in the final picture even when you zoom in, if it's visible at all.

And lastly, I couldn't use this as an alt-text to improve accessibility anyway. Mastodon automatically truncates alt-text at 1,500 characters which would reduce the above text to this:

My avatar in the Metropolis Metaversum, waving a last farewell from the Metropolis welcome building before Metropolis shuts down for good. The Metropolis Metaversum, Metropolis or Metro in short, was a virtual 3-D world, also referred to as a grid in this context, based on OpenSimulator which is a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of Second Life. It was one of the earliest OpenSim grids and the first one run by Germans, and it was shut down by its owners on July 5th, 2022 after 14 years of operation. The avatar is a light-skinned, dark-haired male adult wearing metal-framed glasses, a dark grey blazer jacket with darker grey shoulders and collar, a black button-down shirt buttoned up all the way to the collar, a pair of dark black denim jeans and a pair of black full-brogue shoes. He is standing on the outside platform of level 3, the top level of the building and waving his right hand while having his left hand on his hip. The floor of the platform is standing on the outside platform of level 3, the top level of the building. Level 3 was the top level of four and the place where both new avatars appeared for the first time and travellers landed when teleporting in. The floor is a rusty steel girder that's so coarse that it'd be fairly hard to walk on in real life; here it is only a semi-transparent texture on a solid surface. In front of him is the double railing made of likewise rusty steel that surrounds the platform. Below the platform, the rust-coated st

Not very informative, and all transcriptions are missing.

There's even a request to reduce this maximum length further, namely to the 450 characters Mastodon had in the beginning:

My avatar in the Metropolis Metaversum, waving a last farewell from the Metropolis welcome building before Metropolis shuts down for good. The Metropolis Metaversum, Metropolis or Metro in short, was a virtual 3-D world, also referred to as a grid in this context, based on OpenSimulator which is a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of Second Life. It was one of the earliest OpenSim grids and the first one run by Germans, and it wa

Happy now? I think not.

Fortunately, as of now, Fediverse users, Mastodon users in particular who aren't used to enormously long texts in the Fediverse, are already satisfied with any alt-text that isn't just two or three words. Most of the time, it's only, "No alt-text, no boost!"

But when the Fediverse mainstream switches to "Alt-text not informative enough, no boost!" or ostracising people who write lacking alt-texts which are still considered perfectly okay by some nowadays, and I have to write an alt-text for a similarly detailed picture that's used as an illustration, then I'll run into a big problem.