I am frequently on Piefed (Lemmy) and occasionally on Mastodon and I noticed they use ALT tags for images way more on Mastodon than we do here.
Anyone know why this is? it is more about the software or the culture or maybe just historical?
It seems like a good idea to always set the ALT tag for an image post on both services, and I’ve seen many ppl on the other site say they won’t boost (share) any image posts without ALT tags (since vision-impaired people really benefit from them).
Just curious…
If you don’t use alt text on mastodon the image is flagged with a large alert symbol in the corner. Here, nothing happens. That’s a huge part of the difference in culture. There’s a similar divide between mastodon and Bluesky.
Mastodon also inherently stops to ask if you want to post an image without alt text.
There’s immediate visual feedback telling you, “you’ve missed something.”
Kinda off topic and nerdy but because it relates to UI patterns and behavior I wanted to comment:
On git, when you commit a new patch by default it opens up a whole text editor for you you enter your commit message, which incentivize you to write an extensive commit message with title/summary line and paragraph body. If you create a commit on GitHub it just give space for the title and when GitHub shoes commit it also hide the text body even when viewing the whole commit.
The result is people/project who “grew up” using GitHub usually have terrible commit messages and the commit history sucks.