Here's the latest feature in Catodon's develop, for the upcoming 26.04 release - another suggestion by @germ !

As you may know, Catodon has Firefish's "threads in timeline" feature, which greatly declutters timelines for threads (instead of seeing 1st/2nd+2nd/3rd+3rd/4th etc, you just see 1st/2nd/3rd/4th once), but it can still get annoying with really long threads.

So, here's the improved edition: Collapsed threads. You will never see a thread longer than three posts - you'll get the collapsed version, with a link to view the full thread, and an indicator of how many more posts it has.

Also displayed in profile pages, which didn't have threads until now.

#Catodon ​​ #Firefish

The time has come and I'm beyond excited 😁

We just opened registrations on catodon.rocks.

I know that Catodon created a lot of expectations when Firefish fell apart, and I'm sure many of you were disappointed to see it not going anywhere for a long time. This time I am doing it on my own, so things will happen the way they should have. And, although you can now check it out for youselves, I will say this: I firmly believe that it's better, on every level, than Firefish ever was. I was in both projects, I love them both, but Catodon combines the best features of Firefish and Sharkey, while also being very debloated, being much more comprehensible, and adding actually useful stuff - and I have more plans for the future.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the UX of Catodon, and see how we can improve it further! Let's create the fedi experience we deserve =)

​​
#Catodon #Fediverse #Firefish #Sharkey

RE: https://catodon.rocks/notes/ajo1s763f05z0002

am asking for help pls, from whizbang expert #sharkey / #misskey / #calckey / #firefish [RIP] users.

my eternal struggle to make my sharkey #antennas behave is continuing, & i seem still to be losing the battle.

i have an #antenna for tracking my geek interests, called "geekery". the full list of its followed keywords is provided further below.

historically this antenna would be plagued by heaps of invalid posts that had nothing to do with any of my topical interests, attracted afaict by my attempts to get posts relating to #Arch, as in #ArchLinux, viz random posts that used the calendar month "March", or discussed "archive" or "archaeology", "architecture", & every other irrelevant variant out there.

last night i discovered https://thefedi.wiki/firefish/user/antennas, & was excited to see an apparent solution, via this example:

Tip You can also use the quotes to be very specific in your search.
For example, if I enter bee I will get posts with the word 'bee', but also 'been' and 'beer'. So use quotes and a space:

“bee ”so i edited my antenna's keywords accordingly: #aboutconfig #anonsysnet "#arch " #archies #archinstall #archlinux "#aur " #debian #distrobox #dropbearpooterising #farcebookspace #fedora #firefox #firefoxbeta #firefoxnightly #firefoxsecondsidebar #firejail #floorp "#foss " #fossemojis #freebsd #gnucash #immutable #kalpa #kde #kdelinux #kdeos #kdeplasma #kinoite #kmymoney #kvm #libreoffice #libvirt "#linux " #linuxwomen #microos #openbsd #opensocialspace #opensuse #penguinistas #phanpy "#plasma " #qemu #searx #searxng #sengi #sharkey #sidebery #statuzer #treestyletab #tumbleweed #userjs #virtmanager "#vm " #vpn #wayland #windowrules #windscribe #xfce " arch "

yet, this antenna still attracts numerous unrelated irrelevant posts, like:
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajneoti8bb0i051v
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndfxrvsgre048b
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajneh8mc0ovs04z3
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajnefa540ovs04xu
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndxnvsbb0i04mk
https://blahaj.zone/notes/ajndk154ymls04kh

i'd be so grateful if someone pls could advise me what i'm doing wrong 🥺🤞

Sharkey/Misskey users: Would it make a real difference to you if you could only upload media files instead of any file to your Drive? I'm thinking of restricting it to media files (and only from https) for Catodon, for security reasons. I doubt any of the users in our 3+ years old Firefish server uploaded any other type of file.
#Sharkey #Misskey #Firefish #Catodon

Just the other day, I found something out. Something very inconvenient about Misskey and maybe also the Forkeys.

It should be commonly known that Misskey has a local limit of 3,000 characters for posts (which it refers to as "notes"). What is not so well-known is that Misskey has a limit of about 8,000 characters, probably 8,192 or so, for inbound messages, ironically fewer than this post is long. Also, it has a limit of 512 characters for alt-text, both locally and in-bound.

Mastodon has a character limit for in-bound content, too, at least for Note-type objects (not for Article-type objects because it refuses to render them fully and links to the original instead). To my best knowledge, it rejects messages with over 100,000 characters. As for its 1,500-charater limit for alt-text, it enforces that by truncating alt-text that's longer.

Misskey, in contrast, truncates everything that exceeds its limits while still letting it in. If your post is longer than the inbound limit of ca. 8,000, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away. If your alt-text is longer than 512 characters, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away.

I don't know which Forkey behaves how in this regard, seeing as all Forkeys I know about have a configurable local post character limit that can be adjusted to well over 8,000. But even if the inbound limit is configurable, too, I don't think any *key admin cranks it over 60,000 or over 70,000 or over 100,000. It's simply unimaginable that someone, anyone, could ever post that much at once if your idea of the Fediverse is pure microblogging.

Also, I don't know what *key users do when they come across a truncated post or what blind or visually-impaired *key users do when they come across a truncated alt-text. Do they even suspect that it's a truncated copy of something that's longer at its source and then go check the source? Either way, it's very inconvenient.

It's especially inconvenient for me. My longest posts by a gigantic margin are image posts with original images. They always have a long image description block in the post itself that tends to be tens of thousands of characters long. It contains highly detailed visual descriptions of all images in the post. It contains all explanations necessary to understand the post, the images and the descriptions. It contains verbatim transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image that I can read, no matter whether or not my audience can.

In addition, each image has a shorter description in the alt-text, along with a bit that announces the long description, including where to find it. I even used to explain how to get to that description for Mastodon users for whom the summary and content warning hides the post text, but not the images, depending on which Mastodon version and frontend they use. This alone took up several hundred characters in the alt-text. All in all, I got to a point in which my alt-texts always ended up either at precisely 1,500 characters or just a few characters short.

I myself am not really bound to character limits. I used to post images here on Hubzilla where I have over 16.7 million characters for the post, including all alt-texts. Now I post them on (streams) where I have over 24 million characters. I could theoretically write alt-texts as long as I want to, seeing as, unlike on Mastodon, they aren't separate text fields; instead, they're being woven into the image-embedding markup code in the post text.

Still, I stick to a maximum of 1,500 characters for alt-text to keep Mastodon from truncating it. If you post images into the Fediverse, the main audience for your alt-text is on Mastodon, and most of them don't understand that there's something, anything, out there in the Fediverse that does not work exactly like Mastodon. And 1,500 characters can be tight already.

But if I have to stay within Misskey's limits, I can hardly post images anymore. At least not with appropriate descriptions and explanations.

Since late 2024, I have been working on-and-off on a series of fairly simple avatar portraits or rather their image descriptions. The idea is for the long description to consist of a preamble that starts with a general summary, followed by explanations, then followed by visual descriptions of what all images in the post have in common. Next come the individual descriptions of each image. Each post shall have three or four images with three or four portraits each, all in the same pose, all with only minor differences in outfits, all with a neutral, bright white background.

In addition, of course, each image shall have an alt-text, and none of the alt-texts shall depend on each other.

Now, the problem is that I have to describe three or four individual portraits in each alt-text. I'm actually struggling to squeeze such a description plus the note that announces the long description into 1,500 characters, especially if I want to fulfill Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica With Four Eyes' requirements for outfit descriptions to a tee in the alt-text as well (https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-for-casual-outfits/, https://veroniiiica.com/writing-image-descriptions-for-red-carpet-outfits/; see also https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/ and https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-create-visual-descriptions/).

But in 512 characters so that even Misskey users won't get a severely truncated version? This is absolutely impossible. Even if I limit the long description announcement to some 100 characters, even if I didn't walk people through how to get to the long description, I'd have fewer than 140 characters on average to describe each individual outfit.

The long description won't fare any better. Currently, the preamble starts with some 14,000 characters of explanations, most of which are necessary to understand the visual descriptions. But when Misskey goes and truncates the post at the 8,000-something mark, Misskey users won't even get to any visual description because all visual descriptions would be chopped off.

What makes matters worse is that the preamble grows the longer, the easier to understand I make it and the less I leave people with unexplained technical or jargon terms which you shouldn't use in image descriptions at all anyway. So the next time I go through it and rewrite it to make it easier to understand, I'll also make it even longer than it already is.

But what if I simply cut all the explanations? For one, I'd leave people to their own devices to understand extremely obscure niche content. They won't. My explanations aren't 14,000 characters long because I've artificially inflated them, but because there is so much to know before you understand the post and the images and the descriptions.

Besides, the visual descriptions alone won't fit into 8,192 characters either. What I currently have is over 5,000 characters of common visual description for all portraits in all images plus about 2,500 characters of individual visual description for the three portraits in the first image. That's over 7,500 characters altogether already. And I still have to describe nine portraits in another three images. The post will end up with some 15,000 characters of visual descriptions unless they grow longer when I simplify them again.

I guess users of Misskey or any Forkey will still have to put up with truncated alt-texts and truncated long descriptions in the future. But my future image posts will contain a paragraph at the beginning that explains that the post and/or the alt-text may be truncated on Misskey and the Forkeys, and that both are uncut at the source. Still, this means that *key users will have to put up with the extra hassle of opening my original post at a source with a quite cumbersome UI. And I've got my doubts that this UI is really accessible.

Unfortunately, this also means that *key users won't get any hashtags along with these posts. But then again, the handling of Identi.ca-style/Friendica-style hashtags with the number sign outside the link is broken on all *keys and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Sharkey #CherryPick #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #A11y #Accessibility

Now that the beta is out, I can start showing some of the changes I'm making! Let's start with the redesigned posting form, where I finally got to implement a design that I had first drafted back in Firefish (or was it Calckey?). At the top is the current Sharkey posting form, at the bottom the redesigned, more minimalistic Catodon posting form. This will also give you a general idea of my approach to UX design, and the direction of the new platform.

1. The "Post" button (with a larger font, and without the icon) is at the bottom right corner, closer to where your post would usually end.

2. The posting form expands as you write, a feature I ported from Firefish - which makes moving the Post button more useful, since it was in a kinda awkward position when writing longer posts.

3. The "X" closing button is at the top right corner, where most people would expect it to be.

4. Only the most frequently used icons are visible by default, decluttering the posting form for a cleaner look. The lower "..." menu opens on hover, meaning no extra click from desktops and laptops.

5. When you click "Show preview", the bottom row buttons stay between the typing area and the preview, instead of going all the way to the bottom. This makes it easier to access the buttons while having the preview open, and also keeps the "Show preview" button at the same point, so that you can expand/collapse the preview without having the button jump lower, as in Firefish and Sharkey.

#Catodon #Sharkey #Firefish #Misskey

Yesteday I said #Catodon is returning, and I'd like to say a few more things.

Let me get this out of the way: I am building it with LLMs. To a big extent I don't know what I'm doing, and I am very aware of that. This will be an experiment. If any of this outrages you, please move on, this project is clearly not for you. If you are disrespectful in the comments, you will be blocked. Please don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do with my time. Thank you.

Those who have followed me for a long time, know that I used to be in #Firefish, then its lead dev moved on to different things leaving the project hanging, then we tried to start Catodon with another dev from the core team of Firefish, and I know that created great expectations and excitement to a lot of people (including me), until our lead dev also realized in the process that they couldn't dedicate the time needed for such a project. Then I was involved in Iceshrimp for a while, which was... let's say not a good fit, and since then I have been trying to find a dev who would like to work in a team effort. It has been years now, and I had no luck. But I still loved the first period of Firefish, I'm still interested in fedi, I still have a lot of ideas that I would like to bring to life. I am also still involved in a greek community server, and I want to build something for my friends and comrades there as well.

But I am not a software engineer, and this is not my calling. What I'm drawn to is design and UX. So I had more or less given up on the idea of Catodon, until I recently started experimenting with LLMs. Mind you, this whole AI craze left me cold until now - I had no use for it, so I stayed away. But for coding, in my case, it turns out to be an invaluable tool.

Would I have preferred to do this with an actual human instead? A thousand times yes. However, I know I really, really tried.

I also know it's bad for the environment. Planes are too, but we use them when needed. And anyway, I am not rich, I will be more or less as screwed as anyone by the ongoing destruction of the planet by the bourgeoisie. So I refuse to be victim blamed. The sad truth is that it's not an individual issue, it's a collective issue. No matter what they have told you, you will not stop the climate crisis if you stop using LLMs, airplanes, plastic straws or electricity altogether.

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