On the web I can select the language of a post and comment. The two mobile apps I’ve tried so far don’t have any language-related features.
So I end up posting and commenting with a mix of languages.
Should I just not set any when using the web UI?
I always set it (mobile client, Thunder), because I find it pretty annoying when I see posts in my feed that I don’t understand (so it’s only fair that I don’t cause it to others)
Fortunately it hasn’t been much of an issue on Lemmy, but Mastodon is pretty much unusable for me partly for this reason (last time I tried to curate my feed, ~50% of the posts I saw were in languages I cannot understand – and I don’t follow language-specific topics or people)
It seems it has now been “solved”, with a popup for users posting from the website, reminding them to select a language: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25568 I think users (including me) will always make mistakes, and, as you note, not all clients support this setting, so I don’t think relying on the UX of everyone’s clients is a permanent solution 😕
In the meantime, the best I can do is set the tag manually when I’m posting 😔
It’s annoys me that there’s no way to set a default posting language and have lemmy honor it.
AFAIK setting it helps other see only content in the languages they speak. I think it’s always good to set it when it’s possible.
On my very first day on Lemmy, I couldn’t see the comments to most posts. Luckily I found an answer to this problem that was posted over 2 years ago: I forgot to select additional languages to just “Undetermined.”
I just skimmed over the texts on the settings page and assumed “undetermined” works like with other social media sites: if I don’t select anything, it shows me every language. And as communities are usually formed around a single language, it didn’t seem important. This isn’t the case with Lemmy. Undetermined is its own language, not a wildcard for all languages.
When users don’t know how multiselect works on desktop web, they probably end up with just one language selected and miss every post that has no language set.
It’s very strange.
