@BeAware :veriweed:

but honestly a lot of it just goes over my head past a certain point.

That's what I mean when I say I write about an extremely obscure niche topic, and I always have a lot to explain for people to get my images.

Unfortunately, the whole topic is probably so special-interest that I have to shove too much down people's throats to give them even only the basics. They might not understand the images either way.

But I do see your frustrations on things like post limits and alt text character limits and such.

It isn't so much the technology. It doesn't make much of a difference whether Mastodon cuts my 40,000-character image description off at the 1,500-character mark, or whether Hubzilla lets me read only the first 3,500 characters because there's only so much vertical space in my browser window.

The full description goes into the post text either way because it contains explanations that are necessary for people to understand the image, and people e.g. with a severe tremor who can't move a mouse steadily or with a head pointer that they poke around on a keyboard with can't read it when it's in the alt-text because they can't access alt-text.

And when it's in the post text, Mastodon won't cut it off at the 500-character mark and throw the excess 39,500 characters away. If anything, it rejects posts with over 100,000 characters altogether AFAIK.

I know that Pleroma and Akkoma reject posts over 50,000 characters, and I suspect Misskey and the Forkeys to reject even shorter posts. But nobody in my primary audience is on either of these.

The problem is rather the culture. It's a culture that's cultivated on Mastodon and on Mastodon only, that disregards the rest of the Fediverse and how it's different because nobody knows, but that is being forced upon that self-same rest of the Fediverse regardless. If your home instance is connected to Mastodon, you play by Mastodon's unofficial rules or else.

Sad, but true: The rules of one Mastodon instance don't apply to all connected Mastodon instances all the same. They apply to the local timeline, but not to the federated timeline. Other instances may have contradicting rules, and no instance admin is going to enforce rules that apply to other instances, but not their own one.

At the same time, however, Mastodon's overarching unwritten cultural rules do apply to the federated timeline because they apply to all Mastodon instances. And they're forced upon everything that isn't Mastodon all the same.

That's partly because Mastodon users don't even notice when something doesn't come from Mastodon, partly because some of those who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon still believe that everything that isn't Mastodon is either an alternative UI for Mastodon with a couple extra features (Akkoma or Iceshrimp or Friendica is for the Web what Mona or Tusky is for the phone) or bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on otherwise, and it's partly because whoever is the biggest is the boss, and because Mastodon users tend to think Mastodon was there first.

Mastodon's culture includes not only a sufficient description for each image you post, but you're expected to put the full description into the alt-text and only into the alt-text. This comes from adequately describing images in the post text being technically impossible on vanilla Mastodon with only 500 characters minus the actual post text, minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus even content warning.

So for one, Mastodon users expect an image description in the alt-text. That's why I describe each image twice, once with a few hundred characters in the alt-text, once with thousands upon thousands of characters in the post text.

Besides, I expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated when they discover that I've put a detailed image description into the post text rather than into the alt-text where they expect it. Yes, there's an image description in the alt-text. But why is there a longer one in the post text? Why isn't the long one in the alt-text where it belongs by Mastodon's standards? Why do I refuse to do things like they're done on Mastodon?

Okay, so my full image description is too long for alt-text. But why don't I make it shorter then? Nobody on Mastodon writes image descriptions that are several thousand characters long. Why don't I write image descriptions like Mastodon users?

Also: While Mastodon is fully capable of importing and displaying posts that are tens of thousands of characters long, many many Mastodon users are very opposed to posts longer than 500 characters. They're technically possible, but they're culturally disliked and frowned upon. This mostly applies to those who use the official Mastodon app that can't fold long posts in and expand them if you want to read them, but it isn't limited to those users.

It's another cultural thing: Mastodon cannot post over 500 characters, so Mastodon users aren't used to over 500 characters, so nobody anywhere in the Fediverse must post over 500 characters. Mastodon users actually keep tooting that they want filters which remove everything over 500 characters from their timelines.

And not exactly rarely, they take matters into their own hands. If they spot a post with over 500 characters in their personal timeline, they block the poster upon first strike, but not necessarily without complaining to the user first. Some go as far as doing that when they see a post with over 500 characters in the federated timeline.

In fact, I expect entire Mastodon instances to have blocked non-Mastodon users instance-wide because some local user felt disturbed about their over-500-characters posts and asked the moderation to step in. There may even be instances, not even exactly small ones, that go as far as blocking the entire offending instance.

For these reasons, for me, posting images while having connections all over Mastodon is like treading on raw eggs. I spend 13 hours describing an image in 40,000 characters just to give a casual bystander audience a chance to understand them. I post that thing. A few people may find it helpful. To many, it makes no difference in practice because they don't read my image description. And then there's the unknown number of Mastodon users who take countermeasures or have countermeasures taken by admins/mods because my gargantuan image post disturbs them and/or goes against Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #500Characters #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits