@ Elena Brescacin The point is that if someone wants to connect to you from Hubzilla, they might have a very detailed profile, maybe even several profiles (this is possible on Hubzilla), but they only give permission to access their profile to their contacts or to certain contacts and not to the general public. So while there is a profile, you are not allowed to access it. Unlike Friendica, Hubzilla's Web UI doesn't even tell you up-front that you aren't allowed to access the profile. And, of course, neither does Mastodon's Web UI, and neither do any Mastodon apps.

At the same time, they could actually be very active posters. But for privacy and security reasons, they don't post in public. All their posts have restricted permissions. Alternatively, they do post in public, but they only grant permission to see their stream of posts on their channel to their contacts or even only to certain contacts. Either way, you as a non-contact are not allowed to access their posts.

Imagine you, on Mastodon, could allow only your followers and followed to read your profile. And you could allow only your followers and followed to access the timeline on your profile page. Both is absolutely possible on Hubzilla. Or you only ever post to "followers only" and never in public, so your posts don't show up in your timeline.

Either way, there's a profile, and there are posts, but you are not allowed to access them. So to you, it appears like a blank and inactive account.

Still, Hubzilla does little to nothing in terms of accessibility. In its software family that spans a decade and a half, it's the only server application that requires coding to add alt-texts.

Friendica may have introduced a Mastodon-like entry field. (streams) and Forte allow for alt-texts to be stored with images in the built-in filespace so they're automatically added when an image is embedded into a post or a comment. On Hubzilla, the alt-text must still be manually grafted into the image-embedding BBcode. Even that information was only spread via hearsay until it was added to the official documentation last year or so.

So the reason why there's hardly ever any alt-text coming from Hubzilla is not because Hubzilla staunchly refuses to replace its own culture with Mastodon's (which it does, by the way, and for very good reasons). It's partly because adding alt-texts is so tedious and requires what amounts to "programming". And it's partly because since Hubzilla's post and comment editors have no UI elements for alt-texts, and neither do the file and image uploaders, hardly anyone on Hubzilla even knows about alt-texts and that it's possible to add them on Hubzilla in the first place.

Hubzilla's entire UI/UX is mostly stuck in 2012 with parts of it dating back to 2010. That was when accessibility didn't matter for hobbyist projects. And it was developed by someone who's much more of a protocol developer than a UI expert. There hasn't changed that much about it since back then except for new features having their UI elements glued on in sometimes seemingly random places.

# Long # LongPost # CWLong # CWLongPost # FediMeta # FediverseMeta # CWFediMeta # CWFediverseMeta

@ Elena Brescacin
Agree. It would be excellent if more programmers were available to improve it.