@damon It doesn't help that Mastodon itself is largely a bubble.

Some 70% of all Fediverse users are on Mastodon. But it seems like that within Mastodon itself, at least 95% of all posts originate from Mastodon. Maybe even more.

There are several reasons for this.

First of all, other projects don't federate with Mastodon that much.

Misskey is huge in East Asia, especially Japan. And Japanese Misskey users who hardly know English or not at all won't be interested in connecting with Western Mastodon users, so a large chunk of the second-biggest free project in the Fediverse is out of the equation.

Lemmy is the third-biggest, but Lemmy federates with Mastodon only barely so, also because Lemmy is all about discussion groups and enclosed conversations, both of which Mastodon simply doesn't support. Lemmy users can't follow Mastodon users because Lemmy users can't follow users, full stop. And Mastodon users have to wrap their minds around how to federate with Lemmy. It isn't as straight-forward as communication within Mastodon. And so they simply don't.

Other examples include Hubzilla and (streams) channels having ActivityPub off on purpose to keep ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users out.

But this goes the other way as well. Mastodon can be outright hostile to non-Mastodon users. Why? Because they don't behave like what Mastodon users are used to from Mastodon and, by extent, partly also Twitter. And they have joined the Fediverse in expectation of something that's one big distributed but homogenous Twitter clone. Anything that deviates from that may be disturbing.

There are Mastodon users who, upon seeing a post with over 500 characters, and be it in the federated timeline, block the poster. This alone cuts into the reach of everything that isn't Mastodon. Not few wish for a switch with which they can permanently filter out all posts with over 500 characters.

Others may block everyone who uses text formatting. Either it simply goes on their nerves. Or they can't imagine that it's even possible to format text in the Fediverse because they can't do that on Mastodon, so they think it's all some Unicode trickery. And as this Unicode trickery is not accessible and inclusive because it irritates screen readers, they deem whoever uses text formatting ableist and therefore blockworthy.

Then there's the issue of content warnings. They must be provided the Mastodon way, or you risk being blocked. However, not everything out there provides a) the right text field with b) the right label on it. Non-Mastodon projects may still label the summary field a summary field instead of a CW field like Mastodon does.

Friendica, for example, has done away with that text field entirely and users BBcode tags instead. Hubzilla doesn't provide any means of adding a summary/a Mastodon CW to a reply. And both have had their own way of adding CWs since long before there was Mastodon which their own users consider vastly superior to Mastodon's way.

In general, boosts are very important on Mastodon. I'd say that most activity on Mastodon is boosts because they're so easy to do on a phone without a hardware keyboard. Your reach on Mastodon depends on boosts.

But if you don't play exactly along Mastodon's written and unwritten rules, and if you don't adhere to the "Fediquette" which is entirely defined by only Mastodon users and geared towards only Mastodon's features (or lack thereof), you're boosted far less.

If you post more than 500 characters at once, it takes a lot for your post to get boosted.

If you post an image without alt-text, the post will be boosted dramatically less because not exactly few Mastodon users refuse to boost image posts without alt-text. You may even be muted or blocked for not providing alt-text. But alt-text only is a thing on Mastodon, and hardly anyone provides it outside Mastodon.

In general, anything that deviates from the standards defined by vanilla Mastodon will cut into your visibility on Mastodon deeply.

CC: @Hiker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediquette

@Droppy [infosec] :archlinux: :kde: :floorp: :thunderbird::vegan:​

Otoh the issue of embedding #AltText in pictures is a bit fraught. Eg though it's technically possible to do this in #Friendica, the method for non-technical users is esoteric, obscure & confusing, so is IMO highly likely to be skipped. Others like #Hubzilla have other complexities afaik.

Well, to be fair, no Fediverse project so far has been created from scratch with the greatest accessibility possible as part of its concept. Not even Mastodon. Mastodon is not so much as accessible as it is because the developers have added the necessary features as because its users made the use of these features pretty much mandatory over the last two years and firmly engrained it into Mastodon's culture.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) do alt-text almost exactly the same way, only that Hubzilla and (streams) can use slightly different image and URL tags that support extra features introduced with Zot and OpenWebAuth. But this was born along with Friendica back in 2010 when Friendica was still Mistpark, long before Mastodon has a dedicated alt-text field.

Friendica's way of handling posts, comments and discussion threads is not inspired by Facebook for a change, but by long-form blogging. This is apparent first and foremost by there not being any character limit where Mastodon has 500 characters, by the wealth of text formatting features and by images being embeddable anywhere in a post as opposed to only attachable as files. Basically, anyone who chose Friendica over Facebook was given a full-blown blog with just about all bells and whistles along with it.

But like on so many other blogging platforms, Friendica's WYSIWYG editors has never had buttons for all supported features. In fact, IIRC, Friendica didn't even have a WYSIWYG option at first. Either way, just like on other blogging platforms, if you really want to go all the way, you can't rely on WYSIWYG only. You have to get your hands dirty on raw markup code.

Granted, on Friendica and Hubzilla, it's extended BBcode and not the HTML that was pretty much mandatory back in the day or the Markdown that seems to have become the standard nowadays, but still. And every serious blogger knew HTML back in the day, and today, every serious blogger still knows either HTML or Markdown or both.

Also, when Friendica came out under the name Mistpark back then, bulletin-board forums were still huge, so even if you weren't a blogger, chances were you were familiar with BBcode from using forums. In 2010, no forum had WYSIWYG editors that completely concealed the underlying code, especially not on by default. So when you clicked the "b" button, what you got in the editor was not bold letters but a pair of [b][/b] tags.

All this is also why Friendica, as well as Hubzilla and (streams), has previews for everything, just like blogs and forums.

On all three, alt-text falls under "special features for power users and professionals", just like headlines, horizontal rules, text colour (unlike in forums), background colour, text size or typeface. When that feature was included, nobody added alt-text in privately-used social networks. Thus, it was only necessary to add this feature and to have it in some way or another, not to make it as dead-simple for casual corporate silo converts to use as possible. In the early 2010s, a graphical alt-text editor in a Facebook alternative would have been pearls before swine. The target audience for adding alt-text wasn't afraid of code, and your Facebook buddy who came over to check out Friendica had never even heard of alt-text.

And that's why we still have to manually graft alt-text into the image-embedding code today.

At least Friendica explains it in its user documentation because Friendica has decent user documentation. Hubzilla's user documentation reads like a technical specification because it has barely changed from what Friendica's documentation was like in 2012, and it's hopelessly outdated and incomplete. The community is actually considering re-writing it from scratch. And since it was that terrible in 2018 already, it was handed over as-is all the way to (streams) which eventually discarded any and all documentation because it was so bad. Neither of the two explain how to add alt-text; the knowledge is spread by word-of-mouth.

On the other hand, alt-text seems to be buggy on Friendica. However, nobody ever notices it. This is partly because Friendica has been around for too long to adopt anything from Mastodon's culture, and it's partly because there's hardly any other Fediverse project whose user base is largely as hostile towards Mastodon as Friendica, perceiving it as invasive, obnoxious and completely ignorant towards the non-Mastodon Fediverse. People simply refuse to follow any kind of fad that comes from Mastodon, and this includes alt-text. And since nobody uses it, nobody notices that it's buggy, and nobody files a bug report.

Ipso facto anyone not using CWs &/or warning tags &/or AltText is a bastard

And the few who are aware that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that everything else in the Fediverse is basically Mastodon with extra stuff glued on. It goes beyond the imagination of next to everyone on Mastodon that something that can interact with Mastodon like more Mastodon might actually be designed and work wholly differently. The few who know have Friendica accounts or even Hubzilla channels.

The rest cannot comprehend why some users from outside Mastodon "refuse" to add CWs or flag images sensitive. As I've mentioned previously, hardly anything beyond Mastodon and (streams) can flag images sensitive for Mastodon, and (streams) has no documentation for that, much less dedicated UI elements.

CWs are even more complicated. In the cases of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), this has to do with how different they are from Mastodon in concept and from their long-form blogging heritage.

Mastodon got its CWs in 2017 when a user from the demo scene submitted a feature request and pull request that re-purposed StatusNet's summary field for content warnings. Mastodon didn't use the summary field until then; after all, you don't need a summary for 500 characters or fewer. That pull request was accepted, and Mastodon had its CWs.

AFAIR, Friendica did have a summary field back when I used it, at least up until 2012 when Hubzilla's saga began. Hubzilla still has it, so does (streams). And summaries actually make sense on all three. After all, they're fully capable of long-form blogging, and they don't have any character limits.

Friendica must have done away with the summary field at some point in the second half of the 2010s or in the early 2020s, probably after adding ActivityPub support in 2018. Friendica users themselves are so used to overly long posts that summaries have never been part of Friendica's culture anyway, and not few Friendica users have switched summaries off entirely. Summaries were probably only a concession towards StatusNet users and a requirement for the connectivity to Twitter. After all, back in the day, Twitter was unable to handle anything longer than 140 and, later, 280 characters.

But then Mastodon and all that followed in its footsteps became more and more important and influential, and with it came Mastodon's content warnings. All of a sudden, Friendica's summaries had to serve two contradicting purposes: cutting posts down for Twitter (the original post was linked to AFAIK) and Mastodon CWs. Making two fields out of one was out of question, though.

So Friendica discarded the summary field altogether and replaced it with the [abstract][/abstract] BBcode tags. These could be made as flexible as they have to be: [abstract=twit][/abstract] only went out to Twitter, [abstract=apub][/abstract] only goes out to whatever is connected via ActivityPub, including Mastodon, and both can be used at the same time.

The obvious downside is that Friendica novices don't know how to add Mastodon CWs to their posts because there isn't even a field for that.

The advantage is that these tags can be used everywhere, including comments. @bee in moonshine, this is something that you should know about Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams): On all three, a reply is something entirely different from a post that doesn't reply to anything, even though it's all the same on Mastodon. None of the three has its roots in microblogging, and everything that isn't microblogging distinguishes between (start) posts and replies/comments, all the way to having one editor for posts and one or several completely separate editors for comments whereas Twitter and Mastodon have only one for everything.

Since these editors are separate, they aren't the same either. A reply on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams) is basically like a blog comment. You simply don't need certain features in blog comments. This includes summaries for example. Why would you need a summary for a comment?

On Friendica, this isn't a problem. You can add [abstract][/abstract] tags to comments just the same as you can add them to posts. And in fact, at least when the Twitter connection still worked, they even made sense because Friendica actually made it possible to comment on tweets, but only if there was an abstract to cut that comment down to something Twitter could swallow if it was too long.

Hubzilla, being a hard fork and under a wholly different license than Friendica, did not take this change over in spite of being able to connect to Twitter itself. (streams) doesn't have to because it can only connect through its own Nomad, Hubzilla's Zot6 and ActivityPub; it can't even connect to Diaspora* anymore.

Thus, both still have a summary field. And it's actually labelled accordingly: "Summary".

For one, this confuses the hell out of newbies who have just come over from Mastodon, too. They think they can't add CWs because Hubzilla doesn't have a field for that, because nobody has told them that it's the summary field. On top of that, there's still the false information circulating around Mastodon that Friendica's title field is Mastodon's CW field from which they deduce that so is Hubzilla's title field. In fact, Friendica's title field does something wholly different on Mastodon, something that's largely unexpected, and Hubzilla's and (streams)' title field does zilch on Mastodon.

Besides, even if you know that Hubzilla's summary field is Mastodon's CW field, there's another problem: Only the post editor has a summary field. The comment editors don't. Again, what sense do summaries make for blog comments? None. So why have such a field in the first place if it doesn't make any sense, at least not from a long-form-blogging or Facebook-replacing point of view? And that's why there's no summary field for comments.

But if there's no summary field, you can't add Mastodon-style CWs either. I myself would have put a CW on this comment due to its excessive length, but I don't because I simply don't have the means.

And this is something Mastodon users neither know nor understand.

On top of all this, and Mastodon users don't understand this either, Mastodon CWs aren't and will never be part of the Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) cultures. As I've written previously, all three already have NSFW, and their users prefer it a lot over Mastodon's standard-breaking kluge.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)