@tallship Okay, let me explain this because it's obviously hard to understand unless you really know the Fediverse, its various projects and their cultures.

On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), people hate Mastodon because Mastodon is outdated, lacklustre and utterly, utterly underequipped intentionally by design.

For example, all three can produce full-blown long-form blog posts with absolutely all bells and whistles of long-form blogging. All kinds of text formatting, all kinds of lists, tables, any number of embedded in-line images, what-have-you. If you can do it on WordPress, you can do it on Friendica and Hubzilla and (streams).

And then comes Mastodon and staunchly, flat-out refuses to support anything that isn't old-school, original gangsta, Twitter-like, bare-bone, minimalistic microblogging. It uses an "HTML sanitiser" to completely mangle your precious posts before showing them. It even strips the embedded in-line images out.

If you want your images to make it to Mastodon, you have to automatically attach copies of them to your posts as file attachments because that's something that Mastodon understands. And what does Mastodon do? Only import a measly four of them and throw the others away anyway.

It's a wonder that Mastodon introduced support for a select few text formatting elements, including quotes, with version 4.0 last year. But I kid you not, there are Mastodon instance admins who stubbornly refuse to update to Mastodon 4.x because they reject even these features, because they're "un-Mastodon-like". Oh, and Mastodon 4.x still doesn't know things like strikethrough, text colour, text size, numbered lists or tables. And it still strips in-line images out.

This is not a case of "we'd like to, but unfortunately, our engine can't be made capable of that, sorry". It's a case of deliberate refusal. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive this as Mastodon flipping them the bird. Like, "Fuck you bitches, what you want ain't no old-skool microblogging, we ain't gonna do that!"

On top of that come masses of ignorant and obnoxious Mastodon users. My estimation is that 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and so does everyone in their respective bubble. Most of the rest only knows the Fediverse outside of Mastodon by a bunch of names, but no more than that. Many of them actually believe that Gargron has invented the Fediverse, and everything that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on or actually only an alternate UI for Mastodon with some extra features. Like, whether you use Mitra or Hubzilla, or whether you use Mona or Tusky, it's all Mastodon underneath.

They don't know that there's stuff out there in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon. And they don't really care. And they don't know either that this other stuff has its own culture that differs from Mastodon's. Many of those who do know that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon want to force Mastodon's culture upon all the Fediverse. And with that, I don't only mean that all posts that end up on someone's Mastodon timelines have to conform to Mastodon's culture, but that everything that happens on non-Mastodon instances has to conform to Mastodon's culture.

If Mastodon users don't like it, you shouldn't be allowed to do it on Mitra or Friendica or Hubzilla or wherever. For some Mastodon users, this includes limiting all posts and comments to no more than 500 characters. Even if what you use doesn't have a character limit. Oh, and no quote-posts and no text formatting etc. etc., even if your kin have done that since times when Eugen Rochko was still a school kid, six years before Mastodon was made.

At the same time, Mastodon users are fully convinced that the reason why Mastodon is the biggest is because Mastodon is the best Fediverse project, even feature-wise.

Now, if you want to discuss the whole Fediverse, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), in spite of being amongst the best places in the Fediverse to discuss anything by underlying technology, you can't do that on either. The reason is because their users actually don't know that much about Mastodon and its culture. Most of them have never come into touch with it that much or at all. You first have to explain it all to them. Many won't even want to hear anything about it even then, and those who do still can't believe what you're telling them.

The case with Lemmy is a different one. Just like Mastodon almost entirely consists of former Twitter users who escaped when Musk bought Twitter, Lemmy almost entirely consists of former Redditors who escaped when Reddit was enshittified by trying to charge third-party frontends $20,000,000 to access the Reddit API.

However, all they really know is Reddit where they used to be and Lemmy where they are now. They haven't also been on Twitter, and thus, they haven't also fled to Mastodon.

There's a Lemmy community named "Fediverse". "Community" means "subreddit" on Lemmy. And this one is named "Fediverse". One should expect there to be people who are at least halfway competent about the Fediverse, right? People with whom you can discuss the Fediverse, and who know what you're talking about?

Hahahaha... no.

Nobody in that Lemmy community knows anything about the Fediverse outside Lemmy and maybe the rest of the Threadiverse. They know that Mastodon exists. They know the name Mastodon. But that's all. They absolutely don't know anything else about Mastodon. They literally don't even know what the default Mastodon Web interface looks like because literally not even a single one of them has ever even been bothered to go visit mastodon.social and take a look at it, not even only once.

If you want to discuss Mastodon matters with them, you first have to take a deeeeeeep breath. And then you have to explain everything to them, down to the very very basics. And you probably have to explain certain things several times over because they're too hard to grasp from a Reddit/Lemmy point of view.

If you want to discuss the Fediverse beyond Lemmy and the Threadiverse and Mastodon, forget it. You'd have to explain even more.

At least the Lemmy users don't try to force Lemmy's culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. For one, most of them know that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy. And besides, nonetheless, the idea of Lemmy connecting to something that isn't part of the Threadiverse is still alien to them.


So why is it impossible to discuss accessibility in Fediverse posts?

Because Mastodon users have the Mastodon way set in stone in their minds. Because they cannot imagine that it could possibly go any other way. Or why it should.

And everyone else either takes Mastodon's approach for another Mastodon-specific fad that they're going to ignore like all the other fads that came from Mastodon. Or they have never even heard of it. See Lemmy where the idea of adding alt-text to anything if you aren't a Web developer is completely out of this world and utterly unimaginable.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #A11y #Accessibility