The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.

Um, nope.

George Takei is on Mastodon. I've yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.

Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.

The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn't lure anyone into the Fediverse.

Do you explain the Internet to your grandparents by explaining HTTP first?

Sorry to say, but the Fediverse would be a great deal smaller if it wasn't for millions of Twitter users who were railroaded straight to mastodon.social, not knowing anything about it except that it's allegedly "literally twitter without musk".

There are still people who have been on Mastodon since shortly after Musk bought Twitter out, and who shit brix upon discovering for the first time that the Fediverse is, in fact, surprisingly, who woulda thunk it, not only Mastodon.

These people wouldn't be here, had their introduction to the Fediverse started with an explanation of ActivityPub.

The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?

As many followers as they've built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?

And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?

The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.

Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.

There's also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.

There's Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won't be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.

If you want something with more power, something that's much more like Facebook, there's Friendica and has been since 2010.

If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there's Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks "the Fediverse" needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn't have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.

And so forth.

The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.

They've yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They've run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.

I wasn't talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.

I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.

Thing is, on Mastodon, it's pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone's just got "the Mastodon way" stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.

And everywhere that isn't Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it's another stupid Mastodon fad.

That's what I have mostly got on my mind.

At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk's announcement to buy Twitter.

Reminds me of when Aeris Irides tried to connect (streams) (2021's umpteenth fork-of-a-fork of 2010's Friendica, to dumb it down) and OpenSimulator (free, open-source server application for 3-D virtual worlds very similar to Second Life, est. 2007, interconnected 2008).

Okay, this wasn't to go as far as federating the OpenSim local chat or even only the OpenSim in-world instant messaging system via ActivityPub because both (streams) and OpenSim were to remain untouched. So you couldn't post from OpenSim to Mastodon or vice versa.

But the planned features included

• tying together the creation of channels on (streams) and the creation of avatars in OpenSim
• forwarding notifications from (streams) to OpenSim as a message
• syncing the avatar profile picture in OpenSim with that on (streams) bidirectionally
• automatically uploading snapshots taken in OpenSim to the (streams) file space and generating image-only posts

Nothing came out of this, though. The HoloNeon (streams) instance is gone the HoloNeon grid is gone, and Aeris has moved to another OpenSim grid.

So neither the idea of interweaving the Metaverse with the Fediverse is new, nor is the free, open, decentralised Metaverse.

I think most users don’t care about accessibility or aren’t educated on the subject.

On Mastodon, this happens much more quickly than you might imagine.

Post an image without alt-text, especially on a big, general-purpose, notorious newbie instance, and there'll likely be someone who asks you to add an alt-text to your image.

Unless you keep yourself inside a small special interest bubble with no contact to the outside Fediverse, you will be educated on the subject, whether you want or not.

And Mastodon users don't care if whoever they educate about alt-text and image descriptions is on Mastodon or elsewhere because they can't see where someone is, at least not at first glance.

Would you happen to know why that is?

Unlike other places, Mastodon is not "everyone for themselves" and "hey, let's shitpost about minorities for the lulz". While Lemmy is trying to be Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo, Mastodon is trying to be nega-Twitter. Except for Gargron and the other devs who are trying to make Mastodon Twitter with sprinkles.

The Mastodon community is trying hard to make Mastodon feel nice and comfortable and welcoming for everyone, just like Mastodon felt nice and comfortable and welcoming to them after they had freshly arrived from that rampantly ultra-fascist hellhole that's called 𝕏 now. They're trying hard, and I mean hard, not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist.

This includes lots of things that are completely unthinkable on Reddit because they are technically impossible. Alt-text on images, for example, for which Mastodon offers a whopping 1,500 characters per image. Content warnings for sensitive posts in what's actually the summary field. Hiding sensitive images which is actually something non-standard and semi-proprietary by Mastodon that hardly anything else out there supports.

Many instances actually make alt-text on images and content warnings for specific topics mandatory in their instance rules. Which topics require CWs partly differ from instance to instance; instances with a focus on neurodivergence/autism, for example, require a CW for eye contact in addition to the usual. Instances only enforce these rules on local users and local posts and not on what's happening in the federated timeline, but they do have these rules, and they enforce them to the point of permanently banning users.

At the same time, however, these things have become part of Mastodon's culture. You simply do that stuff, lest you're at least shunned by "the Mastodon community". At least. Or you're being lectured about having to add actually useful alt-text to images and content warnings to sensitive posts. Or you're muted or blocked outright.

Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention?

If an image has alt-text, the Web interface shows a little rectangle with "ALT" in it in one corner. Mobile apps tend to do the same. You immediately see upon first glance whether an image has alt-text or not.

Beware if someone catches your post with an image without that "ALT" marker.

Mastodon's goal, not defined by the devs but by the end users, is for 100% of all images that appear on Mastodon to have alt-text. There are daily stats on which Mastodon instance has how high a percentage of image posts with alt-text. I think mastodon.social, the notorious newbie and "I keep using Mastodon like Twitter" instance, is somewhere between 10% or 20% or so. By Lemmy standards, this may seem mind-boggling high, but by Mastodon standards, it's embarrassingly low. Some instances reach 80%, and by Mastodon standards, this means there are still 20% image posts that aren't accessible.

Oh, and there being an "ALT" marker is not enough. If there is an "ALT" marker, people will go check the alt-text. If it doesn't actually sufficiently describe the image, or if the image is predominantly text, and the alt-text doesn't contain a full, verbatim transcript, that's just as bad as there not being any alt-text, and it's treated just like there was no alt-text.

On Mastodon, alt-text is absolutely. Serious. Muthafscking. Business. Full stop. To the point that you may have mods at your throat if you don't provide it.

On a side-note, most Mastodon users can't tell whether a post came from Mastodon or not. They treat posts in their timelines that came from Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Friendica or Hubzilla or whatever just like native Mastodon posts. Except for sometimes at least being highly annoyed if a post goes over 500 characters, that is. But they aren't like, "Okay, you're excused for not providing alt-text because you're on Misskey, and Misskey doesn't have an alt-text culture," or like, "Okay, you're excused for not providing alt-text because you're on Friendica, and you have to program alt-text into your posts on Friendica, and even that is buggy."

If your post appears on Mastodon, it'd better integrate with Mastodon's culture or else. Also, Mastodon users don't know anything about anything outside Mastodon, neither cultural differences nor technological differences.

Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?

My estimation is rather that 70% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and 25% are on Android phones, always with dedicated Mastodon apps. Hardly anyone seems to use Mastodon on a computer.

There are actually many blind or visually-impaired Mastodon users. It seems to naturally attract them, just like 𝕏 repels them.

However, there are also people with bad Internet connections for whom images often don't load at all. Remember that everyone's on phones, and they don't have 4G or 5G everywhere.

And there are even people with no disabilities who say that alt-text helps them understand what an image shows. I think that should be the task of explanations in the post because not everyone can access alt-text, but that'll never be engrained in Mastodon's culture because you can only explain so much in 500 characters minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus the content warning and minus the actual toot.

We'll see what comes out of this.

Mike has already implemented FEP-ef61 on (streams), and it seemed to have worked well under lab conditions. But then he rolled it out to release in July. Channels created on accounts registered after that point have decentralised IDs already. And surprisingly, it caused tons of bugs to the point of these channels not properly federating with anything. And since he's the only (streams) developer, he had to iron everything out himself. And quickly so because a few dozen people use (streams) as a daily driver.

In mid-August, he forked Forte from the streams repository. It was his vision of "the Fediverse of 2030": basically (streams), but only supporting ActivityPub anymore, with both (streams)' own Nomad and Hubzilla's Zot6 ripped out. Guess the idea was to have something with no extra protocols standing in the way of straightening FEP-ef61 and nomadic identity via ActivityPub. But this caused even more of a workload.

On August 31st, Mike sent a private post to his immediate connections (his channel is set up to send private posts by default) that said that he quits. He wanted to stop developing for the Fediverse because it got too much. The community could carry on if they want.

Trouble is, there's nobody among the few dozen (streams) users who has got what it takes, namely both the time and especially the skills to take over as a lead dev. One guy is ambitious, but he has only recently taught himself git just to make his own pre-FEP-ef61 branch for personal use. Then there are a few people who do know git, who may also know how to code, but who don't have the time.

We got one offer by a guy who wanted to rewrite (streams) from scratch. He had taken a look at the (streams) code, and he said that some of it is very old and crufty and mouldy. Of course, a lot of code probably still dates back to 2012 when Mike forked Red from Friendica to implement nomadic identity and rewrote the entire backend against Zot. Problem was, I think that guy came from Mastodon, he probably hadn't even seen Friendica in action, much less Hubzilla or even (streams), and he described himself as "thick", so we'd have to explain everything to him. Nobody even reacted.

Luckily, Mike is still Mike. He can't keep his fingers off improving the Fediverse. Every couple days, we see commits to the streams repository and/or Forte. It's just that things are moving forward very slowly now. The community is trying to figure out what and where the bugs can be by examining log files and whatnot, but nobody can track them down in the source, much less fix them and submit a PR, and that isn't talking about merging the PR.

What I’d much rather see is instance based accounts, however, with the ability to take over/migrate them from other instances, so that if an instance goes down, people can still keep their identity. It would also allow instances focused on protecting minority communities to keep doing that.

This exists right now. It has existed for longer than Mastodon, much less Lemmy.

Established by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 when he invented nomadic identity. First implemented in his Zot protocol from 2012 and a Friendica fork named Red, later Red Matrix, known as Hubzilla since 2015. Also available on (streams).

Not just a vague concept or an experiment, but daily-driven on stable servers since over a decade.

Nomadic identity goes even further than migration. Nomadic identity allows you to have the same Fediverse identity with everything in it (name, posts, connections, settings, files etc. etc. pp.) on multiple servers simultaneously. Not dumb copies. Bidirectional, near-real-time, live, hot backups. Whatever happens on one instance of a channel will be sync'd to all others almost immediately.

One of the clones goes down, doesn't matter. The main instance goes down, doesn't matter, you can use the clones just the same. The main instances goes down and stays down, doesn't matter, you make one of the clones your new main instance. All your nomadic connections are automagically changed to your new identity based on your new main instance. Yes, even on remote servers.

Even migration is based on the same concept. If you move from one server to another, first a clone is created, then the clone is declared the new main instance, thus demoting the original instance to clone, then the old original instance is deleted and the account with it. Not only can you move with absolutely literally everything, but you don't leave any rubbish behind on the old instance.

Only downside: It does not work on ActivityPub. Yet. It requires a special protocol, either Zot (Hubzilla) or Nomad ((streams)). ActivityPub-based projects don't even understand nomadic identity. So when you move, you have to reconnect all your non-nomadic followers.

ActivityPub implementation is being worked on, at least in theory. But the guy behind all this has, well, apparently not fully quit, but dramatically slowed down.

Is there a reason why you started this conversation? Something you’d like us to do?

Yes.

When I post images on Hubzilla, I always describe them. I have connections not only within Hubzilla, but mostly on Mastodon and also elsewhere (Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish etc. etc., all over the place).

The problem I have is three-fold: One, my images are extreme edge-cases topic-wise. They're about 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. As in, maybe one out of 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying system, and I'm not even talking about the specific place where I've taken an image. This makes very extensive image descriptions necessary because I can't suppose that people already know what whatever is in the images looks like. And it makes very extensive explanations within the image descriptions necessary so that people get the images in the first place.

I can't take anything about my pictures for common knowledge. I need over 1,000 characters alone to explain where an image is from.

Two, I'm not bound to the same limitations as your average Fediverse user when it comes to describing the image. I don't only look at the image when I'm describing it. I look at the real deal in-world when I'm describing it. This gives me an almost infinite zoom factor. I can see things in-world that are so tiny in the image that they're invisible. I can describe and actually have described in the past images within my image. And nearly on the same level as the image that I was actually describing.

Three, I'm not bound to the same limitations as your average Mastodon user when it comes to posting an image description. I am bound to the 1,500-character alt-text limit because Mastodon truncates longer alt-text and throws the excess characters away. But I do not have a 500-character limit. I don't have any character limit at all. I can post 80,000 characters, and Mastodon will show these 80,000 characters, all of them, and so will other Fediverse projects.

So I can put full, detailed image descriptions of nearly any length into the post text body. This is completely unimaginable on Mastodon. And that's why I can't discuss these things with Mastodon users: They can't even imagine what I'm doing.

Anyhow, this leads me into situations which are just as completely unimaginable for Mastodon users, which I therefore can't discuss with people who only know Mastodon. And this raises questions for me which people who only know Mastodon can't answer because they can't even imagine why I'd ask something like that, because the very concept is alien to them.

This started early on in last summer when I started to seriously describe my images after I had found out that many Mastodon users like highly detailed image descriptions. My first attempt at writing one ended with over 13,000 characters of image description, and I couldn't possibly reduce them without losing content. So I wanted to know where the best place to put such a long image description would be. I didn't even get an answer. So I had to figure out from other posts and their replies that it's always best to keep image descriptions and explanations as close to the image as possible, i.e. in the same post. I'm still not sure if that's what Mastodon users, especially disabled users, would prefer in my case.

Then more and more questions came up.

Do I have to describe images in images? Images in images in images?

For example, the rule is that if there's text within the borders of the image, it must be transcribed. However, this rule does not define edge-cases because it doesn't take edge-cases into consideration. What about text that's so small in the image that it's visible, but illegible (3 pixels high)? Or text that's so small in the image that it's invisible (less than a pixel high)? Or text that's partly obscured in the image (poster-sized sign with a tree trunk in front of it)? Must I, may I or mustn't I transcribe it? Again, let's suppose that I can read it in-world with no problems.

Or from which point on is it required to warn about eye contact? (I actually got an answer to this from someone who knows. If an eye can be made out in an image, then an eye contact warning is necessary. I was told that, yes, there are autistic persons who are triggered by an eye that's 1/100th of a pixel high and 1/100 of a pixel wide.)

All stuff that you never think about when all you ever post are fairly simple real-life photographs.

I do not want to discuss these topics in this thread! If anything, my plan is to start separate threads for each of these.

My goal is simply to find a place where I can discuss them with people who know enough to be able to give me sensible answers that I can work with.

If you think this Lemmy community is such a place, then I'll stay and ask away, and then and only then I'd like to see competent answers to my questions.

But if you think that nobody here will be able to understand what I want because what I'm asking is just too alien for everyone here, then it doesn't make sense to try and ask.

A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.

As I've already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it's pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn't Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.

One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can't post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, "alt-text" and "image description" are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It's like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.

If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that'd actually make.

Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren't even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can't be discussed in glorified tweets.

Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.

Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.

Ideally, I'd discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone's needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.

I don't just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.

I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.

I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.

And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.

Also, not everything has Mastodon-style reports built in. Not sure about modern-day Friendica, but AFAIK, Hubzilla and (streams) don't.

So if you're on Mastodon, you report a Hubzilla user on their home hub, and nothing happens, that doesn't mean that moderation is neglected to such degrees that Fediblocking the whole hub is justified. It doesn't mean either that Hubzilla's culture is so much different from Mastodon's although it is.

It simply means that Hubzilla doesn't understand Mastodon reports.

That’s a bit more complicated than I thought.

Then allow me to make it less complicated. Or even more complicated.

And I’m not sure if Lemmy is the right choice for you anyways. The OpenSim community doesn’t seem very active. And since you’re talking about 13.000 character descriptions… That will also not fly on Lemmy.

It has never been my plan to post images with such massive descriptions on Lemmy. Lemmy doesn't require image descriptions. It doesn't require alt-text either. It doesn't even officially support alt-text. Lemmy doesn't live and enforce a culture of accessibility.

Most importantly, though: The OpenSim community has no subscribers on general-purpose Mastodon instances. What's posted there will most likely never appear in the federated timeline of e.g. mastodon.social where people could get all riled up about the lack of alt-text and image description.

Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already. My image descriptions have grown since then. 25,000 characters, 40,000 characters, and yesterday, I've posted a 60,000-character description for an image that also got an alt-text precisely at Mastodon's limit of 1,500 characters.

And then Mastodon is a microblogging platform. Originally intended for short messages.

**I don't intend to post my images on Mastodon either.

I intend to keep posting them on Hubzilla (official website).**

Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon. It was first released in 2015, ten months before Mastodon. It was renamed and repurposed from the Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010.

Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in just about everything. Like its predecessors, it has never had a character limit, and it has always had the full set of features of text formatting and post design as any full-blown long-form blogging platform out there. In fact, maybe even more than that.

Hubzilla is not a microblogging project. It can work as one, but it can seamlessly transition between microblogging and fully featured long-form blogging and everything in-between. Hubzilla is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, renamed from a fork of a Facebook alternative that was created also with blogging in mind.

So I want to post my images on Hubzilla.

What does this have to do with Mastodon then?

It has to do with Mastodon that I've got lots of Mastodon connections. All my OpenSim connections except for one are on Mastodon, and I think all of these are on one and the same OpenSim-themed instance. But on top of that, I've got hundreds of Mastodon connections all over the place, including mastodon.social and other big general-purpose instances.

And all those non-OpenSim Mastodon connections came to exist because they followed me. It was not my decision to follow them. They followed me because they expected me to explain the Fediverse beyond Mastodon to them because I had recently done so. Or they followed me because they had freshly arrived from Twitter, and they desperately needed Mastodon to feel like Twitter, including lots of uninteresting background noise in their personal timeline, so they followed everyone and everything they came across in the federated timeline.

So my image posts on Hubzilla will automatically federate to Mastodon and appear in people's Mastodon timelines. And it isn't my decision.

Sure, on Hubzilla, I have the power to limit precisely who can see my posts by only sending them to specific connections. But I want the Fediverse world out there to see the marvels of OpenSim, to learn that free, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds have been reality since 2007, that "the metaverse" is anything but dead and not invented by Zuckerberg. I don't want to remain stuck in an echo chamber.

Oh, and by the way: Mastodon can receive posts up to a maximum length of 100,000 characters by default. Also, Mastodon does not truncate long posts. It only truncates alt-text that exceeds 1,500 characters. But it leaves posts up to 100,000 characters as intact as any other post and probably simply rejects longer posts.

It might be you using the wrong tool for your task, since it’s intended for a different purpose and you’d need a different tool.

My tool of choice is Hubzilla. And there's hardly anything better in the Fediverse for what I do than Hubzilla.

But it could very well the case that the alt-text and character limits of the platforms aren’t the issue here.

They're only indirectly. With that, I mean that Mastodon's default limit of 500 characters is deeply engrained in Mastodon's culture, and Mastodon's culture is influenced by this limitation. For example, 500 characters make image descriptions in the post impossible. Thus, they're not part of Mastodon's culture. Thus, the very concept, the very idea is completely unimaginable to Mastodon users. Because as per Mastodon's unwritten rules, "alt-text" and "image description" are mutually synonymous. They mean the exact same thing. Everything that describes the image goes into the alt-text, and that's the way it is, full stop.

There are some that are meant for long texts.

Hubzilla is meant for long texts. It has always been.

And you can even use Wordpress or something like that, do your own blog and install an ActivityPub plugin if you want a connection to the Fediverse.

And Hubzilla is every bit as capable of long-form blogging as WordPress.

There's no need to have one separate tool for each task if you already have one tool that can cover all these tasks. And Hubzilla can.

Ultimately, I haven’t seen your posts/toots.

Here's my most recent image post from yesterday.

60,000+ characters of full image description, my longest one so far. Plus precisely 1,500 characters of alt-text. And I actually had to limit myself in comparison to earlier posts. No detailed descriptions of images within the image. No transcripts of text on images within the image. No mentioning in the alt-text where exactly to find the full description.

And I don’t really know the alt-text culture on Mastodon.

And I'm trying to explain it to you.

Maybe it's easier to experience first-hand, to see it with your own very eyes. Go through what appears on mastodon.social under certain hashtags and do so regularly for a few weeks or months:

• #alttext, #alttxt
• #imagedescription, #imagedescriptions
• #bildbeschreibung, #bildbeschreibungen, #bibesch

Also, check the posts from @alttexthalloffame.

Is it really necessary to write that super detailed description in an alt-text?

In the case of the image I've posted yesterday, and seeing as that post went out to general-purpose Mastodon instances and into the realm of Mastodon culture, definitely yes.

Oh, and in case you haven't understood that yet because it's so out-of-whack: I describe my images twice. One, a short description with no explanations in alt-text. Two, a full, detailed description with all necessary explanations in the post text body itself. The latter has to be even more detailed. And here's my explanation why.

As far as I’ve learned about alt-text in webdesign, that is originally intended to give a concise description of the image in the context regarding the rest of the text. It is meant to be short and concise, like a tweet.

Alt-text rules for webdesign are halfway useless in social media.

And alt-text rules for webdesign, as well as alt-text rules for corporate American social media silos, are even more useless on Mastodon. Mastodon's alt-text culture has nothing to do with that.

I’d put that detailed description into the normal text.

Again, I already do that with the full description.

But Mastodon insists, insists, insists in an actually descriptive image description in alt-text, no matter what. For one, out of principle. Besides, they can't imagine there being an image description in the post text (which I hide behind a summary/content warning that they have to click to open first) because this is technically impossible on Mastodon.

So I have to describe the same image once more, this time in the alt-text, in addition to the full description in the post.

Maybe make it a spoiler so it collapses.

I can do that on Hubzilla. But Mastodon doesn't support spoiler tags.

Most frontends for Mastodon collapse longer posts, the official Web interface as well as probably all third-party mobile apps, only the official mobile app doesn't.

Content warnings which are the same as summaries on StatusNet/GNU social/Friendica/Hubzilla collapse posts, too, or rather hide them. I always give one of these when I post over 500 characters, so my image posts do collapse for just about everyone.

And long descriptions go into the body text, not the alt-text.

And once again, that's what I already do. In addition to the shorter description in the alt-text.

I don’t think a nomadic identity is the same as an instance-less identity.

It isn't. (Source: I've been using nomadic stuff since long before any of you has even heard of the Fediverse.)

Nomadic identity always requires one main instance of an "identity container" with a valid Fediverse ID. That Fediverse ID carries in it the domain name of the server on which the main instance of the "identity container" resides. You need something behind the @. The clones have the same Fediverse ID.

So if you have a Hubzilla channel on hub.foo.social, hub.bar.social and hub.baz.social, one instance of that channel has to be the main instance, and the others are the clones. If the instance of the channel on hub.foo.social is defined as the main instance, it's hub.foo.social that defines the idea (e.g. bob@hub.foo.social). From a Hubzilla POV, the clones on hub.bar.social and hub.baz.social are bob@hub.foo.social all the same.

Instance-less would require a fully decentralised, peer-to-peer approach like Briar where (ideally) each user name only exists exactly once. And with no domain name attached to it.

And peer-to-peer in social networking sounds like an awesome idea until you have to run a full-blown, fully-hardened Web server on your iPhone on a wonky 4G connection, simultaneously sending a message to and receiving hundreds of messages from hundreds of other devices out there because you've got, like, 647 connections on your friends list. And then you wonder why your phone is so hot, and the battery craps off within hours.

Too many app devs don't know jack about the Fediverse. Or they didn't when they started developing their apps.

It happens again and again that someone jumps into Fediverse app development, maybe even claims to build a, quote, "Fediverse app," end quote. And then they build it hard against Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. Not even just the Mastodon API. Straight against Mastodon with both a frontend and a backend that only supports Mastodon.

Usually because at this point they still think the Fediverse is the Mastodon network, and there's nothing else in the Fediverse than Mastodon. Some 99% of all Mastodon newbies come into Mastodon believing that, the vast majority still spends the first months believing that, and my estimation is that every other Mastodon user still believes it.

And when you tell such a dev that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, and there's a whole lot of stuff that isn't Mastodon, but that uses ActivityPub, and that communicates with Mastodon like Mastodon communicates with itself, they're taken off-guard.

"What? What do you say? You aren't on Mastodon? How can you talk to me then? Like, black magic or what? Whaddaya mean, that's normal? There's other stuff connected to Mastodon? But Mastodon is the Fediverse. Whaddaya mean, it isn't? The Fediverse is not only Mastodon? So it's Mastodon forks? No? Is it extra stuff glued onto Mastodon then? Not either? Like, WTF? Yeah, sorry, no. I've built my app hard against Mastodon, and if I wanted to support anything else, I'd have to rip everything out and rewrite everything from scratch. 'Sides, it ain't worth doing anyway. Literally nobody uses that stuff. You're, like, literally the first whom I talk to on Mastodon who isn't on Mastodon. Everyone else I see uses Mastodon.* Over 99% of all people in the Fediverse are on the original, Mastodon. Ain't worth supporting those few others."

All this explains why you have tons of iPhone and Android apps for Mastodon that either only work with Mastodon, or that you can connect other Mastodon API stuff to, but only have Mastodon's features at hand. And at the same time, you barely have any apps that support anything beyond Mastodon's features. Exception: Lemmy apps, often written by people for whom the Threadiverse or the Fediverse as a whole is Lemmy.

*No, they don't. But Mastodon users can't see it unless either non-Mastodon users do something that's painfully obviously not possible on Mastodon, or they rub it straight into Mastodon users' faces.

I don't think it's wise to start a Lemmy community and then ask for other people to moderate it while being absent for weeks myself.

In case you haven't read, I'm not primarily a Lemmy user. I'm mostly on Hubzilla and second-mostly on (streams). It may actually occur that I'm not on Lemmy for multiple weeks in a row.

Also, I don't really want to take care of rules and that stuff.

Mastodon Bluesky Nostr where Akkoma where Iceshrimp where Friendica where Pixelfed

"If it ain't got no for-profit "Inc." and no CEO, we ain't gonna support it."

That would basically require all Fediverse servers of all types to grant full-blown user access to Fediverse users with their login credentials stored anywhere in the Fediverse.

I'm not sure if OAuth could do that. Hubzilla supports both OAuth and OAuth2, both as a server and as a client. But for this to work, everything in the Fediverse would require both server-side and client-side OAuth support.

Also, for convenience, OAuth support would basically have to be combined with OpenWebAuth-style magic single sign-on. With bare-bone OAuth, a user would first have to authenticate with a remote server or client or whatever. This is inconvenient. It would have to happen magically on the fly without the user even noticing anything, much less having to act in any way.

If Lemmy had client-side OpenWebAuth support, and you visit a Hubzilla hub, that Hubzilla hub would automagically grant you certain guest privileges because it recognises you.

If it was a combination of OAuth credential transfer and OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, and you visit a Hubzilla hub, you could create a new, full-blown Hubzilla channel residing on that hub, just as if you had a local account, and you could do everything with that channel that you could do with a channel on a local account.

In general, this would create the issue of things being stored in the local server database, like posts or even local settings, but not associated to any one local account in the same database. It's bad enough with content, e.g. posts. It's even worse with technical stuff like settings. I mean, if you drive-by magic-log-in to Mastodon with a Lemmy account, you want all the Mastodon settings, to customise your Mastodon experience, now, don't you?

Now imagine you want to delete your Lemmy account. All of a sudden, discuss.tchncs.de would have to go around to 239 instances of a dozen different projects, because that's how many you've used to do stuff, and wipe stuff from databases on remote servers. Alternative: It stays there, but the user account on discuss.tchncs.de that it's associated with doesn't exist anymore.

Or imagine you'd done that not on discuss.tchncs.de, but on kbin.social which infamously is dead. You'd have stuff in the databases of 239 Fediverse instances that's associated with login credentials on a dead server. No feckin' chance to ever get rid of that stuff unless all Fediverse projects implement some CPU-heavy sanitiser that regularly checks whether the servers and login accounts behind all remote stuff in the databases are still there.

It'd be even worse with server applications that support nomadic identity. Hubzilla and (streams). There, your identity is not your account. They're separate already. Your account is only your login, your access to your identity. Your identity is containerised in something called a "channel" that can be cloned to other servers.

You can't just drive-by magic-log-in to a Hubzilla hub and start posting away and, what, create a wiki or something. Your posts and wikis and whatnot aren't stored in your account. They have to be stored in a channel. So you'll first need a channel. You'll have to create it. By the logic, you'll have a Hubzilla channel and thus a nomadic Hubzilla identity named Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de based on your login credentials. If in this case Hubzilla supports naming channels after login credentials rather than the hub, the server instance they're created on, that is.

Technically speaking, however, since the domain in the ID of the channel differs from the server domain, it's a clone. It is not a main instance. The main instance of a Hubzilla channel always has the same domain in its ID as the hub it resides on. But discuss.tchncs.de is not Hubzilla, nor does it support Hubzilla channels, so Hubzilla channels can't reside on discuss.tchncs.de.

Other connections from Hubzilla and (streams) that understand nomadic identity will relentlessly try to connect to a channel on a Hubzilla hub on discuss.tchncs.de. But there is no Hubzilla hub on discuss.tchncs.de because it's a Lemmy server and not a Hubzilla hub. So your precious Hubzilla channel will be broken from the beginning because the Hubzilla hub that defines its identity does not exist.

I hope this Join the Fediverse Wiki article can help you. I've written it myself.

It's mostly written to pick up Mastodon users who don't know much about the rest of the Fediverse, so it doesn't really explain how Hubzilla relates to Lemmy. I hope it helps anyway.

In the end I still don’t understand that specific culture. I’ve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them I’d shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what they’re trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think that’s making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on what’s really going on in the picture, what’s important, because there’s so much noise added

By professional Web design standards, you're right. But this is part of Mastodon's culture, too: detailed image descriptions that nobody would ever put on a Web site. As long as more people praise than directly criticise it, this won't change.

The people who introduced alt-text to Mastodon and cultivated its alt-text culture were complete amateurs on smartphones who wanted to do something good for blind or visually-impaired users so that they can participate, too. And not professional Web designers who live and breathe WCAG 2.2.

If you say you’re already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body text… Seems I’ve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what you’ve already been doing.

Yes, I do, and I gave you a link as proof. If you don't know how to access alt-text, and you're on a computer, then hover your mouse cursor steadily above the image, and the alt-text will appear.

I got that you’re using Hubzilla. But we’ve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there.

Exactly this is how Mastodon tries to force its culture upon the whole rest of the Fediverse. For example, this is how Mastodon tries to force Friendica to abandon its own culture which is six years older than Mastodon's culture and adopt Mastodon's culture instead.

"We're the majority, so we get to decide how things are done! This is our territory, our Fediverse now!"

If Lemmy had better federation with Mastodon, Mastodon would try to do the same thing with Lemmy.

And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since you’re on Hubzilla and that’s meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microblogging… It’s kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lot’s of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesn’t translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it get’s problematic when interconnecting to users of “narrower” platforms. It’s always been that way. And I don’t see a way around that. At least fundamentally.

In other words, the whole Fediverse should succumb to both technological limitations/limitations in concept and cultural limitations on Mastodon. If Mastodon can't do it, or if Mastodon users don't like it, users of Pleroma and Akkoma and Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Sharkey and Friendica and Hubzilla etc. etc. pp. must not make use of it.

In which way should Mastodon adjust itself to the technology and culture of non-Mastodon projects? And do you honestly believe Mastodon would actually do any of that?

Speaking of technological limitations on Mastodon, I have pretty few to worry about.

If I post 60,000+ characters, Mastodon display the very self-same 60,000+ characters. No problem.

If I put 1,500 characters into the alt-text, Mastodon takes over all 1,500 characters. No problem. That is, if I write more, they're truncated, but Misskey and its forks does the same.

If I put a Mastodon-style content warning into the summary field, Mastodon users get their content warning. No problem.

It's only inline images that are a bit of a problem. Hubzilla has to turn a copy of the image into a file attachment and also copy the alt-text from the image embedding code into the attached image file so that Mastodon has at least got one way to show the image. But still, Mastodon gets the image, and Mastodon gets the alt-text.

Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it.

Well, then there isn't any place at all in the Fediverse or on the Web where I can go and ask e.g. whether illegible text in an image that I can read just fine at the source must, may or mustn't be transcribed when writing an image description for a Fediverse post. There's no such place at all.

Maybe within the “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla. You’re bound to find more people with the same struggles there.

Nope. What few Hubzilla users know Mastodon's culture despise it deeply because Mastodon is trying to force it upon them. The vast majority of Hubzilla's users knows nothing about Mastodon's culture.

Also, I'm very very likely the only Hubzilla user who puts alt-text on images. And I'm definitely the only Hubzilla user who adds a long, detailed image description in the post itself on top.

Hubzilla's culture doesn't know accessibility, and it doesn't care. Same goes for Friendica. Friendica's alt-text handling is actually buggy, but the only Friendica user who even only tries to write alt-text apparently doesn't know how to file a bug report on a Git repository.

In fact, throughout the Fediverse, Mastodon is the only project for whose users alt-text and image descriptions are really serious business. For people everywhere else, it's largely a stupid gimmick or completely unknown.

But you need to lay down the groundworks properly.

I've learned that much. If I want to discuss something concerning Mastodon someplace else than Mastodon, I'll first have to explain how Mastodon works and how Mastodon deviates from what people are used to where I post. Then I'll have to explain Mastodon's user community, who they are in general, where they came from, how most of them are tech-illiterates on phones, and half of them think Mastodon is the Fediverse. Then I'll have to explain Mastodon's culture and give a few links to demonstrate it.

Since all this would be tl;dr, I'd have to explain it by and by and in such ways that my explanations are remembered by the other users.

Then and only then I can ask for advice. That is, probably not even then because all advice I could expect would be 100% based on information that I myself have provided, and I'd be none the wiser.

Common fallacy that the only thing in the Fediverse that people use is Mastodon.

Misskey, for example, is bigger than Lemmy AFAIK.

Maybe it isn't as massive as Mastodon in the western world. But add all the users in East Asia, especially Japan where Misskey comes from, and you've got numbers that can't be ignored anymore.

That's an understatement. It's nothing more than another link dump that doesn't look like anyone wants to actually discuss something. And even as such, it's almost dead. Like, one post in two months.

Also, it looks more like for "how do I, as a full-stack developer, make my Web app accessible" than for "how do I, as an end user, make my image posts accessible". But I'm looking for the latter.

And, preferably, I'm looking for someplace where I don't first have to explain most of the Fediverse to everyone because all they know is Lemmy (if it's on Lemmy), or because all they know is Mastodon (if it's on Mastodon or glued onto Mastodon like Guppe).

Maybe you've overlooked that, but: I'm mainly on Hubzilla, not on Lemmy.

By far most of my connections on Hubzilla are on Mastodon. This means that my posts show up on a) Mastodon users' personal timelines and b) the federated timelines of lots of Mastodon instances. This, in turn, means my content has to fulfill at least some of Mastodon's cultural standards.

Also, I'm one of the few non-Mastodon users who do care for their reach on Mastodon. That's because I'm probably one of the few Fediverse users to explain to Mastodon users the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. This is not the primary topic of my Hubzilla channel, but someone has to do that.

But if even more Mastodon users or entire Mastodon instances mute, block or shadow-block me for repeatedly flipping the bird at Mastodon's etiquette and being unabashedly ableist, this becomes impossible because my explanations can't reach their target audience anymore.

Even when I post about my primary topic, 3-D virtual worlds, I rely on being read on Mastodon. For it is there where the chances are the best for there being someone who is interested in that topic.

Late, but still: I dare say that what Mike Macgirvin has done.

Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica looks like and is marketed as a Facebook alternative. But it comes with extra features on top like a built-in file storage, and its actual killer feature has always been that it federates with everything that moves.

Red a.k.a. the Red Matrix used to handle much like Friendica on the surface, but it introduced nomadic identity and permissions as early as 2012.

Hubzilla, into which the Red Matrix was turned in 2015, is probably the most powerful of all Fediverse projects. It was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And it was the first nomadic one to actually kind of take off.

Finally, the latest offspring of 14 years (plus two days) of development since Mistpark is the streams repository which isn't as feature-heavy as Hubzilla, but the most innovative one, and it's constantly evolving. It will be there first that nomadic identity and even permissions beyond what Hubzilla has to offer will be implemented in ActivityPub. And it's likely that this will happen this year.

The Fediverse is not one enclosed, unified entity under one centralised rule.

It's a common misconception that "the Fediverse" is a network platform created by whomever, usually Eugen Rochko. And Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube etc. are Web UIs for the Fediverse, and Mona, IceCubes, Tusky, Fedilab etc. are mobile UIs for the Fediverse which mimic the functionality of certain Web UIs.

This is complete non-sense. None of this is true.

Instead, the Fediverse is a patchwork of many different things that work together by speaking common languages. And with "work together", I mean "work together ever so barely" in many cases. Mastodon and Lemmy are not different clients for the same server thing. They connect, but they can hardly interact.

These "apps" aren't client apps. They're server applications. They provide a whole slew of very very different server backends.

There is no "Fediverse suite of apps" either. Just about everything in the Fediverse is developed and offered separately from one another.

Mastodon, in particular, ignores the whole rest of the Fediverse and tries to present itself to its users and Fediverse novices as "the Fediverse". And when Mastodon users discover that Mastodon is, in fact, not "the Fediverse", Mastodon makes them believe that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Oh, and no, Eugen Rochko didn't invent the Fediverse. Evan Prodromou did. In 2008. That was when he took his recently launched Twitter alternative Identi.ca, open-sourced its technology under the name Laconi.ca (later StatusNet, now part of GNU social) and laid its protocol open under the name OpenMicroBlogging (now OStatus).

The Fediverse consisting of multiple different kinds of interacting servers came to exist in 2010 when Mike Macgirvin launched his Facebook alternative named Mistpark (now Friendica). He built it on top of a whole new protocol, but he gave it the ability to speak OpenMicroBlogging as well, thus connecting it to StatusNet. One key feature of Friendica is still to be able to connect to everything that moves and then some.

Mastodon was built on top of OStatus, too. But the intention was not to connect it to already-existing StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla (a much more powerful Friendica fork by Mike Macgirvin himself) and Pleroma (which had started out as an alternative UI for StatusNet). The idea was rather that using an already existing protocol was easier for a young and barely experienced coder than designing an all-new protocol from scratch. Mastodon never intended to be interoperable with anything else.

Even when Mastodon introduced ActivityPub as early as September, 2017, it was not to be able to interact with Hubzilla which had it first, two months earlier. By the way, ActivityPub is another one of Evan Prodromou's creations, but this time, he wasn't alone.

The idea behind Lemmy seemed to be similar: Build a Reddit clone, but without the hassle of designing a brand-new communication protocol. The difference was that Mastodon was already quite well-known when Lemmy was launched. When Mastodon was launched, StatusNet was considered dead after its only really known instance, Identi.ca had switched from OStatus to pump.io. As for Friendica, Hubzilla and Pleroma, nobody knew they existed, much less that they spoke OStatus. OStatus was there, ready to use, but to most people who came across it, it felt unused. So I guess that when Eugen Rochko created Mastodon, he unironically and sincerely believed that he was now the only one using this protocol, nobody else ever would again, and Mastodon would only ever connect to itself. Mastodon's whole very concept is to be a "federated walled garden", decentralised on the inside, but not letting anything else connect.

Separating identity from instance was invented in 2011, first implemented in 2012, and it has been stable since 2013. Zot protocol, Red, Red Matrix, nowadays known as Hubzilla. It is called nomadic identity.

Separating identity from platform is a current WIP: Nomadic identity is to be introduced to ActivityPub and then made project-agnostic. The idea is to be able to clone your Lemmy account to Mastodon and Pixelfed and Mobilizon and Hubzilla and Funkwhale all the same. You won't be able to use all features of everywhere everywhere (go ahead, try to edit a Hubzilla wiki or article or webpage on Lemmy, haha), but it'll be the same identity. Still, it would require one account on each server on which you have an instance of your identity.

But what you're talking about is full, unlimited user write access to over tens of thousands of instances of over 100 projects. Like, visiting any one of these tens of thousands of servers and being able to do absolutely everything a locally registered user can do, no exceptions, right away.

Like it or not, but this will require a local account. Even OpenWebAuth doesn't grant you full local user write access, nor does it allow for drive-by, on-the-spot creation of full-blown local user accounts on any instance, regardless of registration of local user accounts is allowed or not. Like, you can't just visit hub.netzgemeinde.eu and, within a split-second, have a local user account with the same login credentials as on lemy.lol and a nomadic clone of matcha_addict@lemy.lol so it's the exact self-same Fediverse identity on Lemmy and Hubzilla.

So it's either this. Immediate drive-by nomadic cloning of your logged-in Fediverse to any instance that you visit for the first time.

Or every Fediverse user must have a user account on every instance of every project out there, and their Fediverse identity must be nomadic everywhere and cloned to everywhere all the same.

Like, you register an account on lemy.lol. Simultaneously, the same account with the self-same credentials will be created on all other Fediverse instances out there. Immediately afterwards, whatever will contain your identity on Lemmy will automatically be cloned to all these other instances of everything. That way, you can immediately use all instances of all projects of the Fediverse just the same.

Or the Fediverse has only one central login server which controls the credentials for all instances of everything out there. You don't register with lemy.lol, you register with this central behemoth. And all tens of thousands of Fediverse instances connect to this central server for login credentials. And, again, your identity with all your data will have to be cloned and mirrored all across the Fediverse.

By the way, I've cloned Hubzilla and (streams) channels before. One channel from one server to one other server. This can take multiple minutes even with not so much content. Guess how long it'll take to clone one identity container from one Lemmy instance to 20,000++ other instances out there.

It literally started in 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.

If you're looking for something that is to Facebook what Bluesky is to pre-Musk Twitter, it doesn't exist.

Otherwise, "the Facebook ones" are:

• Friendica (intended to be a Facebook alternative from the very beginning, designed to federate with everything that moves)
• Hubzilla (fork of (a fork of?) Friendica by Friendica's own creator, currently the most powerful piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, basically a federated Swiss army knife that can do Facebook as well)
• the nameless thing in the streams repository (not in this graph, fork of a fork of a fork of a fork... of Hubzilla by Friendica's and Hubzilla's creator, less feature-laden than Hubzilla, but more modern and evolving at a rapid pace, the most advanced piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, but instances are hard to find)

I know, but that limit is still deeply engrained in Mastodon's culture which seems to actually be built against mastodon.social.

But where would a unified Web client run in the first place? It would have to be installed on a Web server and, from there, access the Web servers of the various different server apps which would still be entirely different and independent installations.

For a Web client with no actual server backend, the same would go as for a mobile app: It would have to cover pretty much all features of everything. If uniting Lemmy and Mastodon in one UI seems tricky already, try adding Hubzilla and (streams) to the mix.

If you're actually looking for a unified Web server and client, i.e. one Fediverse project that literally covers everything the Fediverse can do with one login on one server and one identity: This won't happen.

This would be way too much for one Fediverse project to tackle. You'd basically have to start with (streams), add back all functionality that has been removed since the first fork from Hubzilla (and that's a whole lot), make all kinds of non-nomadic protocols compatible with nomadic identity via Nomad and ActivityPub, and then gradually add all kinds of features from all over the place, from PeerTube to Funkwhale, from PieFed to Owncast, from Mobilizon to BookWyrm. And you'd have to soft-fork everything and keep them in-sync with their respective upstreams.

The outcome would be too complex for most. People would have to deal with their account/their login not being their identity because their identity is containerised in a channel. They would have to wrap their minds around nomadic identity. They would have to deal with fine-grained permissions settings. They would have a post editor that's every bit as powerful as those on big blogging platforms when all they want to do is tweet and retweet and occasionally watch a video. And they would have tons of features on top.

The whole thing would be an utter nightmare for its developers as well, seeing as they'd constantly have to track over 100 Fediverse projects and implement any upgrades which they've rolled out.

For one specific Fediverse project each, yes.

But what the OP is looking for is a Web client that lets you log into Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube all the same. Probably one that unifies your Mastodon, Lemmy and PeerTube timelines into one, rather than listing your Mastodon timeline next to your Lemmy timeline next to your PeerTube timeline in three separate columns, TweetDeck-style.

Or maybe what the OP is looking for is a Web server and client that unites all features of Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube in one Fediverse project so that only one single login is needed for everything.

Neither of these exists.

It would just either have to be on a server that also offers all server applications covered by the Web client so that everything has the same domain.

Or you would have to tell people to register accounts on foo.social, bar.social and/or baz.social, but the Web UI is on qux.social. Bit confusing for newbies who only knew centralised silos five minutes ago.

It isn't just types of content that makes a fully featured, unified Fediverse client nigh-impossible. It's features in general.

It all starts with having one unified timeline for any arbitrary number of Fediverse identities on any arbitrary number of different Fediverse servers. Nicely convenient. You only open one app, and you've got them all. Not even separated timelines within the same app, TweetDeck-style. No, you have posts on your three Mastodon accounts under posts on your Pixelfed account under posts on your Lemmy account under posts on your Friendica account, maybe even under posts on your Hubzilla channel if the app isn't limited to the Mastodon API, and if it supports multiple identities under one login.

But it doesn't stop there.

Maybe you want to reply to a post. Or you want to post something yourself.

And, of course, you don't want to stick with the basics that Mastodon offers. Maybe you want to use text formatting.

So text formatting has to be implemented. But it has to be deactivated if you want to post to one of your Mastodon accounts, but it has to be reactivated if one of them is actually on Glitch.

Next trouble: Not everything that supports text formatting supports standard Markdown. Misskey and its various forks use "Misskey-flavoured Markdown". On Friendica, Markdown is optional and off by default, and BBcode is the standard. On Hubzilla, Markdown is not available at all, only BBcode is, and it comes with a whole slew of extras specific to Mike Macgirvin's nomadic projects from Red (2012) to Forte (2024). So yes, you may want support for things like [zmg][/zmg], [zrl=][/zrl] or [observer.baseurl].

Of course, if you are on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams), you're used to having a post preview. Code-heavy posting like on these three makes it a requirement; pure plain-text posting like on Mastodon doesn't. But the preview button must be able to faithfully render any post just like its native server application would render it. No matter what it'll be. Oh, and if you've got NSFW activated on your Friendica account or your Hubzilla or (streams) channel, the preview must be hidden behind an automatically generated content warning.

Speaking of which, Mastodon-style CWs aren't unified either. Depending on the server, they would have to go into the CW field, the summary field, [abstract=apub][/abstract] (Friendica), [summary][/summary] (streams) or nowhere at all (e.g. Lemmy, replies on Hubzilla).

The Fediverse has various different ways of quote-posting, and Mastodon doesn't have quote-posts at all. The Threadiverse has dislikes/downvotes/thumbs-down, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) optionally have them, too, but others don't. Misskey and the Forkeys have emoji reactions. Hubzilla has only twelve emojis, and clicking one creates a whole new comment with only that emoji in it. Friendica lets you hashtag other people's posts, so does (streams) optionally, but only they themselves even understand this feature.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) also have categories, much like a blog, next to hashtags. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), they're optional. But they require their own text field which the app must have, too, depending on the availability of this feature.

This goes further and further. After all, you may not just want basic functionality for when you aren't on your computer. Maybe you don't have a computer. Maybe your phone is the only digital end-user device you possess. So the app would have to cover not only the bare necessities (read, reply, post etc.), but everything.

For example, someone wants to follow you. On Mastodon, you just confirm it if you've set your account up to do so manually, and you're done.

On Hubzilla with enough optional features activated, you assign a contact role to the new contact to give it the permissions you want to grant it, you add it to one or multiple privacy groups, you choose which profile that contact can see, you adjust the affinity slider, you may even want to pre-fill the per-contact filter lists (one allowlist, one blocklist), and then you confirm the new connection. Upon which Hubzilla automatically follows that connection back. Oh, and then you can still block or ignore or archive a connection or set it to invisible. On (streams), it's somewhat similar, but since you can grant individual permissions to specific contacts in addition to a pre-defined permission role, you've got even more options.

A unified, daily-driver Fediverse app that's supposed to fully replace Web interfaces would have to offer UI elements for all these settings. And only when they're actually needed.

Don't get me started about settings and options. Again, the app would have to mirror all of them. Many people have never touched the Web UI of their Fediverse servers, and they don't intend to. They do everything on their phones with dedicated apps.

On Hubzilla, this would include access to Hubzilla's built-in "apps". "Install", "uninstall" and configure them. Many important optional features are "apps". But amongst these "apps", there are also things like articles, wikis and Web pages. And what would being able to turn these features on and off be worth if you couldn't use them in the app? And so the app will also have to provide access to Hubzilla's articles and wikis and Web pages with all bells and whistles.

Of course, whenever a Fediverse server app changes in a way that makes changes in the UI necessary, this unified mobile app would have to follow suit immediately.

Any bets this will only work with Mastodon because it was built and designed only against Mastodon?

I wouldn't even be surprised if other Fediverse server apps could simply circumvent sub.club if sub.club assumes that everything else out there works like Mastodon, too.

What I meant weren't screenshots from social media that are treated like memes.

I rather meant original memes made in the Fediverse for the Fediverse, lampooning the Fediverse, parts of it or certain aspects of it. Even if they're based on existing templates, no matter how old.

Also, it'd be nice if there was a place where such memes can be posted in the first place.

It's basically like a Hubzilla channel which, in turn, is somewhat like a Friendica account. Which, again, is very vagely like a Mastodon account.

To my best knowledge, you can't follow individual accounts outside the Threadiverse on Lemmy.

In addition, (streams) has recently switched to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. This could be the reason why Lemmy can't find my (streams) channels, but it can find my Hubzilla channels: It doesn't understand DIDs.

Mastodon has the userbase, and - as you say - is the place where the serious discussion of accessibility takes place.

There's no discussion taking place.

Mastodon is horribly bad for discussions because the more people discuss something, the more mentions have to eat away on the 500-character limit.

Instead, there seems to be total consent for how things are done on Mastodon right now. Even though this way of doing things a) doesn't work in niche situations unknown to Mastodon users and b) make no sense if you take away Mastodon's limitations, e.g. everywhere else in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. Nope, no questioning the Mastodon way. How could you even.