Jupiter Rowland on Nostr: @[BeAware :veriweed:]( ) On the one hand, there's describing images the Mastodon way. ...

@[BeAware :veriweed:](https://social.beaware.live/@BeAware ) On the one hand, there's describing images the Mastodon way. It may range from one-liners to descriptions that almost reach 1,500 characters which are seen as absolutely massive and incredibly detailed. But they always go into the alt-text, explanations included. "Image description" and "alt-text" are mutually synonymous on Mastodon. Nobody ever questions that. After all, posts can contain no more than 500 characters.

However, this is mostly geared towards fairly simple real-life photographs which contain lots of elements that don't have to be described because they're uninteresting, and that don't have to be explained because everyone's fairly familiar with them.

And then there's the attitude that any alt-text is better than no alt-text and the idea that AI can describe any and all pictures well enough or even perfectly already now. The latter, of course, comes from people only using AI on simple real-life photographs or social media screenshots.

Those who are on Mastodon not only see these things as given, but they can't imagine them possibly being any different.

On the other hand, I break all these rules.

For one, here on Hubzilla, I don't have a limit for post text, nor do I have a limit for alt-text which has to be grafted into the post text anyway. That is, alt-text is kind of limited because even Hubzilla can only show so much, and it can't scroll through alt-text. Besides, Mastodon, Misskey and all their mutual forks cut off alt-texts from outside at the 1,500-character mark and permanently discard anything that goes beyond. So alt-text remains limited to 1,500 characters.

But posts remain unlimited. If I put an image description into the post text, I can make it as long as I want to or as I have to. And in fact, explanations don't belong into alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text, and any information only available in alt-text is inaccessible and therefore lost to those who can't.

That's important because my image descriptions have to go with a whole lot of explanation.

That, in turn, is because the pictures I post are nothing like what you'd normally find on Mastodon.

They aren't real-life photographs. They're renderings from inside 3-D virtual worlds. Extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds even; I'm not talking about VRchat or Roblox. The whole system is known to probably not more than one in 200,000 Fediverse users, and particular places may be known to not even one in a million Fediverse users. Chances are I'm the only one in over ten million Fediverse users who knows that particular place where an image is from.

This means two things.

One, almost nobody who comes across my image posts knows anything about anything in these pictures. They don't get the pictures at all. And blind or visually-impaired users wouldn't even know what what's in the pictures looks like if I told them what's in the pictures.

Two, on the other hand, people could pretty well be interested in them. After all, I'm talking about something that has been referring to itself as a "metaverse" regularly since early 2007. "The Metaverse" is real, it's living, breathing, much to everyone's surprise. It's got nothing to do with Meta Platforms. And there has to be cool stuff in it if it's worth showing in-world pictures.

So people might become so curious about this discovery that they want to know as much as they can. But they know nothing, so they don't get the images in the first place if these images don't come with extensive explanations and descriptions.

This is the main reason why my image descriptions grow so massively long. [I've explained it in this article.](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/95b6e36d-7fcd-4791-8cc1-c93e8b9975a3 )

And with "massively long", I mean tens of thousands of characters. My most recent example is [a post with only one image, but over 25,000 characters of description and explanation](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/136f021c-06cb-4e38-abe6-2bf37fd521d8 ), and although it's the most up-to-date, I'm not even satisfied with it. Two posts with multiple images each and even longer descriptions for the respectively first one, albeit a bit more out-dated, are [here](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/8c2b4728-dda5-498b-9f84-2f11e163a4a5 ) and [here](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/c8a14063-b4e2-48fa-baf9-cb4faef7225b ).

As you may be able to see, what I do is: I write a fairly short, purely visual description to have at least some description in the alt-text so nobody can complain that the alt-text doesn't actually describe the image. Also, the alt-text mentions that the actual, more detailed and explanatory image description is in the post text, including where and how to find it. That's because I'd never post something of that length with a summary/content warning, so for users on ActivityPub-based microblogging projects, the full image description is hidden.

Not only has nobody ever done anything like this on Mastodon, but it's completely unimaginable because it isn't even possible on the vast majority of instances. My longest picture post is way longer than 150 Mastodon toots.

This gives me experiences with image descriptions that nobody else has ever made, especially not on Mastodon. Those many Mastodon users who "know" it's set in stone that the Mastodon way is the only way sometimes deserve to read about someone else's completely different point of view.

In fact, this becomes a necessity whenever Mastodon users want to establish image-describing standards that a) only apply to Mastodon with its limitations and b) only apply to the kind of image content that's usually posted on Mastodon, but that'd be completely and utterly incompatible with my images and my way of describing them to the point of rendering my image descriptions invalid.

But there may also be other cases in which I differ from the general Mastodon way of thinking.

Memes, for example. Memes in posts should always be described accordingly and explained if necessary. From this, I deduce that template-based memes require explanations of the templates used. At the same time, I know that the majority of Fediverse users prefers having all information in the same place as the image itself over having to get extra information from another website which, for mobile users, means from a different app.

In summary, this means that template-based memes require explanations that go even beyond KnowYourMeme because KnowYourMeme relies on linking to other pages on the same site, e.g. to explain things like 4chan, SomethingAwful, Wojak, snowclones or advice animals. But since the Fediverse prefers to have it all in one place, all these extra explanations have to be woven into the meme description and explanation specific to this particular meme. Nobody on Mastodon has ever thought of this.

Another example is the recurring talk about describing the automatically-selected image in a Mastodon link preview. It's important to know here that it's next to impossible to tell which image from which link will be picked as the preview image, if any. Also, while Hubzilla has a preview feature for posts in the making, it does not have link previews.

Not only does this mean that the link preview image on Mastodon will have to be identified and described after sending the post, but Hubzilla users will have to go to a Mastodon instance and wait until their images have federated there before they can edit the post and describe the image. This, of course, is a greater effort and takes longer than for Mastodon users who can see the link preview in their own timelines immediately or shortly after posting. In the meantime, the post will spend even more time spreading around Mastodon with no image description, and many many more people will see it without an image description, and they might react accordingly, not expecting an image description to be added rather soon.

#[Long](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Long ) #[LongPost](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=LongPost ) #[CWLong](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLong ) #[CWLongPost](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLongPost ) #[FediMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediMeta ) #[FediverseMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediverseMeta ) #[CWFediMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediMeta ) #[CWFediverseMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediverseMeta ) #[AltText](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=AltText ) #[AltTextMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=AltTextMeta ) #[CWAltTextMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWAltTextMeta ) #[ImageDescription](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=ImageDescription ) #[ImageDescriptions](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=ImageDescriptions ) #[ImageDescriptionMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=ImageDescriptionMeta ) #[CWImageDescriptionMeta](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWImageDescriptionMeta )