this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Enable undetermined language in your community (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee
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Most frontends (I don't know any, really) doesn't allow you to set a default language for your post. For that reason, a lot of frontends allow you to post without any language selected, while defaulting to English. But that is not universally true. Photon recently started requiring language to be selected and started defaulting to Undetermined language. This now creates unnecessary friction when the community doesn't have it as allowed language and requires the user to select allowed language for every single post.

It really is a simple change on your end that will take you seconds, but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.

P.S. This community is a great example of one that doesn't allow Undetermined language.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.

On the other hand, it will most likely mean that people will just default to post without any language. And if no one does it, then why bother with the option at all?

My feeling is that the "right" way to fix this is by improving the client, instead of just making things completely relaxed.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's a matter of opportunity cost. If 10 seconds of work once can save 5 seconds per post, why wouldn't you do it?

Sure, long term, all clients allowing setting default language for all posts would be ideal, but that has a lot higher opportunity cost.

And Undetermined is a selected language (id = 0). English is (id = 37).

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 2 months ago

why wouldn’t you do it?

Personally? because I don't really care about comments and posts from people who think that 5 seconds to select an option is too much time.

Some friction is a good thing. If having to select the language to complete the post works as a filter, then you can bet that the ones being caught in that are the ones who are less likely to add anything meaningful or thoughtful to the discussion.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

In the next version or the one after that, I believe it will default to your browser/system language. The undetermined language thing isn't actually good for anyone.

Least of all, people finding communities in their tongue.

If Sync ever updates, I hope it adds language to the post form.

[–] MBM@lemmings.world 4 points 2 months ago

I believe it will default to your browser/system language

Oof, I feel like that'll cause a lot of English comments to be marked with the speaker's native language

[–] Nothing4You@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

this is only for setting the default user language during registration based on the browsers accept language headers.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

The undetermined language thing isn't actually good for anyone.

How is it bad? I never said it was good, I said it's a friction point with a zero cost solution until setting default language for posts becomes available on all clients.

Least of all, people finding communities in their tongue.

Language specific instances can already set allowed languages on instance-level that can't be overwritten by communities, so it's a non-issue.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -1 points 2 months ago

One of the things that really make sense but might be overkill is to have integration with any of the open source Large Language Models. The client could wouldn't have to ask the user or rely or system settings, and autodetect the language. Depending on the content, it would even make sense to have some override system (e.g, I am not fluent in Spanish, but I would be interested in seeing football news from La Liga directly in Spanish without having to wait for the UK newspapers to pick it up)

[–] yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Rather, make Language a required field so I don’t have to spend time blocking users and/or communities who post content in languages other than what I want.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I'm in full agreement, assuming that setting default language for all posts is implemented first. So far no client allows that as far as I know.

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I don't think I intended for photon to require a language to be selected. If it's left unselected, does it use your profile default? If so, I made a bug.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It selects Undetermined by default and there is no way to change default in Photon settings or profile settings. The only way to change the language is on per post basis.

Version 1.31.2

[–] Blaze 1 points 2 months ago

Interesting

[–] Nothing4You@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] Blaze 1 points 2 months ago

Nice post

[–] crimeschneck@feddit.nl 4 points 2 months ago

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.

Thank you for this information! I thought you can only select one language in your personal settings and thats why I haven't selected any language at all until now, but selecting multiple ones works the same way as you described it for the community settings. Maybe this should be clarified on the settings page.

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Shift key.

Probably better to use the Ctrl key - if you click 'Undetermined' and then Shift-click 'English' it will select both and everything in between, but if click 'Undetermined' and then Ctrl-click 'English' it'll just select the two.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks, update body post.

[–] Blaze 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

This community is a great example of one that doesn’t allow Undetermined language.

This was done to have proper tagging of the language used.

Lemmy UI will automatically match the community language with yours to find a match, English in this case. I never have to select English when posting here

I would rather have the front ends have a default language than allow Undetermined for the community but we can of course discuss

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

lemmy-ui setting for languages is not exclusive for posting. It also determines what posts you will see. If you only select a single language, you will not see posts from other languages (including undetermined).

And it defaults to English on lemmy-ui even if undetermined is an available language by instance/community if no language is selected, which is not ideal either. Undetermined has id = 0, English has id = 37, so it's not based on numbered order.

I feel like community sentiment and Lemmy team are in conflict about undetermined language. If communities that are not language specific are excluding it to create artificial friction, then the whole undetermined language should be removed from Lemmy software and user-defined defaults added to replace it, as other Fedi platform does.

[–] Blaze 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

lemmy-ui setting for languages is not exclusive for posting. It also determines what posts you will see. If you only select a single language, you will not see posts from other languages (including undetermined).

Indeed, that's why my settings are

  • Undetermined and English for my account
  • English only at the community level for the ones I mod

That way I can still see Undetermined posts, but Spanish only speakers wouldn't see posts from my communities

And it defaults to English on lemmy-ui even if undetermined is an available language by instance/community if no language is selected, which is not ideal either.

Are you sure? I noticed the opposite (all languages displayed by default), and I created this alt a few days ago

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are you sure? I noticed the opposite (all languages displayed by default), and I created this alt a few days ago

Languages are displayed in the create post page, but by default it has no language selected, aka Select language. If you post like that, it will default to English id = 37 from my testing. Even if expanding the Select language shows other languages, like Undetermined with id = 0.

[–] Blaze 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you post like that, it will default to English id = 37 from my testing.

Depends on the community settings, no?

This post is Undetermined: https://feddit.org/post/2450630?scrollToComments=true

I should maybe try in a new community but no time for that at the moment.

So basically what you are saying is

  • account has default settings
  • community has default settings

Account posts on the community would be in English?

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are 3 levels.

  1. Instance-level languages
  2. Account-level languages (can only select those from above tier)
  3. Community-level languages (can only select those from above tier)

The issue is that account-level and community-level languages are not always accounted for by clients, so they allow posting without setting any. Then Lemmy logic interprets it as whatever default it has set. From my testing, it seems to English, but I haven't studied the code to be certain.

[–] Blaze 2 points 2 months ago

I'll do some testing when I have time later this week

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'd bet a supermajority of users only ever post in one language though.

[–] Blaze 1 points 2 months ago

With the amount of German and French speakers (among others), I'm not so sure

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hey, I recently updated photon (v1.31.3) and unintentionally fixed this issue (mostly). It'll now default to undefined language, so it'll use the community default when posting. You'll need to click "set language" if you want to explicitly set one.

[–] Blaze 2 points 2 months ago

Great !

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Actually, if a users doesn't select a language, the client is supposed to submit the post without any language selected (not even undetermined). THE SERVER then defaults the post to one of the languages allowed in the community.

This is probably how Photon has worked until now, since it obviously never got an error no matter where you posted, even though it didn't have a language selector at all.

But since photon now has a language selector, it is now defaulting to making posts with "undetermined" unless the user changes it, instead of null. If it was using an actual null value then the posts would be correctly defaulting to something valid for the community.

Source: Thunder ran into the same issue when language selection was added to posting and commenting.

@Xylight@lemdro.id might want to experiment with that a bit.

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I recently changed how language selection works, it'll default to undefined then when you click "set language" then it will actually select a language

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Great! Is that in a recent release? I haven't updated my photon instance in a bit.

Love your work btw, it's so nice to have a great UI with multi-account support for browsing/posting/modding at my desktop.

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, it's recent with a slightly changed design for the post page. (v1.31.3)