@
🌱🏴🅰️🏳️⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Let me give you an example. Something that I've actually posted myself.
Here's the image
(CW: eye contact):
https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9Here's the alt-text:
Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”
Do you understand the image without explanations?
I guarantee you that there are
loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.
So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:
Explanation:
The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (
link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).
OSgrid (
https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (
http://opensimulator.org;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator;
https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (
https://www.secondlife.com;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.
Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.
The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.
This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.
Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.
Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join
their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.
Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links
do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.
Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.
For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.
#
Long #
LongPost #
CWLong #
CWLongPost #
FediMeta #
FediverseMeta #
CWFediMeta #
CWFediverseMeta #
AltText #
AltTextMeta #
CWAltTextMeta #
ImageDescription #
ImageDescriptions #
ImageDescriptionMeta #
CWImageDescriptionMeta #
Ableist #
Ableism #
AbleismMeta #
CWAbleismMeta
Jupiter Rowland
Jupiter Rowland