Wondering if my image descriptions are worth the effort if nobody seems to care; CW: long (2,354 characters)
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I'm starting to wonder if the effort I put into image descriptions is actually worth it.
Image descriptions are serious business on Mastodon. Not few users refuse to boost posts with pictures without alt-text. Some even try to get everyone whom they see posting images to add a description to them. In fact, some actually criticise alt-text that isn't sufficient. Sometimes I even see people praise other people's alt-text.
I myself usually end up spending many hours describing one measly image. The outcome may pretty well be an alt-text with over 800 characters which mentions that the actual image description is in the post text.
And that image description is tens of thousands of characters long.However, nobody seems to care. It is as if nobody even notices.
Only in a few cases have I ever received any kind of feedback for posts with lengthy image descriptions. The first time I had written an image description with over 10,000 characters, I used it in
a thread which I also posted to Lemmy and in which I demonstrated four different ways of posting that image description. It got 19 likes and 2 dislikes, all from Lemmy, none from anywhere else, and it didn't get a single reply. The only times I got a reaction from the rest of the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, was a few times when I either replied to a Mastodon user with an image description or pointed Mastodon users at my image descriptions.
Otherwise, nothing. Not even criticism that my posts are too long. Or that my image descriptions are too long and too detailed. Or that my image descriptions are actually even lacking. Or that image descriptions belong into alt-text and not into the post. I'm not even being criticised for using too many or too few content warnings.
I can't see if my posts are being boosted, but it seems like not even this is happening.
I know that I'm writing about completely uninteresting stuff. I know I'm writing many many times more in one post than typical Mastodon users are willing to read. It just strikes me that
neither any of my several hundred followers
nor anyone who might be following any of the hashtags I use
nor anyone who spots my posts in their federated timeline ever gives any feedback.
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