@
Morgan 
Well, what I meant with "do what I do anyway" is not what everyone else does.
My Fediverse meme posts have fairly standard image descriptions. What may make them long and complex are the explanations. They matter in this context because everyone else would explain meme images in the alt-text, but explanations don't belong into alt-text. And meme posts about Fediverse things do need a lot of explanation if they go beyond Mastodon, and mine tend to go way beyond Mastodon.
(Content warning: eye contact) My first attempt at a new meme-posting format on a new, specialised channel was made under the assumption that Mastodon users prefer explanations given to them on a silver platter, right in the post itself which also contains the image. I was told a while ago that external links are bad and inconvenient and probably not accessible, and it's better to explain everything myself.
I always have to explain the meme template, and especially in this case, I also had to explain the topic. So I ended up with nine explanations on four or five levels with some 25,000 characters altogether, more than half of which went into the two explanations for the topic.
I couldn't imagine that this was actually what people wanted, seeing as it was generally Mastodon users who seemed to want me to explain everything, but at the same time, it's Mastodon users who complain the most loudly about long posts. And so
I ran a poll on how people
actually wanted meme posts to be explained. At least of the few who voted, nobody wanted explanations in the post if they end up tens of thousands of characters long.
Ever since, I've delegated the meme template explanations to KnowYourMeme which I link to.
As for the topic,
(content warning: eye contact, guns) sometimes it needs no explanation. Sometimes ]
(content warning: eye contact, food) it can entirely be covered by links. Sometimes
(content warning: eye contact) I only need a short explanation.
But in cases like
(content warning: eye contact, swearing) this or
(content warning: eye contact, anger, crying, Japanese swearing) this, I have to write extensive explanations, even if I can link to a whole lot of external information sources.
For my original images, renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds, I do much more. I always write two image descriptions for each image.
One goes into the alt-text, and it's as long as I can make it within the 1500-character limit imposed by Mastodon, Misskey and their forks. And that's the short description that's mostly only there to satisfy the "every image must have alt-text, no matter what" fundamentalists.
There's also a long description in the post itself which is much, much more detailed. It also contains all necessary explanations which I have to write myself because I can't really rely on external links. And if there's any text anywhere within the borders of the image, legible or not, verbatim transcripts of all these bits of text go into the long description.
My most recent example, already on my new image-posting channel, but from four months ago, is
(content warning: eye contact) this. I've taken care to have as little scenery or surrounding or anything else in the pictures as possible, and still, I ended up with over 20,000 characters of image description.
Here I explain why portraits are easier to describe.
A few examples with scenery, in chronological order, and much longer descriptions, and I consider them all outdated regardless:
(content warning: eye contact, food) this,
(content warning: eye contact) this and
(content warning: eye contact) this.
The first two links also demonstrate how I used to describe pictures within a picture, even on three levels in the case of the second link. But if I had carried on doing this the same way for the image behind the third link, I would have had to describe over a hundred images in various locations on at least four levels. Besides, I would have described details that not only aren't visible in the image, but that aren't visible either in the place shown in the image. Also, this might have revealed eye contact or another trigger of sorts.
So I decided against describing things that cannot be seen in the shown place. This was the first time that I actually imposed a limitation on myself.
I could post many, many, many more scenery pictures, maybe even with
actual scenery and with many more details. But it would always take me
days to describe one of them. The last two image posts I've linked to required two days to write descriptions.
For example,
I've been to a New Orleans-themed place a month ago. It would have made for a gorgeous picture report. But it would have taken me at least a week and a half to only describe the four images that Mastodon would let through. In fact, Mastodon would have rejected the post anyway because, with the massive image descriptions, it would have exceeded 100,000 characters by far.
If you're wondering why my descriptions of virtual world images have to be so long and so detailed,
I've written an article about that.
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