As a blind individual, I have to say that #Caturday on #Mastodon is far far more enjoyable then at #Twitter, where the vast majority of cat photos are not described.

It is also been fascinating for me to hear descriptions written by those who sent the image, immediately followed by Apple image recognition’s attempts to describe the same image. Only rarely does that add anything to the ALT, & often directly contradicts it.

There is no auto magical solution to image description. It is something best done by a human, for only that human can explain the “why” of the image: the reason that image was chosen to speak so eloquently without words for those who can see it. ALT allows you to provide those words.

I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.

It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.

It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.

Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.

Okay. So you’re on here now. You feel like maybe you could make fediverse your new home. What next?

Well, it’s different for everyone, but the thing that made this place really work for me was starting to explore different instances. Every instance is its own community with its own culture, and they are all fabulous. This is my main account, but I have three others: one in an art community, one in a queer community, and one where you can’t use the letter e. Explore! This place is weird and fun

Linux, Wikipedia, Mastodon. All of them built by strange, intrinsically motivated people.

All of them are full of problems and flaws that are hard and maybe impossible to fix.

But at the end of the day, these things help us and keep the wonders of the Internet alive, because they come out of a deep understanding that humanity needs giving more than taking.

I don’t know who needs to hear this. Maybe nobody here. But if you approach a credible, respected #cybersecurity company and after you explain what you want to buy they’re like, “you’re asking to buy something that is not feasible to do with your current maturity / budget / timeframe / architecture, and we recommend you do something else and won’t sell you that” you should listen and do some reevaluating.

If you then ignore them and go to ten other random companies, someone will eventually absolutely be willing to unethically sell you the impossible or ill-advised thing on paper. It’s not a win for you. You didn’t show up the respectable firm. It’s like trying to buy a power cord with two male ends at Christmas.

There is a unfortunately lot of snake oil and exaggerated qualifications in our industry, and a lot of pressure for Sales to sell. Someone will always say “sure”. Listen to why credible experts say, “try something else”.