Title. The language of a post or comment is never displayed, nor can it be defined when writing posts or comments.
This leads to posts/comments with the language set to “undetermined” which leads to them appearing to users that didn’t select the actual language.
Edit: Additionally some communities seem to have started disallowing “undetermined” as a post/comment language, leading to Jerboa users being unable to post/comment. I’ve encountered !foodporn@lemmy.world so far.
It’s not absolutely necessary, but I think it makes sense. It allows users to select which language posts they want to see, but that requires the language to be set correctly. Alternatively they can block these communities altogether, which feels heavy-handed. I agree it’s poorly implemented and there’s an open issue where I made a suggestion how to set reasonable default values.
I’m struggling to see how it even makes sense. Personally I can read 2 languages and kinda a couple more if I try. And google translate can do the rest pretty well. I struggle to think why I wouldn’t want tonat least see posts regardless of language, seems like separating people for a silly reason. Maybe I’m weird. It will be interesting to see how this part works out.
Only if one of them happens to be English and the other isn’t too “exotic.” Beyond that it’s a crapshot.
And relying on Google, or any centralised translation service, feels somewhat counterproductive on a platform that tries to break away from the centralised approach.
And ultimately this discussion is entirely beside the point, because the point is that Lemmy flags the language of content and I argue that any client app should properly handle these flags.