In the end I still don’t understand that specific culture. I’ve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them I’d shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what they’re trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think that’s making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on what’s really going on in the picture, what’s important, because there’s so much noise added
By professional Web design standards, you’re right. But this is part of Mastodon’s culture, too: detailed image descriptions that nobody would ever put on a Web site. As long as more people praise than directly criticise it, this won’t change.
The people who introduced alt-text to Mastodon and cultivated its alt-text culture were complete amateurs on smartphones who wanted to do something good for blind or visually-impaired users so that they can participate, too. And not professional Web designers who live and breathe WCAG 2.2.
If you say you’re already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body text… Seems I’ve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what you’ve already been doing.
Yes, I do, and I gave you a link as proof. If you don’t know how to access alt-text, and you’re on a computer, then hover your mouse cursor steadily above the image, and the alt-text will appear.
I got that you’re using Hubzilla. But we’ve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there.
Exactly this is how Mastodon tries to force its culture upon the whole rest of the Fediverse. For example, this is how Mastodon tries to force Friendica to abandon its own culture which is six years older than Mastodon’s culture and adopt Mastodon’s culture instead.
“We’re the majority, so we get to decide how things are done! This is our territory, our Fediverse now!”
If Lemmy had better federation with Mastodon, Mastodon would try to do the same thing with Lemmy.
And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since you’re on Hubzilla and that’s meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microblogging… It’s kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lot’s of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesn’t translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it get’s problematic when interconnecting to users of “narrower” platforms. It’s always been that way. And I don’t see a way around that. At least fundamentally.
In other words, the whole Fediverse should succumb to both technological limitations/limitations in concept and cultural limitations on Mastodon. If Mastodon can’t do it, or if Mastodon users don’t like it, users of Pleroma and Akkoma and Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Sharkey and Friendica and Hubzilla etc. etc. pp. must not make use of it.
In which way should Mastodon adjust itself to the technology and culture of non-Mastodon projects? And do you honestly believe Mastodon would actually do any of that?
Speaking of technological limitations on Mastodon, I have pretty few to worry about.
If I post 60,000+ characters, Mastodon display the very self-same 60,000+ characters. No problem.
If I put 1,500 characters into the alt-text, Mastodon takes over all 1,500 characters. No problem. That is, if I write more, they’re truncated, but Misskey and its forks does the same.
If I put a Mastodon-style content warning into the summary field, Mastodon users get their content warning. No problem.
It’s only inline images that are a bit of a problem. Hubzilla has to turn a copy of the image into a file attachment and also copy the alt-text from the image embedding code into the attached image file so that Mastodon has at least got one way to show the image. But still, Mastodon gets the image, and Mastodon gets the alt-text.
Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it.
Well, then there isn’t any place at all in the Fediverse or on the Web where I can go and ask e.g. whether illegible text in an image that I can read just fine at the source must, may or mustn’t be transcribed when writing an image description for a Fediverse post. There’s no such place at all.
Maybe within the “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla. You’re bound to find more people with the same struggles there.
Nope. What few Hubzilla users know Mastodon’s culture despise it deeply because Mastodon is trying to force it upon them. The vast majority of Hubzilla’s users knows nothing about Mastodon’s culture.
Also, I’m very very likely the only Hubzilla user who puts alt-text on images. And I’m definitely the only Hubzilla user who adds a long, detailed image description in the post itself on top.
Hubzilla’s culture doesn’t know accessibility, and it doesn’t care. Same goes for Friendica. Friendica’s alt-text handling is actually buggy, but the only Friendica user who even only tries to write alt-text apparently doesn’t know how to file a bug report on a Git repository.
In fact, throughout the Fediverse, Mastodon is the only project for whose users alt-text and image descriptions are really serious business. For people everywhere else, it’s largely a stupid gimmick or completely unknown.
But you need to lay down the groundworks properly.
I’ve learned that much. If I want to discuss something concerning Mastodon someplace else than Mastodon, I’ll first have to explain how Mastodon works and how Mastodon deviates from what people are used to where I post. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s user community, who they are in general, where they came from, how most of them are tech-illiterates on phones, and half of them think Mastodon is the Fediverse. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s culture and give a few links to demonstrate it.
Since all this would be tl;dr, I’d have to explain it by and by and in such ways that my explanations are remembered by the other users.
Then and only then I can ask for advice. That is, probably not even then because all advice I could expect would be 100% based on information that I myself have provided, and I’d be none the wiser.
At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter.