I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla, and I've got no way to hide sensitive pictures (e.g. eye contact, food, alcohol) in posts from Mastodon users. I could link to them, but that'd be inconvenient for you.

Also, I tend to have to write extremely long and detailed image descriptions of sometimes tens of thousands of characters. My image descriptions always go into the post text. But if the image is linked, it won't be where the description is.

How should I handle this?

Here are the options for those who can't read them on their apps with a bit of explanation:

Image and full description in the post
+ convenient
+ fairly interesting post with an image
+ image and description are together
+ guaranteed to work with screen readers
– extremely long post
– risk of triggering someone

Link to the image, full description in the post
+ reduced trigger risk
+ description is in the post
+ guaranteed to work with screen readers
– inconvenient for you
– uninteresting post with no image
– image and description are separate
– extremely long post

Link to an article with the image and the full description
+ even more reduced trigger risk
+ image and description are together
+ much shorter post
– inconvenient for you
– uninteresting post with no image
– might not work with screen readers

All three suck, don't post those pictures
+ most convenient
+ saves me hours of work
+ saves you an eternity of reading an image description
– I can no longer post images that might trigger someone



(Please boost so I get more than six or seven votes.)

#AskFedi #Poll #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #Inclusivity #SensitiveImages #SensitiveContent #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #EyeContact #CWEyeContact #Food #CWFood #Alcohol #CWAlcohol

@jupiter_rowland in the end the user chooses their own experience based on what client they choose to use.

If a user is very worried about being triggered by an image then they need to use a client with features that would hide all images.

It's not your responsibility to save a user from bad choices about which clients they choose to use.

@volkris

If a user is very worried about being triggered by an image then they need to use a client with features that would hide all images.


I think just about all Mastodon mobile apps behave like the default Web UI: They only hide images if the images have Mastodon's very own "sensitive" flag that Hubzilla can't set.

And telling people to switch to another app just because of an incompatibility between Mastodon and something that's so very much not Mastodon is stupid and lazy. Especially towards those millions of iPhone users who only get to choose from very few apps.
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@jupiter_rowland Right, so we should encourage the Mastodon developers to focus on empowering users to make that kind of decision.

Mastodon should do better.

@volkris I'm tempted to say that Mastodon doesn't want to become more compatible with anything else. If anything, everything else shall either follow Mastodon's lead or suffer consequences.

But the last time I've filed a compatibility bug on Mastodon's GitHub that was clearly on Mastodon's side, it was fixed in dev the same evening and in the new stable release three days later.
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