@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.

Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.

We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.

Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?

No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)

When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.

It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.

This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".

Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.

So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.

Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.

I think I ended up Superblocking them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

@Mrs. McGibbons 🧚‍♀️ This may be true for real-life cat photos. Just about the most simple images imaginable in the Fediverse.

But what if I don't just post real-life cat photos in which I don't have to describe much more than the cat? Because I don't post real-life cat photos. I don't post real-life photos at all unless they're meme templates.

My own original images are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. This means:

• I can't forgo detail descriptions under the assumption that people know what stuff looks like anyway. I can't assume that anyone already knows what anything in my images looks like.
• Every other time, there's nothing particular in the image that matters more within the context of the post than everything else. Instead, the whole image with everything in it matters all the same.
• The other half of times, what matters within the context is irrelevant because the existence of 3-D virtual worlds is so intriguing to someone out there that they demand a full, detailed image description.

As for the actual alt-texts, I'll try to keep them at 512 characters or fewer, difficult as that will be. But I'll do that for technical reasons: While Misskey and its forks are supposed to truncate longer alt-texts at the 512-character mark, they actually delete them due to a bug. If I make them longer, users on Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc. will believe that I haven't written any alt-text in the first place.

But I will keep adding long, fully detailed image descriptions to the post text where I have much more room. I need room for sufficiently detailed descriptions, I need room for all the explanations necessary for people to understand the post and the images and the descriptions, and I often need room for all the text transcripts.

For example, do you know what the main building on Nebadon Izumi's Universal Campus looks like? Would it be sufficient for you if I just name-dropped it? Or must I describe what it looks like?

If so, well, that's 40,000 characters of description only for that building and what's visible inside it because the building mostly has glass panes for walls. 7,800 characters only for the front of a building that's five times as long as it's wide. 500 characters only for that one piece of structure around the main entrance doors. In fact, over 1,600 characters for the doors. Also, 3,200 characters for a teleport panel, including transcripts of 13 bits of text. Been there, done that, got the figures from there.

Don't worry, I will always hide long posts behind a summary with content warnings, including a warning about the post being tens of thousands of characters long due to the long image descriptions.

In fact, my meme posts will continue to be very long themselves, although not quite as long as posts with original pictures. Describing the visuals is easy most of the time, and it can be done in 512 characters or fewer. But they still need explanations. Otherwise, nobody will understand anything. All my meme posts are about obscure topics, too.

Now I'm wondering what's more likely to upset people and make them sanction me in some way, including blocking me without saying a word. Insufficient image descriptions? Insufficient alt-text in particular? Not putting all the text transcripts into the alt-text where many insist that they belong? Or posts behind summaries and CWs that indicate that these posts are 25,000, 40,000, 60,000 characters long?

But seriously, even if I cut down visual descriptions to a more normal level, which would come with its own nasty side-effects, I would still need to explain everything. So no, I can't keep image posts at 500 characters or fewer.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Justin Crozer @Stefan Bohacek @Lentävä Kalakukko @Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Whenever I see Mastodon users talk about "culture" in a Fediverse context, I have to wonder: What exactly do they refer to when they talk about "culture"?

Is it Fediverse culture? As in, overarching, software-independent Fediverse culture?

As in, taking into consideration that Fediverse server applications that aren't Mastodon, e.g. Misskey or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla, have different cultures than Mastodon?

Recognising a post or a comment from one of these applications, acknowledging that it comes from a place with a different history, a different set of features and thus a different culture than Mastodon and refraining from enforcing Mastodon's unwritten rules against it?

Or does "culture" only refer to Mastodon's culture? Does it reject or completely disregard all cultures in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon's and demand the whole Fediverse adopt Mastodon's culture and only Mastodon's culture?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who post more than 500 characters at once (which, by the way, is perfectly normal everywhere outside of Mastodon)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who reply to people who haven't mentioned them first, and whom they aren't mutually following either (which, by the way, is perfectly normal in large parts of the non-Mastodon Fediverse, too)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who quote-post Mastodon toots that must not be quote-posted (because they've had quote-posts for much longer than Mastodon, but without a no-quote flag so they can't see Mastodon's no-quote flag)?

Do these "bad eggs" incllude users who "misuse" Mastodon's CW field for summaries (because they have literally had the exact same text field as a summary field for seven years longer than Mastodon has had it as a CW field, and because having a summary field makes a whole lot of sense if your character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who use more than four hashtags in one post (because, unlike Mastodon, the places where they are have filtering as well as automatically having messages hidden behind CW buttons deeply engrained into their cultures, but this requires the appropriate keywords to be present)?

If so, then this explains why only Mastodon users can enjoy significant reach on Mastodon: Everyone else is mass-blocked for misbehaving by Mastodon's standards.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity