@julian Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
Mastodon has misused summaries for content warnings since someone from the demo scene sent in a PR for Mastodon to do so in 2017.

So this means that Mastodon stopped doing so on Article-type objects and actually regards summaries as summaries and handles them accordingly instead?

And when and with which version was this rolled out?

Or did Mastodon insist in the creation of yet another text field which has to be rolled out to all macroblogging and long-form blogging server applications? Even though ActivityPub does have a perfectly good summary field, only that Mastodon uses it for CWs?

Although I must say that the step from displaying Article-type objects as title (if there is any) + link to displaying them as title (if there is any) + summary (if there is any) + link is not that big. Mobile users who see their Web browsers popping up as a nuisance will still ignore your content.

On the other hand, this does not only appease Eugen Rochko, the Lord and Creator of the Fediverse and all of its technology (according to the Gospel of Mastodon, anyway), but also those Mastodonians who demand there must not be any posts with over 500 characters in the Fediverse, and who immediately block everyone who exceeds 500 characters even only once even on the federated timeline.

Besides, there is still "long-form", multiple-paragraph content going out as Note-type objects. In general, I guess that comments always go out as Note-type objects.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Summary #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #ArticleType #LongFormContent

@Christian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥ I can't really go with that proposal.

First of all, if you turn the automatic generation of alt-text on by default, then fully-abled people with tons of spoons who could write their own alt-texts with no problems will use that automatic alt-text-generating AI, too. Especially newbies who'll keep everything at default settings for quite a while. This would make alt-text quality and especially accuracy plummet.

Trust me. I've pitted LLaVA against my own hand-written image descriptions twice. In both cases, the images were renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds with a resolution of only 800x533. The results were utterly devastating by my standards. Granted, the AI only had the images whereas I described the images while looking around in-world, being able to move the camera and zoom in on things and such.

So instead of turning AI-generated alt-text on by default, people should be educated about alt-text and told to write them themselves. Only if they can't, they should be told about the alt-text generator switch.

Besides, having this established on Mastodon is one thing. Trying to force the whole Fediverse to implement an image-describing AI is something else. And: It will never come to pass.

The Fediverse is far from being only Mastodon. The Fediverse is not even a) Mastodon, b) Mastodon forks and c) stuff (actually or seemingly) glued onto Mastodon as add-ons after the fact. There's stuff in the Fediverse that's vastly different from Mastodon while at the same time being in direct competition against Mastodon.

For example, you have rather minimalist stuff like snac2 or GoToSocial. I'm not sure if their devs are too keen on including an AI-based automatic alt-text generator even if the AI is external.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. These four are vastly more powerful than Hubzilla by various degrees. And they're so modular that, in theory, it'd be possible to build an add-on that uses an AI to automatically describe images.

Now, the first issue is that neither of these four strives to be more like Mastodon. In fact, they've got their own cultures that date back to times when Mastodon wasn't even an idea. After all, Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon, and the others are part of the same big family tree of forks and forks of forks. And, unlike Mastodon, they're Facebook alternatives with a side of fully-featured long-form blogging and not minimalist Twitter alternatives (and Hubzilla is much much more than that even).

Their cultures are vastly different from Mastodon's and will always be. They don't aim for brevity, what with "character limits" with eight digits. They don't ask for CWs in a dedicated CW field. What's the CW field on Mastodon has been the abstract field on Friendica for almost seven years longer and on StatusNet for some nine years longer, and like Friendica, the other three use it for summaries. All four have always been able to automatically generate CWs individually for each reader, depending on a) the presence of keywords in a message and b) the keywords in that reader's "NSFW" keyword list. Something that Mastodon didn't have until October, 2022 when Mastodon 4 came out, and that is not part of Mastodon's culture because it came that late.

As for alt-text, users on all four are completely unaware of its existence at best. That's because they're completely out of touch with Mastodon and its culture. In fact, some Hubzilla users chose to leave ActivityPub switched off, and some (streams) users decided to turn it off themselves, in both cases with the explicit intent of locking Mastodon out. Of those few who have heard about alt-text in the Fediverse, most see it as just another stupid Mastodon fad that Mastodon is trying hard to force upon the rest of the Fediverse. Like that 500-character limit.

Also, especially the Hubzilla devs and the (streams) and Forte dev are not too keen on implementing Mastodon features to say the least. For now, they only do what's absolutely necessary to federate with Mastodon, but not much beyond that. These three will not make an image-describing AI add-on a priority task. Or a task at all. And don't ask for building that image-describing feature into the core. This will happen even less. Also, don't expect either of them to hard-code a connection to a power-hungry corporation like Alphabet (Google) or OpenAI into an add-on, much less into the core. Despite the fact that Hubzilla still has its old (optional, off-by-default for both hubs and channels) Twitter connector.

By the way: (streams) and Forte are the only server applications in the Fediverse with a server-wide user agent filter that's not only capable of blocking Mastodon in its entirety, but that was actually announced and advertised as having that capability while having actually been designed to keep Threads out. This should give you to think.

There's another obstacle: Where would the alt-text be stored? After all, the handling of images is, again, vastly different on these four than on Mastodon. On Mastodon, images are files attached to posts with their own alt-text data fields. And upon uploading the images, they end up in some data nirvana.

In stark contrast, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte all have a cloud file storage built into each account (Friendica)/channel (Hubzilla, (streams), Forte), complete with its own simple file manager and, except for Friendica, even WebDAV connectivity. It's there where image files are uploaded. And then they aren't attached to posts as files. Rather, they're embedded into posts just like into webpages or blog posts. You can have text, then an image, then more text, than another image, then more text. These four can generate something that Mastodon still staunchly refuses to even display.

Now, I know that (streams) and Forte do have a field for an image description. It can be filled out during upload or in the image editor after the upload. I'm not sure if Friendica has at least got a data field for alt-text. But I know for a fact from daily-driving it that Hubzilla does not have any data field for alt-text, not in the UI and most likely not in the database either.

In the posts, the alt-text is not added to the images by referencing that data field. The posts don't work on some murky hocus-pocus in the background. By default, they're composed in a markdown language in plain sight. Friendica uses expanded BBcode or optionally Markdown. Hubzilla uses even more expanded BBcode. (streams) and Forte can use the same expanded BBcode as Hubzilla and Markdown and HTML within the same post. And the alt-text is always part of the image-embedding code.

And this is also the only place on Hubzilla where alt-text can come into play. This means that if Hubzilla wanted to include automatic alt-text generation, the alt-text would have to a) be generated whenever an image is embedded into a post while composing the post (= you embed the same image file a hundred times, and a hundred times will the AI generate a new alt-text for it from scratch) and then b) be woven into the image-embedding BBcode.

Speaking of image storage, WriteFreely, a specialised long-form blogging server application and basically a Medium alternative, doesn't even have that. You can embed images into posts on WriteFreely, but only as long as you can store them someplace that allows for hotlinking because you will have to hotlink your images from there. But if WriteFreely doesn't handle images itself at all, if images in WriteFreely posts don't actually go through WriteFreely until after the post is sent (namely when someone views the post for the first time), it can't use an AI to automatically describe them either.

Unlike WriteFreely, Plume does have its own dedicated image storage. However, while Plume is not dead, its development has come to a complete halt for the foreseeable future because its devs don't have any time to work on it. And even if they got back to it, they'd probably have more important things to work on after several years of neglect.

And then there is software that is actually dead, that was officially pronounced dead by its own last maintainers, but that still has running servers. Calckey. Firefish. /kbin. But if it's dead, it won't even get security patches anymore, much less new features such as automatic AI-driven alt-text generation.

CC: @James Edwards @Danny Boling ☮️

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #snac #snac2 #GoToSocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Plume #WriteFreely #Calckey #Firefish #/kbin

@Mirko Schenk wenn ich das recht mitbekam, war z.B. die "Content Warning" im Protokoll eigentlich als Überschrift gedacht, wurde dann für "Spoiler" genutzt, die dann zu den CWs wurde.
Ursprünglich war das die Zusammenfassung von StatusNet von 2008.

Überschriften im Sinne von Post-Titeln kamen im Fediverse 2010 mit Mistpark (heute Friendica) an, und zwar zusätzlich zu Zusammenfassungen. Aber die spielen auf Mastodon nur eine Rolle bei Article-Type Objects, wo Mastodon den Titel zeigt und dann aufs Original verlinkt.

2017 kam dann ein Bastler aus der Demoszene und reichte auf Mastodon einen Pull Request ein, mit dem auf Mastodon die Unterstützung des Zusammenfassungsfelds eingebaut wurde. Aber nicht als Zusammenfassung, weil das bei nur 500 Zeichen Quatsch wäre, sondern als Inhaltswarnung.

Seitdem glauben alle auf Mastodon, das Feld wäre von vornherein für CWs und nur für CWs erfunden worden.

Quoted Posts werden jetzt nach etlichen Jahren langsam eingeführt
Auf Mastodon. Fast das ganze übrige Fediverse hat sie schon. Friendica hat sie auch schon seit Anbeginn (2010). Und so können Friendica und Hubzilla Mastodon-Tröts quote-posten, seit es Mastodon überhaupt gibt. Und das werden sie weiterhin können, egal, wer auf Mastodon was wie einstellt.

Andererseits muss man Mastodon halt zugestehen, dass es den Einstieg vergleichsweise einfach macht. Also abgesehen davon, dass dieses Instanzen-Zeug für Monopol-gewohnte User anscheinend generell nicht so einfach ist.
Och, 2022/2023 sind auch Unmengen an Japanern nach misskey.io gerailroadet worden.

Mastodon ist nur so groß, weil es praktisch allen westlichen Twitter-Flüchtlingen als die einzige Twitter-Alternative angepriesen wurde. Wohlgemerkt, überwiegend von Leuten, die selbst glaubten, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon.

Und die meisten Alternativen skalieren auch schlecht auf sehr viele User.
Wobei Mastodon eigentlich pro Identität absurd viele Server-Ressourcen braucht. Möglicherweise kommt das notorische Fliegengewicht Akkoma mit noch mehr Identitäten pro Server klar.

Selbst die Friendica-Familie ist dank PHP leichtwiegiger als Mastodon, auch Friendica selbst, das um 2012 geradezu absurd viel Leistung pro Nase brauchte, und sogar das Featuremonster Hubzilla. Weil die aber ziemlich obskur sind und auf (streams) geschätzt 90% aller Nutzer und auf Forte praktisch jeder auf einem eigenen Server ist, ist überhaupt nicht bekannt, wie die skalieren. Also, mal abgesehen vom Schluckauf, den die bestehenden bekannteren Nodes Anfang des Jahres hatten, als haufenweise Leute aus Facebook umgestiegen sind.

GoToSocial dürfte auch eine Riesenkapazität haben auf entsprechend leistungsfähigen Maschinen, gerade auch, weil es kein Web-Frontend hat. Da ist es nur eben so, daß eine Fediverse-Serveranwendung ohne Web-Frontend jetzt nicht unbedingt so attraktiv ist, auch wenn alle Welt mit Smartphone-Apps unterwegs ist.

CC: @Michael Blume

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Akkoma #GoToSocial #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta