Perhaps it would help a bit, I don’t know. Even if it does, it would be far less than having the sharer to actually write something, and telling the reader the focus of the picture.
I’ll give you a personal albeit real example of that. I posted this picture in Mastodon, some time ago:
A machine learning model could theoretically say something like there’s a tabby cat in the picture, one semi-abstract acrylic painting, one figurative oil painting. Both paintings rest on a white wall… except that most of those things don’t matter, what matters is what the cat is doing towards the viewer.
Contrast it with the translated version of the alt text that I’ve provided: A playful tabby cat, leaning against the back of a chair, looking at the viewer. Her head, upper thorax, and paws are visible. One paw is holding the back of the chair; the other paw is on the air, in an “I got you!” movement towards the viewer. It’s completely different and, when I wrote this, I hoped that both blind and non-blind users could get something out of the picture that they wouldn’t without the alt text.
And it’s the same deal with other Mastodon posters, not just me. This system - where the user is expected to provide alt text - works well, IMO.
And it would also require people to actually use the feature. I still don’t know how Mastodon managed to pull this off in this regard…
By making it convenient on the tech side, and having a cohesive enough culture that any newcomers from the many Twitter migrations just did the right thing because that was the norm when they joined.
I myself won’t boost anything that doesn’t have alt text for example. (Which is still surprisingly common despite the reputation of Masto being well-alt-texted)
Well, Lemmy already kind of has its own culture, and it didn’t catch here yet. But I hope that, if the feature gets implemented, we manage to spread its usage.
Lemmy appears to have focused more on instance culture than systemwide culture and lacked / discouraged using user level or mod level tools to do anything to enforce or preserve it.
It also started out with a strong “this is Reddit but you can’t censor us” culture and when more people from Reddit showed up that then meant “this is Reddit but you can’t censor us” became “this is more of Reddit.”
The bit about Communitree on page 9 (labeled as 191) is most relevant.
Though I’m still curious about how distinct of a culture Lemmy had that was distinct from the culture on an instance (with the corresponding “the only way to categorically prevent the culture of another instance from spreading to another was to defederate”).
There’s still some “wider” culture here. Specially in this topic (accessibility), given that at least some redditfugees left as Reddit Inc. was showing a middle finger to its blind users. And from further checking, alt text for images is already implemented:
If the pic above doesn’t load, it’ll show “The Lemmy logo” instead. But in no moment the interface tells you “hey, add alt text” (there’s a feature request for that though). It doesn’t show on mouseover either, as in Mastodon, and I think that this is important (it shows non-blind users that the alt text does something).
As such there’s still a good chance that this spreads across Lemmy, if implemented better.
I do agree however that Lemmy is more focused on instance culture than the platform-wide culture. That’s visible for me as I’ve noticed that, usually, users behaving too “Reddity” tend to cluster on certain instances, and avoid others. That sounds like a compromise between large scale and seeking what the link calls “the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration” - let the kids use the platform, but somewhere that it won’t hamper adult discussion.
Though I’m still curious about how distinct of a culture Lemmy had that was distinct from the culture on an instance (with the corresponding “the only way to categorically prevent the culture of another instance from spreading to another was to defederate”).
The relatively higher barrier of entry of the platform as a whole selects people who are a bit more prone to discuss tech, in detriment to other subjects. And even considering your typical user in “reddity instances”, he might look dumb in comparison with the rest of lemmy, but he’s still an IQ 9001 in comparison with your typical redditor.
(I’m still reading the .pdf, saved it here. Thanks for the link, it looks interesting. As of yet I’ve focused mostly on the part that you mentioned to be relevant for this discussion.)
given that at least some redditfugees left as Reddit Inc. was showing a middle finger to its blind users.
Many of them headed over to !main@rblind.com though it only has one community on it and rather low activity overall (the most recent comment on the site was left 5 days ago). Glancing at all on that instance, not many people subscribed externally and the reddit continues to have more activity today than rblind has had this month (based on number of posts and comments).
Part of this, I believe, is a mismatch between what Lemmy offers (and while some things are more accessible than Reddit, others aren’t) and what different communities need. startrek did quite well with startrek.website… but /r/blind and rblind seem to be more of an sync chat… and Lemmy does that poorly compared to other offerings.
If you look at the tail end of many communities ( for example https://programming.dev/communities?listingType=Local&page=4 ) you can see a bunch of “lift and shift” attempts of a community on Reddit that just didn’t do it. !boardgamedeals@lemmy.world was one were the mod closed the sub on Reddit for a while and said “go here” … but the problem was that the mod wasn’t the one creating the content and so it kind of sputtered out.
And so part of the difficulty of the reddit exodus - it wasn’t the content creators and power users that moved over here with the expectations of great amounts of new content, but rather the mods and the dissatisfied. Those who were able to find an existing community here tended to do reasonably well. Those who tried to start one from scratch (“follow me to the new Lemmy instance”) … that often didn’t work well unless the community wanted to go and a lot of them were grumpy about a mod shutting down the sub.
Which brings us to “just dropping the culture of a reddit sub on a general Lemmy instance (lemmy.world and lemmy.ml vs startrek.website)” tended to be an experience that was overall worse for everyone involved than Reddit.
… And lets face it, the content creators that came to Lemmy aren’t the ones posting neat things in woodworking, but rather the ones making memes.
This more than anything, I think, made the largest difference. There were lots of alt-scolds on every other platform, but Mastodon embraced alt text to a far greater degree … BECAUSE IT’S SO EASY.
I do like that Mastodon reminds you to add Alt text before posting an image. People think alt text is just for the blind or near blind but sometimes I have a hard time figuring out why a picture was posted and the alt text clears that up. All that to say, it’s reminders help create the habit of adding text descriptors, which helps everyone.
Alt text for blind people in images, a la Mastodon.
Would adding ML generated descriptions of images help here? Would be trivial to add in a third party client.
Perhaps it would help a bit, I don’t know. Even if it does, it would be far less than having the sharer to actually write something, and telling the reader the focus of the picture.
I’ll give you a personal albeit real example of that. I posted this picture in Mastodon, some time ago:
A machine learning model could theoretically say something like there’s a tabby cat in the picture, one semi-abstract acrylic painting, one figurative oil painting. Both paintings rest on a white wall… except that most of those things don’t matter, what matters is what the cat is doing towards the viewer.
Contrast it with the translated version of the alt text that I’ve provided: A playful tabby cat, leaning against the back of a chair, looking at the viewer. Her head, upper thorax, and paws are visible. One paw is holding the back of the chair; the other paw is on the air, in an “I got you!” movement towards the viewer. It’s completely different and, when I wrote this, I hoped that both blind and non-blind users could get something out of the picture that they wouldn’t without the alt text.
And it’s the same deal with other Mastodon posters, not just me. This system - where the user is expected to provide alt text - works well, IMO.
Could this be solved with an app?
I’m not sure but I don’t think so. It would require the server to store the alt text for the picture.
And it would also require people to actually use the feature. I still don’t know how Mastodon managed to pull this off in this regard…
By making it convenient on the tech side, and having a cohesive enough culture that any newcomers from the many Twitter migrations just did the right thing because that was the norm when they joined.
I myself won’t boost anything that doesn’t have alt text for example. (Which is still surprisingly common despite the reputation of Masto being well-alt-texted)
Got it.
Well, Lemmy already kind of has its own culture, and it didn’t catch here yet. But I hope that, if the feature gets implemented, we manage to spread its usage.
Lemmy appears to have focused more on instance culture than systemwide culture and lacked / discouraged using user level or mod level tools to do anything to enforce or preserve it.
It also started out with a strong “this is Reddit but you can’t censor us” culture and when more people from Reddit showed up that then meant “this is Reddit but you can’t censor us” became “this is more of Reddit.”
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy is a good read - https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf
The bit about Communitree on page 9 (labeled as 191) is most relevant.
Though I’m still curious about how distinct of a culture Lemmy had that was distinct from the culture on an instance (with the corresponding “the only way to categorically prevent the culture of another instance from spreading to another was to defederate”).
There’s still some “wider” culture here. Specially in this topic (accessibility), given that at least some redditfugees left as Reddit Inc. was showing a middle finger to its blind users. And from further checking, alt text for images is already implemented:
If the pic above doesn’t load, it’ll show “The Lemmy logo” instead. But in no moment the interface tells you “hey, add alt text” (there’s a feature request for that though). It doesn’t show on mouseover either, as in Mastodon, and I think that this is important (it shows non-blind users that the alt text does something).
As such there’s still a good chance that this spreads across Lemmy, if implemented better.
I do agree however that Lemmy is more focused on instance culture than the platform-wide culture. That’s visible for me as I’ve noticed that, usually, users behaving too “Reddity” tend to cluster on certain instances, and avoid others. That sounds like a compromise between large scale and seeking what the link calls “the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration” - let the kids use the platform, but somewhere that it won’t hamper adult discussion.
The relatively higher barrier of entry of the platform as a whole selects people who are a bit more prone to discuss tech, in detriment to other subjects. And even considering your typical user in “reddity instances”, he might look dumb in comparison with the rest of lemmy, but he’s still an IQ 9001 in comparison with your typical redditor.
(I’m still reading the .pdf, saved it here. Thanks for the link, it looks interesting. As of yet I’ve focused mostly on the part that you mentioned to be relevant for this discussion.)
Many of them headed over to !main@rblind.com though it only has one community on it and rather low activity overall (the most recent comment on the site was left 5 days ago). Glancing at all on that instance, not many people subscribed externally and the reddit continues to have more activity today than rblind has had this month (based on number of posts and comments).
Part of this, I believe, is a mismatch between what Lemmy offers (and while some things are more accessible than Reddit, others aren’t) and what different communities need. startrek did quite well with startrek.website… but /r/blind and rblind seem to be more of an sync chat… and Lemmy does that poorly compared to other offerings.
If you look at the tail end of many communities ( for example https://programming.dev/communities?listingType=Local&page=4 ) you can see a bunch of “lift and shift” attempts of a community on Reddit that just didn’t do it. !boardgamedeals@lemmy.world was one were the mod closed the sub on Reddit for a while and said “go here” … but the problem was that the mod wasn’t the one creating the content and so it kind of sputtered out.
And so part of the difficulty of the reddit exodus - it wasn’t the content creators and power users that moved over here with the expectations of great amounts of new content, but rather the mods and the dissatisfied. Those who were able to find an existing community here tended to do reasonably well. Those who tried to start one from scratch (“follow me to the new Lemmy instance”) … that often didn’t work well unless the community wanted to go and a lot of them were grumpy about a mod shutting down the sub.
Which brings us to “just dropping the culture of a reddit sub on a general Lemmy instance (lemmy.world and lemmy.ml vs startrek.website)” tended to be an experience that was overall worse for everyone involved than Reddit.
… And lets face it, the content creators that came to Lemmy aren’t the ones posting neat things in woodworking, but rather the ones making memes.
This more than anything, I think, made the largest difference. There were lots of alt-scolds on every other platform, but Mastodon embraced alt text to a far greater degree … BECAUSE IT’S SO EASY.
I do like that Mastodon reminds you to add Alt text before posting an image. People think alt text is just for the blind or near blind but sometimes I have a hard time figuring out why a picture was posted and the alt text clears that up. All that to say, it’s reminders help create the habit of adding text descriptors, which helps everyone.