Title text:
Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3090/
The bot adds the alt text to the post, so no need to head to the site to see the entire comic.
Are you the bot author? If so have you considered using Lemmys alt text field directly? This would display the text with the image is some clients like voyager. It would also federate to Mastodon (post body doesn’t federate). You could also keep the text in the post body and do it both places :)
I am not, that appears to be @deebster@programming.dev
That splits the comic between two separate screens, and requires multiple steps (and page loads) to read it.
It's not as good as linking to the whole comic, intact, in one place.
As has been pointed out though on non-web clients it's much more disruptive to link to the webpage instead of how the bot works now. I'm not sure what the split is between web and mobile users but I'd hazard a guess there's appreciably more mobile client users.
I'm also not sure why it would require more loads on web, if you open a post (as you have to do regardless) does it not show the image with text below it anyways?
I guess this is going to come down to desktop vs mobile preference. On mobile this shows everything on one page with no additional loading. Alternatively, using the source page requires multiple steps and page loads for mobile users, who may also need to amend the link to see the hover text.
In that case, perhaps linking to the mobile site would make sense, since it ought to work for both mobile and desktop:
https://m.xkcd.com/3090/
If you are on the standard lemmy ui:
Still not equivalent, since it still requires multiple steps, and doesn't work with privacy settings that forbid off-site images.