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.

That’s an understatement. It’s nothing more than another link dump that doesn’t look like anyone wants to actually discuss something. And even as such, it’s almost dead. Like, one post in two months.

Also, it looks more like for “how do I, as a full-stack developer, make my Web app accessible” than for “how do I, as an end user, make my image posts accessible”. But I’m looking for the latter.

And, preferably, I’m looking for someplace where I don’t first have to explain most of the Fediverse to everyone because all they know is Lemmy (if it’s on Lemmy), or because all they know is Mastodon (if it’s on Mastodon or glued onto Mastodon like Guppe).

Would you happen to know why that is?

Unlike other places, Mastodon is not “everyone for themselves” and “hey, let’s shitpost about minorities for the lulz”. While Lemmy is trying to be Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo, Mastodon is trying to be nega-Twitter. Except for Gargron and the other devs who are trying to make Mastodon Twitter with sprinkles.

The Mastodon community is trying hard to make Mastodon feel nice and comfortable and welcoming for everyone, just like Mastodon felt nice and comfortable and welcoming to them after they had freshly arrived from that rampantly ultra-fascist hellhole that’s called 𝕏 now. They’re trying hard, and I mean hard, not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist.

This includes lots of things that are completely unthinkable on Reddit because they are technically impossible. Alt-text on images, for example, for which Mastodon offers a whopping 1,500 characters per image. Content warnings for sensitive posts in what’s actually the summary field. Hiding sensitive images which is actually something non-standard and semi-proprietary by Mastodon that hardly anything else out there supports.

Many instances actually make alt-text on images and content warnings for specific topics mandatory in their instance rules. Which topics require CWs partly differ from instance to instance; instances with a focus on neurodivergence/autism, for example, require a CW for eye contact in addition to the usual. Instances only enforce these rules on local users and local posts and not on what’s happening in the federated timeline, but they do have these rules, and they enforce them to the point of permanently banning users.

At the same time, however, these things have become part of Mastodon’s culture. You simply do that stuff, lest you’re at least shunned by “the Mastodon community”. At least. Or you’re being lectured about having to add actually useful alt-text to images and content warnings to sensitive posts. Or you’re muted or blocked outright.

Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention?

If an image has alt-text, the Web interface shows a little rectangle with “ALT” in it in one corner. Mobile apps tend to do the same. You immediately see upon first glance whether an image has alt-text or not.

Beware if someone catches your post with an image without that “ALT” marker.

Mastodon’s goal, not defined by the devs but by the end users, is for 100% of all images that appear on Mastodon to have alt-text. There are daily stats on which Mastodon instance has how high a percentage of image posts with alt-text. I think mastodon.social, the notorious newbie and “I keep using Mastodon like Twitter” instance, is somewhere between 10% or 20% or so. By Lemmy standards, this may seem mind-boggling high, but by Mastodon standards, it’s embarrassingly low. Some instances reach 80%, and by Mastodon standards, this means there are still 20% image posts that aren’t accessible.

Oh, and there being an “ALT” marker is not enough. If there is an “ALT” marker, people will go check the alt-text. If it doesn’t actually sufficiently describe the image, or if the image is predominantly text, and the alt-text doesn’t contain a full, verbatim transcript, that’s just as bad as there not being any alt-text, and it’s treated just like there was no alt-text.

On Mastodon, alt-text is absolutely. Serious. Muthafscking. Business. Full stop. To the point that you may have mods at your throat if you don’t provide it.

On a side-note, most Mastodon users can’t tell whether a post came from Mastodon or not. They treat posts in their timelines that came from Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Friendica or Hubzilla or whatever just like native Mastodon posts. Except for sometimes at least being highly annoyed if a post goes over 500 characters, that is. But they aren’t like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Misskey, and Misskey doesn’t have an alt-text culture,” or like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Friendica, and you have to program alt-text into your posts on Friendica, and even that is buggy.”

If your post appears on Mastodon, it’d better integrate with Mastodon’s culture or else. Also, Mastodon users don’t know anything about anything outside Mastodon, neither cultural differences nor technological differences.

Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?

My estimation is rather that 70% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and 25% are on Android phones, always with dedicated Mastodon apps. Hardly anyone seems to use Mastodon on a computer.

There are actually many blind or visually-impaired Mastodon users. It seems to naturally attract them, just like 𝕏 repels them.

However, there are also people with bad Internet connections for whom images often don’t load at all. Remember that everyone’s on phones, and they don’t have 4G or 5G everywhere.

And there are even people with no disabilities who say that alt-text helps them understand what an image shows. I think that should be the task of explanations in the post because not everyone can access alt-text, but that’ll never be engrained in Mastodon’s culture because you can only explain so much in 500 characters minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus the content warning and minus the actual toot.

I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject.

On Mastodon, this happens much more quickly than you might imagine.

Post an image without alt-text, especially on a big, general-purpose, notorious newbie instance, and there’ll likely be someone who asks you to add an alt-text to your image.

Unless you keep yourself inside a small special interest bubble with no contact to the outside Fediverse, you will be educated on the subject, whether you want or not.

And Mastodon users don’t care if whoever they educate about alt-text and image descriptions is on Mastodon or elsewhere because they can’t see where someone is, at least not at first glance.

Maybe you’ve overlooked that, but: I’m mainly on Hubzilla, not on Lemmy.

By far most of my connections on Hubzilla are on Mastodon. This means that my posts show up on a) Mastodon users’ personal timelines and b) the federated timelines of lots of Mastodon instances. This, in turn, means my content has to fulfill at least some of Mastodon’s cultural standards.

Also, I’m one of the few non-Mastodon users who do care for their reach on Mastodon. That’s because I’m probably one of the few Fediverse users to explain to Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. This is not the primary topic of my Hubzilla channel, but someone has to do that.

But if even more Mastodon users or entire Mastodon instances mute, block or shadow-block me for repeatedly flipping the bird at Mastodon’s etiquette and being unabashedly ableist, this becomes impossible because my explanations can’t reach their target audience anymore.

Even when I post about my primary topic, 3-D virtual worlds, I rely on being read on Mastodon. For it is there where the chances are the best for there being someone who is interested in that topic.

Late, but still: I dare say that what Mike Macgirvin has done.

Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica looks like and is marketed as a Facebook alternative. But it comes with extra features on top like a built-in file storage, and its actual killer feature has always been that it federates with everything that moves.

Red a.k.a. the Red Matrix used to handle much like Friendica on the surface, but it introduced nomadic identity and permissions as early as 2012.

Hubzilla, into which the Red Matrix was turned in 2015, is probably the most powerful of all Fediverse projects. It was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And it was the first nomadic one to actually kind of take off.

Finally, the latest offspring of 14 years (plus two days) of development since Mistpark is the streams repository which isn’t as feature-heavy as Hubzilla, but the most innovative one, and it’s constantly evolving. It will be there first that nomadic identity and even permissions beyond what Hubzilla has to offer will be implemented in ActivityPub. And it’s likely that this will happen this year.

I know, but that limit is still deeply engrained in Mastodon’s culture which seems to actually be built against mastodon.social.

Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.

There’s no discussion taking place.

Mastodon is horribly bad for discussions because the more people discuss something, the more mentions have to eat away on the 500-character limit.

Instead, there seems to be total consent for how things are done on Mastodon right now. Even though this way of doing things a) doesn’t work in niche situations unknown to Mastodon users and b) make no sense if you take away Mastodon’s limitations, e.g. everywhere else in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. Nope, no questioning the Mastodon way. How could you even.

A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.

As I’ve already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it’s pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn’t Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.

One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can’t post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, “alt-text” and “image description” are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It’s like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.

If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that’d actually make.

Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren’t even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can’t be discussed in glorified tweets.

Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.

Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.

Ideally, I’d discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone’s needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.

I don’t just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.

I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.

I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.

And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.

I wasn’t talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.

I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.

Thing is, on Mastodon, it’s pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone’s just got “the Mastodon way” stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.

And everywhere that isn’t Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it’s another stupid Mastodon fad.

That’s what I have mostly got on my mind.